Tag: reviews

  • 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 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…

  • 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 movies

    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

    The film noir that emerged from Hollywood in the years after World War II did not know it was film noir. Influenced by the moody, bleak visual style of German Expressionism—indeed, many noir directors were German émigrés who had fled the Nazi regime—crime thrillers like Double Indemnity, The Postman Always Rings Twice and Out of…

  • The 15 best revenge movies

    Revenge is one of the oldest, most durable engines in storytelling. From The Lion King to John Wick, movie audiences have made it clear they like that eye-for-an-eye business. At least they do on that giant screen in the darkened theater, where moviegoers find complicit satisfaction in vengeance being served. Maybe part of the draw…

  • The 10 most memorable U.S. presidents in film

    The U.S. presidency is one of cinema’s more enduring subjects for drama—and comedy, too, for that matter. Presidents both real and fictitious have inspired reverence and ridicule in movies, which mirrors how Americans tend to view the office. And like politics itself, perceptions can be fluid. Take, for example, 1933’s Gabriel Over the White House,…

  • 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…