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The 15 best revenge films
From The Count of Monte Cristo to John Wick, revenge has been one of moviedom’s most durable engines for storytelling. Maybe part of the appeal is that vengeance—the really nasty, scheming, go-for-broke kind—seldom gets meted out to our satisfaction in real life. In the anonymity of a darkened theater, however, we can vicariously scratch the…
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The 10 best films about dreams
“Talking about dreams is like talking about movies, since the cinema uses the language of dreams,” mused the great Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini. “Years can pass in a second and you can hop from one place to another. It’s a language made of image.” It only makes sense, then, that a medium with such similarities…
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The 10 most memorable U.S. presidents in film
The U.S. presidency has long been one of Hollywood’s favorite subjects for drama—and comedy, too, for that matter. Presidents both real and fictitious have inspired reverence and ridicule in cinema; and like politics itself, perceptions can be fluid. Take, for instance, 1933’s Gabriel Over the White House, in which Walter Huston plays a proudly fascist…
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The 15 best films that explore class divides
The silent-era comedies of Charlie Chaplin were not simply about an unlucky fellow with a funny waddle and mustache; his Little Tramp character highlighted the indignities heaped upon the poor. Cinema has a rich tradition of highlighting the divisions between haves and have-nots. During the Great Depression, screwball comedies goosed the upper-class to the delight…
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The 10 best films based on real-life crimes (that don’t involve serial killers or organized crime)
From streaming docuseries and podcasts to books and social-media deep dives, true crime is everywhere. Movies recognized the sensational appeal early. One of cinema’s first true-crime reenactments came in 1901 with Execution of Czolgosz with Panorama of Auburn Prison, in which Edison Studios combined actual footage of the prison with a staged depiction of President…
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The 10 best female buddy films
Big-screen portrayals of female friendship are far less common than those of their male counterparts—unless, that is, the women are bonding over men. Otherwise, the movies often seemed flat-out ambivalent about friendships among women. That imbalance is exactly why the release of Thelma & Louise in 1991 landed as a cultural event rather than just…
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The 10 best conspiracy films
It’s no surprise that the 1970s were the salad days of the conspiracy movie. In the wake of political assassinations, the Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal and sundry revelations of CIA shenanigans, Americans were poised to believe the very worst about their government. Conspiracy-minded movies, like conspiracy theories themselves, continue to thrive because they offer…
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The 10 best screwball comedies
From car radios to Social Security, some good things emerged from the Great Depression––the screwball comedy being one of them. After all, the genre was very much about humiliating the upper-class. Painting the nation’s wealthy as ridiculous, eccentric and stupid was more than welcome when millions of Americans were out of work or losing their…
Cutting to the Chase with Phil Bacharach
Let’s talk about movies.
