Tag: movies

  • The 10 best films about filmmaking

    It’s hardly surprising that an industry devoted to mythmaking has long been fascinated with its own self-image. Movies about moviemaking are nearly as old as the medium itself, with “behind the scenes” comedies about Hollywood appearing as early as the 1910s. Viewpoints vary widely, however, ranging from valentines like Singin’ in the Rain and Day…

  • The 10 best gangster pictures

    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 movies (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 movies

    People are rightly terrified of serial killers, but they sure like to cozy up to them from a safe distance. Let’s face it, savagery is fascinating. Unlike gangsters, serial killers such as Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer and the BTK killer seemed disturbingly recognizable—human in every outward respect. Early serial-killer pictures like Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lodger:…

  • The 10 best films about artificial intelligence

    Revolutionary advancement that dramatically improves our lives? Scourge of humanity that kills jobs, decimates the environment and impedes creativity? The meteoric rise of artificial intelligence doesn’t lend itself to soft opinions. The cinema has been skeptical since 1927’s Metropolis, when a nefarious robot took on the guise of a seductive woman to deceive the working…

  • The 20 best hangout movies

    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 movies

    Creaking floors, hidden passageways, strange sounds, maybe a ghost or 13 … who doesn’t love a juicy haunted-house story? Cinema quickly jumped on the genre with adaptations of literary works, two of the earliest and most notable silents being 1927’s The Cat and the Canary and 1928’s The Fall of the House of Usher. The…

  • The 10 best movies 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…