It is surprisingly difficult to find examples of science-fiction films which you could call optimistic. There are several reasons for this. One is that it is harder to tell stories about futuristic worlds in which everybody is happy. It also tends to be a symptom of how the popular imagination reflects the world shaping it. […]
Author: Alex Brogan
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The 10 Best Swashbuckler Movies
In recent years there has been a noticeable dearth of sword-fights in films. This particular form of choreographed action is most indelibly associated with the swashbuckler, romantic action-adventures whose heyday was Classical Hollywood. Back then, audiences loved them for their speed, vitality, and dazzling visuals. Studios loved them because you could be as freely creative […]
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10 Great Cult Movies Favored By Martin Scorsese
In 1998 Martin Scorsese compiled a list of his favourite guilty pleasures for Film Comment magazine. Included with them were a further hundred films, termed his “random pleasures”. These were grouped into fifty he considers “unguilty [but] something spoils them”, and fifty which on the whole are “not good” but still “worthwhile”. Widely regarded as […]
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The 10 Darkest Noir Films of The Classic Era
Once the U.S. entered the Second World War, it become necessary for Hollywood to address certain aspects of grim reality which post-Depression era cinema had specialized in ignoring. After the war had ended, reality seemed to become even grimmer, and filmmakers responded by showing audiences a version of the world in which Hollywood’s conservative, romantic […]
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10 Movie Masterpieces of The 1980s That Flopped At The Box Office
It has become common in recent years to look back on the ‘80s as one of Hollywood’s worst decades – a tawdry era of infantilization, golden age of the video shop, when Best Picture winners were elephantine bores, and the comic book blockbuster, that still dominates cinema forty years later, was born. It is almost […]