Tag: movie

  • The 20 best performances by a child actor

    W.C. Fields famously advised against ever working with children or animals. While any discussion of animal thespians can wait for another day, I come to the defense of child actors, many of whom have delivered outstanding performances in the movies. Hopefully the gifted actors listed below weren’t subjected to the sort of head games inflicted…

  • The 10 best mindfuck films

    The label of “mindfuck films” didn’t really come around until the late 1990s, but moviemakers were producing mindfucks as far back as 1929, when surrealists like Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí were slicing a calf’s eyeball in Un Chien Andalou. But one doesn’t have to resort to such extremes to make a mindfuck. For purposes…

  • 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 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 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…