‘100 Films: A Feminist Eyeroll Through the AFI Canon’

An unapologetically feminist takedown of Hollywood’s most hallowed films—where the men get mythologized, the women get sidelined, and greatness always seems to come with a side of misogyny.

The American Film Institute’s Top 100 list has long been held up as cinema’s sacred scroll—a who's-who of "greatness" where celluloid legends are enshrined in amber and no woman is ever more than a plot twist away from disappearing. These films are taught in classrooms, quoted in dorm rooms, and dusted off in retrospectives like holy relics. But greatness, as it turns out, has a type: white, male, hetero, and frequently holding a gun, a cigarette, or a woman by the wrist.

Here’s the thing: many of these films are masterpieces. Technically, narratively, historically. They changed cinema. But they also built a myth—of male heroism, female disposability, and suffering as a masculine virtue. They taught us how to watch movies, yes—but also who gets to be watched, who gets to speak, and who gets to be a symbol while someone else gets an arc.

So what happens when we revisit this canon—not with reverence, but with rage? Not to knock the artistry, but to question the mythology?

What follows are 100 reviews of the so-called greatest American films of all time, through the lens of a justifia jaded film critic who has seen one too many close-ups of male redemption and not nearly enough women allowed to want something other than being loved, left, or sainted. The gaze is shifted. The sacred cows are skewered. The lauded are lanced. And yes, there will be blood (but mostly in slow motion, scored by a string section, and filmed from the male point of view).

Consider this your guided tour through the canon—scratched, dented, and desperately overdue for a feminist restoration. Welcome to the real director’s cut.

#100 ‘Ben-Hur’ (1959)

Sandals, Salvation, and the Suffering Olympics for Righteous Men Only

Ben-Hur (1959) is the crown jewel of Biblical epics—1950s Hollywood at its most bloated, sanctimonious, and shirtless. Clocking in at nearly four hours, it’s a Technicolor testament to male pain, divine intervention, and the belief that no amount of human suffering is too much if it results in one slow-motion chariot race and a casual crucifixion. Directed by William Wyler with the solemnity of a papal mass and the budget of a small war, Ben-Hur wants to be both historical drama and spiritual epic. What it mostly is? A dusty, muscular melodrama where women pray and men compete in long, drawn-out trauma parades.

Charlton Heston stars as Judah Ben-Hur, a wealthy Jewish prince who’s falsely accused of treason by his childhood friend Messala (Stephen Boyd)—whose betrayal is so emotionally charged you’d be forgiven for thinking this is less about Rome versus Judea and more about the tragic end of a closeted ancient romance. Boyd practically devours the screen with longing; Heston, meanwhile, clenches his jaw like it’s the Ark of the Covenant. Together, they’re an epic in search of a kiss.

The film’s central thrust (besides Messala’s subtle obsession with Judah’s well-being) is vengeance—Judah is enslaved, rowed into oblivion, saved by divine plot armor, and eventually returns to challenge his frenemy in the now-legendary chariot race. And yes, that sequence still slaps. It’s brutal, thrilling, and so well-edited it feels like a film within a film—one that moves faster than the rest of the movie combined.

But once that catharsis is achieved, the film swerves into religious territory so hard it practically gets whiplash. Suddenly it’s about Jesus, forgiveness, and miracles—because nothing says narrative resolution like offscreen crucifixion curing your sister’s leprosy. The final scenes ask us to abandon revenge in favor of spiritual grace, but only after we've spent three and a half hours reveling in vengeance. Convenient.

And the women? Tertiary at best. Esther (Haya Harareet), Judah’s love interest, spends most of the film in devotional mode—either to Judah or to Jesus. Miriam and Tirzah, Judah’s mother and sister, exist mainly to suffer in a leper colony so their miraculous healing can signify the triumph of faith. There’s no agency, no inner life—just purity, pain, and gratitude. It's Biblical Womanhood 101.

Ben-Hur is technically impeccable. The sets are vast, the costumes extravagant, and Miklós Rózsa’s score swells like divine punctuation. But for all its grandeur, it’s still a deeply conservative myth: a story where justice is personal, salvation is passive, and the world is redeemed not through action or solidarity but through silent acceptance and male martyrdom.

3.5 out of 5 golden laurels
(One for the chariot race. One for the unintentional homoeroticism. One for the sheer spectacle. Half a star for Heston’s ability to hold a grudge across multiple continents. The missing stars? Left in the shadow of every woman who wept, suffered, and disappeared so the men could work out their theological trauma in matching robes.)

#99 ‘Toy Story’

Plastic, Possession, and the Cult of Male Sentience in a Kid’s Bedroom

Toy Story (1995) is the darling of digital animation history—the first fully computer-animated feature film and Pixar’s declaration of war on traditional storytelling as we knew it. It’s clever, fast-paced, and emotionally manipulative in that soft-voiced, Randy Newman-scored way that Pixar has since turned into a billion-dollar empathy factory. But peel back the nostalgic glee and beneath the plastic lies a surprisingly rigid structure about hierarchy, masculine insecurity, and the terrifying idea that your self-worth depends entirely on how much one child likes you.

At the heart of the story is Woody (voiced by Tom Hanks), a cowboy doll with the personality of a middle manager facing redundancy. He’s charming, sure, but only in the brittle, controlling way of someone who knows his power is hanging by a thread—and that thread is a six-year-old boy named Andy. Woody’s entire sense of identity is tied to being “the favorite,” which makes Toy Story less a whimsical romp and more a parable about white-collar male fragility in the face of younger, flashier competition.

Enter Buzz Lightyear (voiced by Tim Allen), a shiny, self-important space toy who doesn’t realize he’s a toy—which, in this universe, is treated as both tragic and hilarious. His existential delusion is milked for comedy until it becomes pathos, at which point the film pivots hard and asks you to cry over a mass-produced action figure discovering his own disposability. It’s capitalism with tear ducts.

The real arc is Woody learning to share dominance, not dismantle it. At no point is the toy hierarchy seriously questioned. It’s just adjusted to accommodate two alphas instead of one. The other toys—Mr. Potato Head, Slinky Dog, Hamm—exist as a Greek chorus of anxious consumers terrified of obsolescence. The film has the emotional stakes of Glengarry Glen Ross, but with more googly eyes.

And the women? Minimal. Bo Peep is the designated female love interest with a porcelain waist and the personality of a polite lampshade. Her purpose is to soothe Woody’s ego and bat her eyelashes. There are no female friendships, no real agency, no equivalent power struggle among the women—just boys jousting for status while everyone else literally stays in the toy box.

That said, Toy Story is tight. The script is smart. The voice acting is spot-on. The animation, groundbreaking for its time, holds up surprisingly well. It’s paced like a caper, scored like a lullaby, and structured like a therapy session for toys processing abandonment and identity crises.

4 out of 5 plastic hats
(One for the script’s wit. One for the innovation. One for the voice acting. One for the emotional gut-punch that sneaks up on you. The missing star? Stuck behind the glassy eyes of the female toys, who were never given inner lives—only soft voices and the patience to wait while the cowboys and spacemen figured out who gets to sit in the front seat of someone else’s childhood.)

#98 ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy’

Tap Shoes, Flag-Waving, and the Musical Biopic Where Patriotism Wears a Top Hat and Women Wait in the Wings

Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) is a red-white-and-blued fever dream of a musical biopic, a star-spangled love letter to America written in tap dance, ruffles, and manifest destiny. It’s the story of George M. Cohan—composer, performer, egomaniac—and the only man who could make “You’re a Grand Old Flag” sound like a mating call. James Cagney stars as Cohan in a performance so energetic it practically taps out Morse code for “Oscar me now” across the stage.

Cagney is, to be fair, phenomenal. He doesn’t just sing and dance—he explodes, grins, spins, and wisecracks his way through the entire 20th century. His Cohan is part showman, part salesman, and all male bravado, riding the wave of jingoistic musical theatre with the breathless arrogance of a man who never doubted for a moment that the spotlight belonged to him.

But let’s not get swept away by the patriotic glitter. Yankee Doodle Dandy is a biopic that sanitizes as much as it celebrates. It erases nuance, brushes off politics with jazz hands, and equates national pride with artistic greatness—because apparently writing war songs is the highest form of civic duty. Cohan’s complicated politics? Vanished. His reputation for egotism? Rewritten as lovable pluck. And his collaborators? Reduced to scenery.

And of course, the women. Joan Leslie plays Mary, Cohan’s ever-loyal, ever-gracious wife—a character who, like all good cinematic spouses of the 1940s, supports his genius from the sidelines while wearing impeccable hats. She has no arc, no ambition, and no real emotional presence outside of reacting supportively to her husband’s career. Cohan’s mother (Rosemary DeCamp) is saintly. His sister? A duet partner. Women in Yankee Doodle Dandy are there to hug, smile, and disappear. They’re the emotional wallpaper in a room built for one man and his mirror.

Director Michael Curtiz does his best to keep things moving at the pace of a vaudeville quick-change, and the musical numbers are glossy, punchy, and relentlessly upbeat. But the film doesn’t interrogate patriotism—it performs it. Cohan’s gift is selling America to Americans, and Yankee Doodle Dandy takes that branding and runs with it, all the way to the White House, where the final scene has Cohan literally walking down the steps after receiving the Medal of Honor, humming “Over There,” like a founding father in tap shoes.

3.5 out of 5 flags with jazz hands
(One for Cagney’s footwork. One for the bombastic charm. One for Curtiz’s musical polish. Half a star for sheer historical camp. The missing stars? Left behind with every woman whose story was shoved offstage to make room for a man, a song, and a nation that still can’t dance without stepping on someone’s neck.)

#97 ‘Blade Runner’

Neon, Noir, and the Fetishization of Existential Crisis with a Trench Coat On

Blade Runner (1982) is Ridley Scott’s rain-soaked, neon-lit fever dream of a future where the lines between man and machine are blurred—but patriarchal control, corporate dystopia, and moody white men with guns are still running on the same tired operating system. It’s beautiful, brooding, and philosophically overripe in that way sci-fi loves best: asking deep questions about humanity while ignoring the humanity of most of its characters, especially the female-coded ones.

Harrison Ford plays Rick Deckard, a “blade runner” tasked with hunting down rogue replicants—bioengineered beings who look human, think human, and most importantly, ask too many questions about their own mortality. Ford mopes through the film like a man recovering from both a hangover and an existential crisis, mumbling lines in a noir growl as if vocal fry is proof of sentience. He’s supposed to be our hero. He’s mostly a vibe in a trench coat.

Let’s be clear: Blade Runner isn’t interested in morality. It’s interested in aesthetic guilt. Everything is dark, wet, and humming with sadness. Cities have become vertical nightmares, populated by smog, synths, and the occasional geisha advertisement blown up to God-size. It’s stunning, of course. Production designer Lawrence G. Paull and cinematographer Jordan Cronenweth created a visual world so iconic it’s still being ripped off four decades later. But what’s all that beauty in service of? Mostly to frame one man’s vague ethical dilemma as revolutionary thought.

And what of the replicants? Rutger Hauer’s Roy Batty steals the film out from under Ford’s damp cynicism, giving a performance that is equal parts terrifying, tender, and transcendent. His dying monologue (“tears in rain”) is the moment Blade Runner earns its reputation: not because it answers the film’s questions, but because it admits that answers don’t matter. What matters is that he felt—and no one cared.

Now let’s talk about women. Or rather, let’s talk about the replicant Rachel (Sean Young), who is introduced as a femme fatale and quickly reduced to a philosophical punching bag. She’s elegant, trapped, and forced into “awakening” via a love story that looks disturbingly like coercion. The infamous “romantic” scene between Deckard and Rachel plays like a tutorial in power imbalance: he corners her, commands her, kisses her when she tries to leave. It's not seduction—it’s a soft-lit assault, framed like a breakthrough.

Pris (Daryl Hannah), another replicant, is styled like a post-apocalyptic cheerleader and killed off in a way that feels more aesthetic than tragic. The replicant women are either fragile dolls or feral threats—never fully people, only metaphors for male anxiety. They’re not asking what it means to be human. They’re asking permission to survive.

Ridley Scott gives us a world where humanity is defined by empathy, but only grants it to the male-coded replicants. The rest are collateral beauty. It’s telling that the most emotional, vivid character in the film is Roy Batty—while Rachel is given the emotional arc of a houseplant in a fur coat.

4 out of 5 origami unicorns
(One for the visual design that redefined sci-fi. One for Hauer’s poetic fury. One for Vangelis’s synth-soaked score. One for daring to ask if the soul is a glitch. The missing star? Vanished into the rainy void with every replicant woman whose “humanity” was only allowed to bloom when it could be controlled, kissed, or killed.)

#96 ‘Do the Right Thing’

Heat, Hate, and the Beautiful Fury of a System That Never Loved You Back

Do the Right Thing (1989) isn’t just a film—it’s a pressure cooker wired to blow, a day in the life of a Brooklyn block that spirals into a masterclass in racial tension, community fracture, and what happens when justice is as absent as air conditioning. Written, directed, and starred in by Spike Lee, it’s a film that refuses catharsis, sidesteps respectability politics, and burns its own questions into the screen like graffiti on a brownstone.

Set on the hottest day of the year in Bed-Stuy, the film follows Mookie (Lee), a pizza delivery guy juggling a job at Sal’s Pizzeria, a girlfriend he mostly avoids, and a community cracking under the weight of history, inequality, and 400-degree sidewalks. Everyone in the film is real—sharp, complicated, contradictory. There are no saints here, just survivors.

Sal (Danny Aiello) owns the pizzeria. His sons are casually racist in two distinct flavors: one is simmering rage, the other benign condescension. Radio Raheem blasts Public Enemy from a boombox like it’s a shield. Buggin’ Out questions why the Wall of Fame has no Black faces in a Black neighborhood. And Smiley, with his photographs of Martin and Malcolm, floats through it all like a ghost trying to be heard.

The genius of Do the Right Thing is its refusal to moralize. Spike Lee doesn’t tell you who is right. He shows you how everyone is wrong, how the system has baked injustice so deep into the bricks that people can’t help but ignite. When the violence comes, it’s inevitable—not because anyone wants it, but because this country is rigged like a matchbook in a microwave.

The climax—Raheem choked to death by cops while the block watches in horror, followed by Mookie hurling a trash can through Sal’s window—is still debated like it’s a philosophy exam. Did he do the right thing? Lee doesn’t answer. That’s the point. The question is a trap. What choices do you have when you're never meant to win in the first place?

Cinematographer Ernest Dickerson bathes the film in blistering reds and oranges, every frame sweating with tension. The camera angles are confrontational, the monologues blistering. And the editing, the music, the rhythm of it all—it’s jazz with a switchblade, lyrical and angry and utterly alive.

Let’s talk about the women. They’re there—strong, sharp, exhausted. Rosie Perez dances the opening credits into legend. Mother Sister watches her block through lace curtains with judgment and fear. Tina (Perez again) is Mookie’s girlfriend, mostly reduced to sex and sass—but at least she’s not a tragic corpse or a silent partner. Still, it’s a film about men—angry, loud, explosive men—and the women mostly endure rather than act. They carry the emotional weight while the men hurl the furniture.

But if the women don’t get equal narrative space, at least the film sees them. Unlike most “social issue” films, Do the Right Thing isn’t interested in tokenism. It’s interested in truth. And the truth is ugly, beautiful, unresolved—and still playing out on every street corner in America.

5 out of 5 melting sneakers
(One for the screenplay that cuts like a boxcutter. One for the camera that dares you to blink. One for the music that never lets you off the hook. One for the rage that feels righteous and earned. One for telling the truth—and then making you sit with it while the credits roll.)

#95 ‘The Last Picture Show’

Desire, Dust, and the American Male Melancholia Industrial Complex

The Last Picture Show (1971) is a black-and-white elegy for a town, a time, and a testosterone-soaked idea of America that can’t stop crying into its whiskey glass about the end of an era it never questioned to begin with. Directed by Peter Bogdanovich with aching nostalgia and just enough nihilism to pass for honesty, the film floats through a dying Texas town in the early ’50s, cataloging the loneliness of men, the availability of women, and the slow, erotic decay of the postwar American dream.

At the center are two high school boys: Sonny (Timothy Bottoms), who is so passive he could be mistaken for a plot device in jeans, and Duane (Jeff Bridges), who at least has the decency to punch things. They drift from football fields to diner booths to backseats, all while the town’s movie theater—the titular Picture Show—flickers toward oblivion, much like the illusions of masculinity and small-town virtue the film seems to mourn but never interrogates.

And then there are the women—each one brighter, bolder, and infinitely more punished.

Jacy Farrow (Cybill Shepherd, radiant and weaponized) is the town beauty who learns early that her sexuality is the only form of power she has—so she uses it, strategically, messily, and never without cost. She’s labeled manipulative, but she’s just playing a rigged game where every outcome ends in judgment or abandonment. Her desire is pathologized. Her virginity is a transaction. Her autonomy? Threatening.

Cloris Leachman, in a heartbreaking Oscar-winning performance, plays Ruth Popper, the coach’s wife who begins an affair with Sonny, not because it’s sexy, but because it’s something. Their relationship is not scandalous so much as deeply sad—an intergenerational transaction born of mutual desperation in a town that’s emotionally malnourished. Ruth is lonely, kind, and ultimately discarded when Sonny decides he’d rather feel less guilty.

Ellen Burstyn rounds out the holy trinity of women-who-deserve-better as Jacy’s mother, who’s resigned to the knowledge that men disappoint and women survive—if they’re lucky.

Bogdanovich’s direction is restrained and reverent, and the black-and-white cinematography by Robert Surtees gives every dusty street and empty swimming pool the tragic beauty of a faded photograph. But make no mistake: this isn’t realism. It’s romanticism—with just enough cynicism to pass as critique. The film mourns a vanishing world, but it never asks whether that world deserved to survive.

It’s a movie obsessed with longing—especially male longing. For youth. For sex. For simpler times that were only “simple” if you were white, male, and emotionally underdeveloped. Everyone else? They were just background characters in someone else's slow descent into nostalgia.

4 out of 5 broken windshields
(One for Leachman’s devastation. One for Shepherd’s brittle brilliance. One for the cinematography that makes decay look like art. One for capturing the ache of a dying town. The missing star? Swallowed by the film’s refusal to admit that sometimes the past deserves to die—and that women aren’t just there to cry while it happens.)

#94 ‘Pulp Fiction’

Tarantino, Time Loops, and the Art of Making Misogyny Look Cool in a Black Suit

Pulp Fiction (1994) is Quentin Tarantino’s postmodern mixtape masterpiece: a nonlinear, needle-dropped celebration of violence, pop culture, and the kind of overwritten male dialogue that passes for profundity if you say it while pointing a gun. It’s brash, stylish, endlessly quotable—and like all great cinematic grifts, it convinces you that you’re watching something revolutionary while it reaffirms every tired gender cliché in the book.

The film braids three-ish narratives together: hitmen Jules and Vincent waxing poetic about foot massages and divine intervention; washed-up boxer Butch running from mobster Marcellus Wallace after a double-cross; and the infamous overdose dinner date between Vincent and Mia Wallace, who remains the film’s most iconic female character despite barely existing outside of eyeliner, mystery, and the ability to collapse artfully on a living room carpet.

Let’s be honest: Pulp Fiction is a film about men performing coolness under pressure. Whether they’re quoting the Bible before execution, cleaning brains off upholstery, or negotiating a samurai sword standoff in a pawnshop rape dungeon, the men here are always the story. They get nuance. They get monologues. They get redemption—or at least a well-scored exit.

And the women? Props, mostly. Mia (Uma Thurman) is the embodiment of the manic mob wife muse—sexy, aloof, doomed to be misunderstood and mishandled by the narrative. Fabienne (Maria de Medeiros) exists only to misplace a gold watch and talk about pancakes in a baby voice. Honey Bunny, in the opening diner scene, flips out adorably while her man plans the heist. It’s not that women aren’t present—it’s that they exist to orbit the emotional arcs of men, never their own.

Tarantino’s style is unmistakable: whip-smart dialogue, sudden violence, and pop culture references stacked like a Jenga tower of VHS tapes. But for all its surface brilliance, Pulp Fiction is less a critique of pulp storytelling than a celebration of its most adolescent instincts. The film doesn’t deconstruct masculinity—it fetishizes it. Every man is a philosopher with a pistol. Every woman is a mirror, a prize, or a problem.

Still, there’s no denying the craft. The structure is bold. The pacing is electric. The performances—especially Samuel L. Jackson’s righteous fury and Travolta’s greasy cool—are burned into cinematic history. But beneath the swagger is a film that reenacts the same stories pulp fiction always has: men making messes, cleaning them up, and getting the last word.

4 out of 5 Royale-with-Cheeses
(One for Jackson’s delivery. One for the fractured timeline. One for the soundtrack that made Dick Dale cool again. One for the sheer audacity of it all. The missing star? OD’d on the bathroom floor of a film that still thinks women are most powerful when they’re silent, stylish, or shot.)

#93 ‘The French Connection’

Heroin, Handguns, and the Heroic Legacy of the Racist Cop Who Gets Results

The French Connection (1971) is a gritty, adrenaline-soaked procedural soaked in the grainy realism of early ’70s urban decay. It’s the godfather of modern cop thrillers, the film that made car chases into cinematic gospel, and the one that launched Gene Hackman’s Popeye Doyle—a man so committed to law and order he’ll blow up half of Brooklyn to stop a guy with a baguette. It’s brilliant, it’s brutal, and it’s built entirely on the fantasy that being a terrible human being is acceptable if you occasionally tackle a drug dealer into a trash can.

Hackman’s Doyle is a walking snarl in a porkpie hat: racist, violent, and charming in the way only white men in 1970s crime films are allowed to be. He’s not a complicated antihero—he’s just a bad cop with good instincts and a license to dehumanize. The film presents his flaws like flavor: sure, he’s a bigot, but look how good he is at shaking down bars and harassing suspects. He’s what happens when the system decides results matter more than humanity, and audiences have been cheering for him ever since.

The plot—if you care—is a cat-and-mouse game between New York narcotics detectives and a slick, sophisticated French heroin smuggler. It’s an exercise in surveillance, tension, and mid-century masculinity, where the biggest thrill isn’t catching the bad guy—it’s the feeling that you might be the only one in the room who understands how the game works. And if someone has to get slapped, shot, or racially profiled in the process? Occupational hazard.

The famous car chase—Doyle gunning it under an elevated train while nearly killing half the city—is pure chaos ballet, filmed with a real sense of danger because, fun fact: it was dangerous. William Friedkin directs with documentary grit and zero sentimentality. There’s no score to tell you how to feel, just screeching tires and Doyle’s jaw clenched like it owes him money. It’s an iconic sequence, but also a metaphor: a cop endangering everyone around him in pursuit of a criminal he's not entirely sure he can even identify.

And what of the women? Oh, sweet summer child. There are barely any. A girlfriend glimpsed. A woman in a car. A waitress, maybe? This is a film where femininity exists only in the margins, and morality is defined exclusively by who gets to carry a badge. The French villain (Fernando Rey) is elegant, inscrutable, and silent enough to feel mysterious. The Americans are loud, brutal, and driven by a moral compass made entirely out of broken glass and whiskey fumes.

The final moments of the film—ambiguous, bleak, unresolved—pretend to critique the whole mess, but by then it’s too late. The French Connection has already elevated Popeye Doyle into the pantheon of American movie cops: the ends-justify-the-means icon who always gets his man, even if he shoots the wrong one along the way.

3.5 out of 5 cold subway stakeouts
(One for Friedkin’s furious direction. One for Hackman’s feral charisma. One for the chase that redefined the genre. Half a star for the cinematography that made winter in New York feel like a war zone. The missing stars? Cuffed to the idea that maybe, just maybe, being good at your job doesn’t excuse being the kind of man who plants drugs, tramples rights, and never once questions his place in the food chain.)

#92 ‘Goodfellas’

Coke, Cadillacs, and the Cult of the Charismatic Sociopath

Goodfellas (1990) is Martin Scorsese’s coke-fueled mob opera: a dizzying, swaggering tour of organized crime so seductive in its style that you almost forget you’re watching a 145-minute meditation on greed, betrayal, and emotional stuntedness dressed in gold chains and marinara sauce. It’s masterful, yes. Iconic, absolutely. But let’s not pretend it isn’t also Exhibit A in the endless Hollywood fascination with men who are terrible, as long as they do it with a decent soundtrack and a well-cut suit.

Ray Liotta’s Henry Hill is our guide through this morally bankrupt wonderland—a wide-eyed, eager-to-please Irish-Italian hanger-on who starts out as a kid running errands for the local mob and ends up as a paranoid, coke-dusted shell of a man hiding in suburbia, whining about not being able to get a good tomato sauce in witness protection. Henry isn’t a genius or a bruiser or a leader. He’s just available. And somehow, that’s enough for the American Dream in a tracksuit.

Joe Pesci’s Tommy is pure id with a pistol: volatile, vicious, and funny until he’s not—then horrifying. The “funny how?” scene is a masterclass in male dominance games, a testosterone-soaked dance where laughter becomes a threat. Robert De Niro’s Jimmy, meanwhile, plays the long con: cool, calculating, and just moral enough to make you forget he’s a killer until he’s suddenly calling hits on everyone in his phonebook. These men are not deep. They are loud. And the film lets them drown out everything else—including, surprise surprise, the women.

Karen Hill (Lorraine Bracco) is the only woman with real screen time, and for a while, she’s thrilling. She’s sharp, skeptical, and totally seduced by the power. The scene where Henry gives her a gun to hide and she talks about how it turned her on? Incredible. It’s honest about how intoxicating proximity to power can be. But then she fades into the background—first a wife, then a liability, then a passenger. Her rage is real, but the narrative isn’t interested. She's another cautionary tale sacrificed to the altar of male spectacle.

Scorsese directs like a man mainlining film stock—tracking shots, freeze frames, needle drops, fourth-wall breaks. The editing is breathless, the narration relentless. The camera is always moving, because in this world, stillness is death. It’s exhilarating, exhausting, and executed with surgical precision.

And yet, for all its brilliance, Goodfellas is still part of the grand tradition of cinematic myth-making that romanticizes the rise while hand-waving the rot. It shows you the violence, yes. The paranoia. The eventual comeuppance. But it also makes being a gangster look like the most glamorous self-destruction imaginable—at least until the pasta gets bad.

4 out of 5 frozen bodies in meat trucks
(One for Scorsese’s relentless command. One for Pesci’s gleeful menace. One for Bracco’s early brilliance. One for turning moral decay into visual poetry. The missing star? Buried somewhere in the crawl space between admiration and indictment, alongside the women who were never offered a cut—only a cleanup.)

#91 ‘Sophie’s Choice’

Trauma, Tragedy, and the Fetishization of Female Suffering in Prestige Packaging

Sophie’s Choice (1982) is the cinematic equivalent of a slow descent into despair—polished, poignant, and meticulously crafted to deliver suffering as art. It’s the kind of film that screams important from every frame, not because it challenges power or systems, but because it gently lays a woman’s trauma at the feet of the male gaze and asks us to weep for her beauty in pain.

Meryl Streep, in a performance so precise it’s practically forensic, plays Sophie Zawistowski, a Polish Holocaust survivor living in post-war Brooklyn. She’s luminous and haunted, fragile yet flirtatious—the perfect muse for the film’s narrator, Stingo (Peter MacNicol), a young Southern writer and stand-in for author William Styron. The story is her tragedy, but it’s told through his eyes, filtered through his voyeuristic fascination with her trauma and cleavage in equal measure.

Stingo is both protagonist and audience surrogate: naive, earnest, and utterly obsessed with Sophie’s mystery. He wants to write about her, love her, maybe save her—but mostly, he just wants access to her pain. Because nothing makes a man feel like an artist faster than watching a broken woman explain the unexplainable.

The film unfolds slowly, revealing Sophie’s backstory in fragments—her abusive relationship with the volatile Nathan (Kevin Kline), her survivor’s guilt, and of course, the titular “choice”: an unspeakable moment of forced decision in Auschwitz, delivered by Streep with such restraint it burns hotter than melodrama ever could. That scene is justly infamous, but what surrounds it is a quiet, relentless framing of female trauma as romantic pathos.

Sophie isn’t a woman so much as a canvas—painted with suffering, lit like a dream. Her pain is real, yes, but the film aestheticizes it. Her choices, her victimhood, her survival—they’re all turned into emotional architecture for the male characters to inhabit, grieve, and ultimately narrate. Even Nathan, in all his abusive volatility, is treated as a tragic figure—a genius twisted by mental illness, not just another man who lashes out and gets a violin cue behind him while doing it.

Alan J. Pakula’s direction is elegant, the cinematography soft and sepia-toned, as if to gently stroke your soul while recounting one of the most horrific crimes of the 20th century. And therein lies the problem: Sophie’s Choice doesn’t challenge trauma—it curates it. It doesn’t ask what systems allowed Sophie’s suffering to go unacknowledged—it asks how beautifully it can be framed for someone else’s catharsis.

Yes, Meryl is astonishing. Yes, the film is wrenching. But it’s also an exquisite example of the cinematic tradition that turns women’s trauma into a male emotional awakening machine. Sophie gets no agency, no justice, and no real voice—just a choice, remembered by a man, who walks away and writes it all down.

3.5 out of 5 haunted violins
(One for Streep’s unblinking brilliance. One for the restraint in direction. One for portraying the weight of unspeakable horror without sensationalism. Half a star for Kline’s ability to make instability terrifying and charismatic. The missing stars? Buried under a pile of notebooks written by men who never had to live through the things they can’t stop describing.)

#90 ‘Swing Time’

Taps, Tails, and the Tap-Danced Apology for a Plot That Should’ve Been Thrown Down a Staircase

Swing Time (1936) is Fred and Ginger at their most iconic: all floating gowns, featherlight banter, and the kind of gravity-defying tap numbers that make you forget you're watching a man lie, stalk, and sabotage his way into a woman’s life while wearing tails. It’s shimmering, toe-tapping joy—if you don’t mind your romance built on deception, your Black characters rendered in shoe polish, and your leading lady being gaslit in waltz time.

Fred Astaire plays Lucky Garnett, a gambler-slash-dancer who misses his wedding because of a bad case of plot-induced hijinks. To win back his fiancée (a woman so forgettable she barely gets lines), he’s told to earn $25,000 as penance. But the second he arrives in New York, he meets Penny (Ginger Rogers), a dance instructor with killer lines, sharper rhythm, and—tragically—a complete lack of romantic boundaries. Lucky proceeds to lie about everything—his job, his intentions, his availability—and then woos her through sheer dance stamina.

And yes, the dancing is divine. “Pick Yourself Up” is joy incarnate. “Never Gonna Dance” is a slow-burn heartbreak in tap form. When Fred and Ginger move together, time bends. But then comes “Bojangles of Harlem”—the musical blackface number Astaire performs as a “tribute” to Bill Robinson, which is the cinematic equivalent of setting your tap shoes on fire and calling it a candlelight vigil. It's racist, full stop. Not just a product of its time, but a stain on its legacy, and no amount of choreography can shuffle past that.

Ginger Rogers, as always, does everything Astaire does but backwards and in heels—and with more charm than the script deserves. Penny is smart, funny, and talented, and yet the film rewards her with a man who treats honesty like a dance step he hasn’t rehearsed. Their chemistry is effortless; the writing, less so. She spends most of the film forgiving Lucky for manipulating her life, her job, and her emotions. And because it’s all set to music, we’re meant to swoon rather than scream.

The supporting cast includes a best friend with all the personality of a prop hat, and a comic relief subplot involving a bumbling sidekick and a fiancé who deserves better from life, the screenplay, and possibly the state. But Swing Time doesn’t care about structure—it cares about spectacle. It wants to dazzle you into submission. And it almost does.

3.5 out of 5 airborne ascots
(One for Rogers’ bone-deep brilliance. One for Astaire’s immaculate timing. One for the choreography that still stuns. Half a star for the costumes and camera work that make elegance look easy. The missing stars? Vanished in a puff of tap dust and minstrel show makeup, along with the hope that Hollywood could deliver joy without stepping on someone else’s dignity to get there.)

#89 ‘The Sixth Sense’

Ghosts, Guilt, and the Tragedy of Women Who Must Die So Men Can Feel Feelings

The Sixth Sense (1999) is M. Night Shyamalan’s genre-defining ghost story wrapped in a meditation on grief, wrapped again in a twist so famous it should have its own SAG card. It’s elegant, eerie, and perfectly structured—a slow-burn horror about dead people, yes, but mostly about emotionally constipated men who can only confront their trauma through spectral intermediaries.

Bruce Willis plays Dr. Malcolm Crowe, a child psychologist who spends the entire film with the blank affect of a man who thinks whispering counts as emotional depth. He’s trying to help Cole (Haley Joel Osment, in a performance that single-handedly made the phrase “I see dead people” into a millennial party trick), a terrified boy haunted by ghosts who, unlike most men in this film, actually express their feelings—even if it’s through blue-filtered panic and tiny, trembling lips.

Cole is a fascinating character: traumatized, intuitive, and more emotionally literate than the adults around him. He’s what happens when a child absorbs everyone else’s pain and has no safe outlet—basically every woman in a family drama, but in OshKosh overalls. And while the film treats his condition with empathy, it also implies that the only way to heal is by helping dead people find closure. You know—because nothing teaches healthy boundaries like being the grief counselor for a parade of murdered adults.

And the ghosts? Almost all of them are women and children. And almost all of them are victims. Poisoned daughters. Abused wives. Forgotten mothers. Their suffering exists to be uncovered, explained, and—most importantly—witnessed by men. The afterlife in The Sixth Sense is less a metaphysical realm than a holding pen for women whose stories were never heard until a sensitive boy and a dead therapist show up to validate them.

Let’s talk about Malcolm’s wife (Olivia Williams), who spends the entire film in a slow-motion trance of sadness. We’re meant to read this as marital grief, but in retrospect (spoiler alert), it’s just widowhood played for narrative sleight of hand. Her job is to cry, look haunted, and never question why her husband no longer speaks to her—because apparently, being married to an emotionally unavailable man prepares you for being married to an actually unavailable one.

Shyamalan directs with restraint, allowing silence and stillness to carry dread better than any jump scare. The muted palette, the careful framing, the unassuming camera work—it’s all masterful. And the twist? Still holds up. But the real surprise isn’t that Malcolm’s dead. It’s that a film about pain, grief, and visibility still can’t quite see its women as more than vessels for someone else’s growth.

4 out of 5 cold spots in the hallway
(One for Osment’s haunting vulnerability. One for Shyamalan’s controlled direction. One for the genuinely shattering twist. One for the film’s atmosphere of restrained terror. The missing star? Buried with the dozens of female ghosts who never got a name, a voice, or a second act beyond inspiring emotional breakthroughs in the living men who failed them.)

#88 ‘Bringing Up Baby’

Leopards, Lunacy, and the Screwball Gaslighting of a Paleontologist in a Bow Tie

Bringing Up Baby (1938) is the gold standard of screwball comedy—an unhinged ballet of chaos, courtship, and casual animal endangerment where Katherine Hepburn steamrolls Cary Grant with enough manic charm to flatten the entire Smithsonian. It’s fizzy, fast, and frequently hilarious. It’s also Exhibit A in the long history of Hollywood equating feminine agency with delightful insanity, and masculine boundaries with obstacles to be worn down like a shoe heel on Fifth Avenue.

Cary Grant plays David Huxley, a bespectacled, repressed paleontologist trying to secure a million-dollar museum donation and assemble a brontosaurus skeleton—because, sure, that’s what men did before therapy. Enter Susan Vance (Hepburn), a socialite hurricane who mistakes his life for a crossword puzzle and decides to solve him. Within minutes, she’s stolen his golf ball, crashed his date, borrowed his car, and kidnapped his entire trajectory with the wide-eyed conviction that chaos is courtship.

Susan doesn’t just pursue David—she derails him. And the film frames this as romance. Her love language is sabotage. She loses his bone (not a euphemism), convinces him to impersonate a big-game hunter, and drags him into the countryside with a leopard named Baby and a dog named George. Is she charming? Absolutely. Is she sociopathic? Also yes. But because she’s played by Hepburn—intelligent, luminous, and terrifying—we’re supposed to applaud her for showing David how to live.

And let’s be honest: David needs help. He’s so repressed he might fossilize mid-scene. But instead of encouraging emotional growth, the film insists the solution is for him to be abducted into a new life by a woman who never lets him finish a sentence. Hepburn’s Susan is smart and impulsive, but her intelligence is never allowed to stand alone—it must be filtered through kooky unpredictability, lest she seem too threatening. Classic.

The pacing is breathless, the dialogue stacked ten jokes deep. Howard Hawks directs like someone trying to outrun a fire, and the result is kinetic brilliance. The chemistry between Hepburn and Grant is combustible—less sexual tension than an ongoing custody battle over the script’s last shred of realism.

But beneath the comedy is a grim little truth about how women were allowed to exist on screen: either elegant objects of desire or batty forces of nature. Susan gets away with it because she’s beautiful. Because she’s rich. Because, ultimately, she wants what all 1930s heroines must want—a man, even if she has to flatten his professional life and skeletal legacy to get him.

4 out of 5 missing dinosaur bones
(One for Hepburn’s unrelenting brilliance. One for Grant’s pratfalling dignity. One for the sparkling script. One for the cinematic courage to let a woman be this extra. The missing star? Mauled by Baby the leopard, along with the idea that maybe, just maybe, a woman could be chaotic and introspective without the whole plot treating it like adorable pathology.)

#87 “‘12 Angry Men’

Sweat, Stares, and the Triumph of White Liberal Conscience in a Room Without Women

12 Angry Men (1957) is a pressure-cooker of a film—a single-room showdown where the stakes are life and death, and the weapons are logic, sweat, and mid-century moral superiority. It’s hailed as a masterpiece of deliberative democracy, and it is—if your idea of justice involves twelve men yelling at each other until the most rational one wears down the rest like a cardigan-wrapped jackhammer.

Directed by Sidney Lumet in his stunning debut, the film takes place entirely in a jury room, where eleven men are ready to send a young (and notably non-white) boy to the electric chair without much thought—until Juror #8 (Henry Fonda, patron saint of patient righteousness) quietly suggests they slow their roll. What follows is an intricate unraveling of bias, ego, and class resentment disguised as civic duty.

Fonda plays Juror #8 like Atticus Finch with a subway pass: calm, rational, and utterly convinced that if we just talk it through, the truth will reveal itself like a math problem solved on a chalkboard. And sure, he’s noble. But let’s not pretend this isn’t the fantasy of the Enlightenment-minded white liberal: that prejudice can be reasoned with, that racism melts under the glow of polite confrontation, and that everyone just needs a second chance—preferably explained to them by a man in a tie.

The rest of the jurors are walking archetypes: the loudmouth bigot, the bitter father, the nervous immigrant, the “just get it over with” cynic. They’re all white, all male, and all conveniently arranged to give Fonda a progressive ladder to climb as he dismantles their assumptions one monologue at a time. It’s satisfying, yes. But it’s also sanitized. The film wants us to believe that bigotry is just a misunderstanding, not a structure. That justice is just one passionate voice away. That the system works if you participate hard enough.

And where, you might ask, are the women? Nowhere. Not on the jury. Not in the courtroom. Not even as characters discussed beyond the defendant’s mother, who barely exists. Justice here is a men-only game, where women are presumed too emotional, too biased, or simply irrelevant. The film makes a point about how prejudice taints the process—but doesn’t question why the process is built entirely around a specific kind of man in the first place.

That said, Lumet’s direction is a masterclass in spatial tension. The room gets hotter, the camera moves lower, the walls seem to close in. It’s claustrophobic and riveting. The performances—particularly from Lee J. Cobb and E.G. Marshall—are impeccable. The script is taut. The stakes are clear. And the message—that doubt is not weakness but duty—is as timely as ever.

4 out of 5 reasonable doubts
(One for Fonda’s benevolent steeliness. One for the perfect pacing. One for Lumet’s stage-to-screen mastery. One for reminding us that truth requires effort. The missing star? Still waiting outside the jury room, wearing heels, holding receipts, and wondering why justice always takes so damn long when women aren’t allowed in the room.)

#86 ‘Platoon’

War, Wounds, and the Masculine Ritual of Self-Destruction Dressed as Cinema Vérité

Platoon (1986) is Oliver Stone’s scorched confessional—a dirt-smeared fever dream about Vietnam that claims to show war as it really was, while still making sure the camera lingers on every slow-motion death like it’s shooting a cologne ad for PTSD. It’s a testosterone baptism by napalm, where young men are stripped of innocence, morality, and shirts—but somehow never of the idea that their trauma is the most important thing in the jungle.

Charlie Sheen plays Chris, a fresh-faced college dropout who enlists in Vietnam because he wants to find something real—because apparently nothing says “reality check” like stepping on a landmine. He narrates the film with an existential weariness that belies his age, which is the first clue this is less a story and more a mythic male psychodrama. Chris isn’t a character. He’s a cipher. An avatar for Stone’s own guilt, disillusionment, and need to stage-manage his memories into moral clarity.

The real story is the war between two father figures: Sgt. Elias (Willem Dafoe), the weed-smoking, soul-bearing Christ figure with cheekbones carved by ethics, and Sgt. Barnes (Tom Berenger), a walking war crime with a scarred face and an even more scarred conscience. Elias = conscience. Barnes = cruelty. Chris = the blank-faced audience caught between them, wondering if he can still go home and get into Brown.

And let’s be honest: the battle between Elias and Barnes isn’t about strategy. It’s about masculinity. Elias feels. Barnes acts. Elias kneels in the jungle like a martyr. Barnes spits blood and ideology. Their conflict is a morality play disguised as a platoon fight, and Chris’s eventual choice between them is treated like spiritual rebirth—except it comes with a machine gun and a dead man’s face burned into his soul.

Meanwhile, the Vietnamese people? Nameless, voiceless, and framed mostly as threat or collateral damage. They’re not part of the story—they’re the terrain the white boys move across, suffer upon, and occasionally massacre in slow, “tragic” dissolves. The film doesn’t dehumanize them overtly—it just forgets to humanize them in the first place. Women? Either sex workers or crying mothers. As usual, the war happens to them. The film isn’t about their losses—it’s about how those losses haunt the men afterward.

Stone’s direction is visceral, yes. Cinematographer Robert Richardson bathes everything in sickly greens and browns. The jungle feels alive. The sound design is claustrophobic. And Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings has never been the same since Dafoe collapsed in that crucifixion pose in a clearing. But for all its anti-war intentions, Platoon still indulges in the pageantry of violence. It wants to condemn the horror while showing it with operatic slow-motion and anguished male screams. It critiques the war, sure—but it also aestheticizes it.

3.5 out of 5 dog tags discarded in the mud
(One for Dafoe’s luminous grace under fire. One for the grime and realism. One for the honesty of rage. Half a star for daring to let the protagonist end the film unsure if he’s still human. The missing stars? Left in a burning village with the unnamed women and children the film forgot to mourn—because even in its most self-aware moment, Platoon still believes the most sacred casualty of war is the man who lives to remember it.)

#85 ‘A Night at the Opera’

Contracts, Chaos, and the Marxist Brothers Who Made Anarchy Fashionable

A Night at the Opera (1935) is the Marx Brothers at their most streamlined and studio-polished—which is to say, slightly less feral but no less committed to tearing logic limb from limb while wearing tuxedos. It’s a screwball grenade lobbed at high culture, capitalism, and the idea that rich people are better just because they can pronounce “Rigoletto” without choking.

This time, Groucho is Otis B. Driftwood, a money-grubbing parasite attaching himself to a wealthy widow and clawing his way into the world of opera, because apparently that’s where the real grift is. Chico and Harpo are along for the ride, playing the piano, stealing scenes, and violating the laws of space-time with their usual blend of joyful destruction and suspicious accents.

The “plot” (generous term) concerns the effort to elevate a talented unknown tenor to operatic fame while undermining a pompous diva and a tyrannical manager. But plot is not the point. The point is the stateroom scene. The contract negotiation scene. Harpo crawling through the orchestra pit like a mime exorcised from hell. The Marx Brothers don’t build narratives—they detonate them.

Let’s talk about the comedy: it’s sharp, surreal, and anarchic in all the right ways. Groucho’s one-liners are so fast they should come with subtitles. Chico turns malapropisms into a jazz form. And Harpo—well, he’s still the beautiful chaos elemental, running on pure instinct and whatever was in the prop department that day.

But for all its brilliance, A Night at the Opera still clings to the era’s predictable gender politics. Kitty Carlisle plays the lovely soprano whose main job is to stand next to the romantic lead and not trip over her dress. Margaret Dumont returns as the wealthy dowager, Groucho’s eternal foil and the patron saint of women who are expected to be endlessly tolerant of men behaving like caffeinated toddlers.

Yes, Dumont is glorious. But let’s not pretend she’s in on the joke. She is the joke—a symbol of feminine order, wealth, and social decorum that must be mocked, manipulated, and eventually kissed without warning. The film loves her for being the straight woman, but it never lets her win the game.

Still, this is arguably the Marx Brothers’ most accessible film. It tempers their usual anarchy with a dash of structure, thanks to producer Irving Thalberg, who thought maybe audiences would care more if there were actual stakes and a romantic subplot. He wasn’t wrong—it was a massive hit—but part of you misses the unfiltered weirdness of Duck Soup, where they weren’t shackled by sentiment or story arcs.

4 out of 5 crumpled contracts
(One for Groucho’s acid tongue. One for Harpo’s divine mischief. One for Chico’s linguistic jazz. One for the stateroom scene, which should be preserved in the Louvre. The missing star? Lost somewhere between the soprano’s bland love interest and the realization that even comedic revolution still made women stand off to the side while the boys burned everything down.)

#84 ‘Easy Rider’

Bikes, Blow, and the Counterculture That Couldn’t Escape Its Own Reflection

Easy Rider (1969) is the film that defined a generation, then immediately crashed into a ditch. It’s a sunburned hallucination of freedom, a rebel yell on two wheels, and the cinematic equivalent of a Doors song played on repeat at a commune that’s slowly running out of food. Directed by Dennis Hopper and starring Hopper, Peter Fonda, and an almost-too-young-to-be-that-drunk Jack Nicholson, it’s a myth, a manifesto, and a mess—and that’s the point.

Fonda is Wyatt, aka “Captain America” (subtle), the stoic dreamer with a stars-and-stripes helmet and the emotional range of a leather fringe. Hopper is Billy, the twitchy, incoherent sidekick who seems to be doing a live-action impression of your least favorite guy at the afterparty. Together, they smuggle drug money in a gas tank and ride across America in search of… something. Freedom? Truth? An excuse to look cool while chain-smoking in silence?

What Easy Rider wants to be is a critique of the American dream—a road trip through the rot beneath the red, white, and blue. What it often becomes is a slow-motion vanity project about two white guys mistaking detachment for enlightenment while women, Black people, and actual social movements remain firmly in the rearview mirror.

Let’s talk about the women. Briefly, because the film does. Women here are mostly topless accessories, mystic visions, or disposable hallucinations. They exist to provide sex, spiritual ambiguity, or a reaction shot to the boys’ angst. The film’s big emotional climax? A bad trip in a New Orleans graveyard with two prostitutes who are never even allowed to be people before being absorbed into the men’s symbolic breakdown.

And yes, the film is beautifully shot—Laszlo Kovacs’ cinematography is pure dusty poetry. The editing, the cross-fades, the soundtrack (hello, Born to Be Wild)—it’s all designed to feel important. But for all its rebellion, Easy Rider is obsessed with its own iconography. It critiques the mainstream while constantly performing for it. These aren’t men fleeing the system—they’re modeling on its ashes.

Then there’s Jack Nicholson as George, the ACLU lawyer who joins the ride and provides the film’s only real warmth. He’s funny, tragic, and actually says something about America’s fear of difference. Naturally, he’s murdered the moment he becomes too interesting—because nothing threatens the fragile male odyssey like someone else having a coherent thought.

By the time the final gunshots ring out, we’re meant to feel the full weight of freedom’s cost. The dream is dead. The road leads to violence. America kills what it doesn’t understand. But the film doesn’t examine why—it just pouts about it.

3.5 out of 5 acid-laced illusions
(One for the cinematography. One for the soundtrack. One for Nicholson. Half a star for sheer cultural impact. The missing stars? Blown away with every opportunity this film had to include a woman with a name, a cause with a point, or a rebellion that didn’t smell like Marlboros and male ego.)

#83 ‘Titanic’

Icebergs, Ideals, and the Unsinkable Burden of Being a Woman in a James Cameron Love Story

Titanic (1997) is James Cameron’s monument to doomed romance, tragic hubris, and the endurance of cheekbones under extreme aquatic pressure. It’s three hours of spectacle, soft lighting, and class warfare, all pinned to a love story that has been declared “epic” so many times it’s practically in the Louvre. But beneath the grandeur, Titanic is less a romance and more a gothic horror about what a woman has to survive just to reclaim her own goddamn name.

Kate Winslet’s Rose is the caged dove of the piece: a 17-year-old aristocrat with a corset, a fiancé she despises, and a mother who weaponizes social class like it’s a loaded pistol. Her life is a gilded coffin—until Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio), a penniless artist with hair like a shampoo ad and zero boundaries, swoops in and teaches her the sacred rites of living free: spitting off balconies, dancing with the Irish, and posing nude for a sketch that every millennial still references in therapy.

Jack is not a character. He’s a concept: the male fantasy of himself as savior, rendered in charcoal and abs. He exists solely to awaken Rose’s inner rebel, then nobly die so she can discover indoor plumbing and personal agency. He’s not complicated—he’s correct. He’s the kind of man who respects women’s bodies while still getting them naked on a chaise lounge. The dream.

But let’s not forget: this is Rose’s story, even if the film pretends it’s Jack’s right up until he’s frozen into a romantic popsicle. Rose is the one who changes, who dares to live, who throws a priceless necklace into the ocean instead of giving it to her traumatized granddaughter. She’s an icon—but also a burdened one. Because the film frames her liberation as something granted by Jack, rather than forged by her own rage and resilience.

The class politics? Just aesthetic. The poor dance better, the rich dine slower, and everyone’s doomed either way. The ship isn’t just a metaphor—it’s a floating morality play, complete with string quartet. When the iceberg hits, the film kicks into survival mode and becomes a masterpiece of tension, chaos, and watery despair. Cameron’s direction here is impeccable. The sinking sequence is a technical and emotional marvel—because nothing says “tragedy” like a man clinging to wood while Celine Dion soars over the credits.

But the tragedy underneath the tragedy is that Rose, like so many heroines before and after her, must lose everything—including the man who “saves” her—to become fully herself. It’s emancipation by attrition. Empowerment via trauma. She gets to tell her story—at 101 years old, with trembling hands and Hollywood-grade makeup—because everyone else is gone. How inspiring.

4 out of 5 floating doors that definitely could’ve fit two people
(One for Winslet’s fire. One for the ship as feminist metaphor. One for the scale of the disaster. One for the fact that Cameron accidentally made the most enduring critique of the male savior complex in cinema. The missing star? Sank with the idea that a woman needs to be nearly drowned, disowned, and widowed just to live a little.)

#82 ‘Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans’ (1927)

Swamps, Sin, and the Emotional Labor of Forgiving a Murder Plot

Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927) is F.W. Murnau’s silent-era masterpiece, a visual poem about love, guilt, redemption—and a man who almost murders his wife but gets forgiven after buying her lunch and taking her on a boat ride. Hailed as one of the greatest films ever made, Sunrise is luminous, expressionistic, and emotionally operatic. It’s also a cautionary tale about why “he said he was sorry” should not be a complete character arc.

The story begins in a swamp—symbolic, subtle—where a nameless Man (George O’Brien) is lured by a sultry, black-clad vamp from the City who encourages him to murder his wife, the nameless Wife (Janet Gaynor), so they can run off together. His plan? Drown her in a boat. Subtlety was not the silent era’s strong suit.

But once he rows her out and she realizes what’s happening, she looks at him with such pure terror that he… doesn’t do it. Progress! He breaks down sobbing, and because this is a morality fable wrapped in visual ecstasy, the Wife begins the long, arduous process of emotionally rehabilitating her would-be murderer with a day of wholesome rural tourism. They go to a fair. They get their photo taken. They watch pigs race. He wins her back with remorse and cake.

Let’s be clear: Sunrise is breathtaking. Charles Rosher and Karl Struss’s cinematography is visionary, all drifting mists, looming shadows, and double exposures that make desire look like damnation. Murnau’s camera floats like memory, dreams, and guilt all braided together. Every frame is composed like a cathedral window.

But for all its artistry, the story hinges on the Wife’s capacity to forgive—a forgiveness that is neither earned nor truly interrogated. She’s not a woman; she’s an archetype: the eternal feminine, endlessly pure, endlessly forgiving, endlessly absorbent of male violence and regret. She is the reward for his remorse. Her trauma becomes a footnote to his emotional breakthrough.

The City Woman, on the other hand, is all sin and sequins—a walking moral panic with a garter belt. She’s the seductress archetype with no backstory, just lipstick and a plan. She exists to corrupt the man, disappear in a storm, and let the Wife’s halo shine even brighter. Sunrise doesn’t just reduce women to symbols—it puts them on opposing ends of the Madonna/Whore seesaw and cuts the rope.

And yet, despite its regressive morality, Sunrise remains hypnotic. The emotions are grand, the stakes primal, and the visuals transcendent. It’s cinema at its most poetic, even when the message reads like a purity ring manual wrapped in roses.

4 out of 5 double exposures
(One for the direction. One for the cinematography. One for Gaynor’s luminous suffering. One for proving silent film could speak volumes. The missing star? Drowned somewhere in that foggy swamp, along with the idea that maybe women deserve more than to be plot devices in men’s journeys to moral clarity.)