Tag: reviews

  • 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 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 20 best hangout films

    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 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 intimate killers of Psycho and Peeping Tom, but the modern version snapped into place with John Carpenter’s Halloween, which transformed on-screen murder into a kind of ritualized stalking game. The early 1980s were the genre’s salad days, thanks in part to simple economics—low budgets, high returns. The…

  • 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.…