Tag: Film

  • The 15 best film noir

    Film noir didn’t know it was film noir. French critics coined the term after World War II to describe a cycle of American crime pictures steeped in shadows and cynicism, but the filmmakers themselves were simply reflecting a changed world. Inspired by the starkness of German Expressionism—many noir directors were German émigrés who had fled…

  • The 10 best films about voyeurism 

    In cinema, where we watch characters who don’t know they are being watched, voyeurism is a feature and not a bug. It isn’t surprising, then, that movies often explore the implications of being a voyeur.  Some filmmakers, particularly Alfred Hitchcock and Brian De Palma, made it a cornerstone of their works. “When you’re watching something…

  • The 15 best slasher films

    Slasher flicks can be traced back to the unnervingly intimate killers of Psycho and Peeping Tom, but the modern template snapped into place with Halloween, which transformed murder into a kind of ritualized stalking game. The late 1970s and early ’80s were the genre’s glory days, thanks partly to simple economics—low budgets, high returns—and perhaps…

  • The 15 best neo-noir films

    While film noir didn’t know it was film noir, neo-noir knows exactly what it is—and that self-consciousness is both its power and its risk. A self-aware descendant, it transplants noir’s dark soul to new eras, locales, and cultures, made by directors who grew up worshipping Bogart and Bacall and are now in on the joke.…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…