Tag: writing

  • 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…

  • 10 memorable movie teachers

    Typically there isn’t much middle ground when it comes to teachers in the movies. Either they are inspirational heroes or tyrannical monsters. The template for the former came with 1939’s Goodbye Mr. Chips, in which Robert Donat played the eponymous teacher with considerable warmth (and aging makeup). There is one trait onscreen teachers tend to…

  • 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 films about dreams

    “Talking about dreams is like talking about movies, since the cinema uses the language of dreams,” mused the great Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini. “Years can pass in a second and you can hop from one place to another. It’s a language made of image.” It only makes sense, then, that a medium with such similarities…

  • The 10 best movies based on real-life crimes (that don’t involve serial killers)

    From streaming docuseries to podcasts, books to social media deep dives, true crime is everywhere. The movies have long understood the lurid appeal of such tales. The first film to explore the topic might be 1901’s Execution of Czolgosz with Panorama of Auburn Prison, in which Edison Studios staged a reenactment of President McKinley’s assassin,…

  • The 10 best road-trip movies

    “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…

  • The 10 best journalism movies

    Long before the profession of journalism became a casualty of the culture wars, movies about reporters tended to depict them as stalwart crusaders for the people’s right to know or as doughy cynics in ill-fitting suits who chainsmoke, drink from flasks and wisecrack throughout the day. Journalism flicks have evolved over the years as the…

  • Hot films in the summertime: 10 movies ideal for summer now streaming

    Movies love summer. The two just go together, kindred spirits dedicated to childhood, fun and escapism.  Hollywood saves its blockbuster entertainments for that period between Memorial Day and Labor Day, of course, but there is also that class of films that are set during, or otherwise pay homage to, the season of long days and…