Tag: Film

  • 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 female buddy movie revolves around romance. When not focused on menfolk and how to snag one, the movies of classic Hollywood were often flat-out ambivalent about friendships among women. Even some of the best of classic Hollywood,…

  • 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…

  • The 10 best films about Black and white America

    First, my disclaimer. I’m a white guy and, therefore, have a limited perspective on what it means to be anything other than a white guy in America. The “race issue” in the United States is a tidy phrase for an untidy reality. The original sins of the nation are the enslavement of Black Americans and the…

  • The 20 best Pre-Code movies

    Handwringing over Hollywood is as old as Hollywood itself. In 1930, the movie studios acquiesced to religious and civic organizations and promised to clean up their act. The Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), under the stewardship of former U.S. Postmaster General Will H. Hays, established the Motion Picture Production Code to set…

  • The 10 best R-rated comedies

    Let’s not beat around the bush. Dirty jokes are pretty damn funny. The best R-rated comedies aren’t just crude, however. They’re giddily transgressive, pushing past politeness and dragging the audience along with them. Laughter is the best medicine, but sometimes adults need something a little stronger than aspirin or a Z-Pak. These are my picks…

  • The 10 best movies about the workplace

    Americans spend about one-third of their lives at work. That translates to roughly 90,000 hours, although in fairness that figure probably includes plenty of time spent watching the clock and scrolling through TikTok. The workplace, such a huge chunk of modern existence, is ripe for melodrama and farce, and everything in between. What follows are…

  • 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…

  • The 25 best love stories on film

    This just in: Moviegoers love romance. From the very start––beginning with The Kiss in 1896––cinema has excavated emotional gold from affairs of the heart. Big-screen love stories are so pervasive, in fact, that most of us know the tropes by heart (pun intended), from the meet-cute to that inevitable conclusion in which someone, usually male,…