Tag: Film

  • The 10 best gangster films

    Crime doesn’t pay? Try telling that to filmmakers. The gangster movie is among cinema’s most enduring genres, offering audiences the vicarious thrill of being bad. Its golden age came in the 1930s, when hard-edged, Pre-Code pictures such as Little Caesar, The Public Enemy, and Scarface: The Shame of a Nation introduced a rogue’s gallery of…

  • The 10 best alien encounter films (that aren’t about invasion)

    Is there life on other planets? Judging by most films over the years, one would think humans are terrified by that possibility. Cinema’s default on space aliens has been hostile. For science-fiction of the 1950s, preoccupations with the Cold War and atomic nightmares tended to envision little green men as being bent on world domination.…

  • The 10 best serial-killer films

    Serial killers fascinate and terrify us. Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, and the BTK killer are disturbingly recognizable—monsters who are human in every outward respect. Early serial-killer films like Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927) and Fritz Lang’s M (1931) created a blueprint for a genre that exploded in popularity alongside…

  • The 10 best prison films

    Few settings are as innately dramatic as prison, where freedom is the only currency that matters and the struggle to maintain humanity amid a dehumanizing system plays out in brutal relief. The genre has been a movie staple since at least 1930, when MGM’s The Big House essentially set the template, made a star of…

  • The 10 best films about artificial intelligence

    Revolutionary boon or scourge that will destroy the world? The subject of artificial intelligence tends to elicit strong opinions. Cinema has been leery of AI since 1927’s Metropolis, when a robot schemed to manipulate the working classes into doing the bidding of their masters. That suspicion echoed through successive decades of movies that produced malevolent…

  • The 20 best hangout films

    Sometimes you just want to be with a film. Quentin Tarantino is often credited with popularizing the term “hangout movie” back in a New Yorker profile where he referenced the 1959 western Rio Bravo (see #6 below). What’s a hangout movie, you ask? A movie you can chill with and return to. A movie whose…

  • The 10 best haunted-house films

    Creaking floors, hidden passageways, curious sounds, maybe a ghost or 13… Who doesn’t love a good haunted house story? 10. The Changeling (1980,  dir. Peter Medak) George C. Scott plays John Russell, a composer and university music professor mourning the deaths of his wife and daughter in a car accident. As every widower knows, nothing…

  • The 10 best films about sex workers

    The movies have come a long way since the days of the “hooker with a heart of gold” archetype that populated westerns and gangster flicks. Sex workers have been a mainstay of film, but their treatment has transformed dramatically over decades. World cinema’s examination of sex workers has been more realistic and ambiguous than that…