Tag: reviews

  • The 10 best films 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 films

    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

    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 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 most memorable U.S. presidents in film

    The U.S. presidency has long been one of Hollywood’s favorite subjects for drama—and comedy, too, for that matter. Presidents both real and fictitious have inspired reverence and ridicule in cinema; and like politics itself, perceptions can be fluid. Take, for instance, 1933’s Gabriel Over the White House, in which Walter Huston plays a proudly fascist…

  • 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…

  • The 10 best road-trip films

    “I take the open road. Healthy, free, the world before me,” wrote the poet Walt Whitman, long before anyone in Hollywood even thought about shooting a road-trip movie. The road is a potent metaphor. It symbolizes growth, freedom, reinvention and escape––or just a place to get your kicks (if you’re on Route 66, anyway)––but the…