Tag: movie-review

  • 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 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 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 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 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 best movies of 2025!

    For cinephiles, 2025—much as with nearly every other facet of society—was not for the faint of heart. Netflix’s intended purchase of Warner Brothers Discovery has ominous implications for the long-term future of movie theaters. The introduction last September of a fully AI-generated actress named Tilly Norwood flipped out Hollywood for a period. New ideas continued…