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 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…

  • 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 race in 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 films

    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 just say it: dirty jokes are pretty effing funny. The best R-rated comedies, however, are more than exercises in vulgarity. They’re happily transgressive, pushing past the boundaries of good taste and dragging the audience along with them. Laughter may be the best medicine, but sometimes adults need something stronger than aspirin.  10. The Hangover…

  • The 10 best workplace films

    For most adults, work consumes more waking hours than almost anything except sleep. Admittedly, not all of that time is spent working; some of it likely includes scrolling through TikTok or watching the second hand crawl toward quitting time (or so I’m told). Even so, the workplace occupies an enormous share of modern life—and provides…

  • The 10 best films 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 in film

    This just in: Moviegoers love romance. 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 climax in which someone, usually male, makes a…