Tag: books

  • 10 memorable movie teachers

    Typically there isn’t much middle ground when it comes to teachers in the movies. Either they are inspirational heroes or tyrannical monsters. The template for the former came with 1939’s Goodbye Mr. Chips, in which Robert Donat played the eponymous teacher with considerable warmth (and aging makeup). There is one trait onscreen teachers tend to…

  • The 10 best haunted-house movies

    Creaking floors, hidden passageways, strange sounds, maybe a ghost or 13 … who doesn’t love a juicy haunted-house story? Cinema quickly jumped on the genre with adaptations of literary works, two of the earliest and most notable silents being 1927’s The Cat and the Canary and 1928’s The Fall of the House of Usher. The…

  • 10 memorable movie fathers

    Movie dads, like everything and everyone else on the big screen, are a reflection of their time. That’s why the all-knowing patriarchs of Life with Father and To Kill a Mockingbird in classic American cinema began to recede with the emergence of New Hollywood in the late 1960s and early ‘70s. Suddenly fathers became more…

  • The 10 best road-trip movies

    “I take the open road. Healthy, free, the world before me,” wrote the poet Walt Whitman, long before anyone in Hollywood even thought about shooting a road-trip movie. The road is a potent metaphor. It symbolizes growth, freedom, reinvention and escape––or just a place to get your kicks (if you’re on Route 66, anyway)––but the…

  • The 10 best movies about infidelity

    As a general rule, any violation of one of the 10 Commandments tends to be great story material. There’s a reason cheating has long been a mainstay of literature, film and television, not to mention about 90% of the lyrics that have come out of Nashville. Infidelity is catnip for storytellers. The stakes are baked…