#81 ‘Spartacus’

Chains, Chests, and the Appropriation of Rebellion for the Heterosexual Ego

Spartacus (1960) is Stanley Kubrick’s sprawling, sand-drenched epic about one man’s uprising against Roman tyranny—by which we mostly mean lots of shirtless men yelling in unison while women weep prettily in the background. It’s long. It’s lavish. It’s loaded with politics and pecs. And while it flirts with revolution, it ultimately can’t resist framing liberation as the slow, noble suffering of a single, beautiful man played by Kirk Douglas with all the gravitas of a man auditioning for a marble statue.

Douglas, who also produced the film, plays Spartacus like Moses if Moses had a chin that could cut glass. He starts out enslaved, rises through gladiatorial ranks, and then leads a slave revolt so sanitized you’d think the Roman Empire collapsed under the weight of its own melodrama. The film claims to be about freedom, but let’s be honest: it’s really about the charisma of one white guy who liberates others while being worshipped for his restraint.

The most infamous moment—“I’m Spartacus!”—is pure Hollywood martyrdom. It’s meant to show collective loyalty, sure, but really it’s a monument to the power of self-sacrifice performed by men who all look like they spend more time oiling each other than actually strategizing. The slave army doesn’t win the war, but it does win the moral high ground, and in the cinema of empire, that’s apparently enough.

And let’s talk about the women—briefly, because the film barely does. Jean Simmons plays Varinia, Spartacus’s love interest, whose primary function is to look beautiful, get pregnant, and cry from behind a veil. She’s “liberated” by Spartacus through love, because of course the real revolution is heteronormative affection. Her arc? From captive to wife to grieving mother of a symbol. She’s not a woman—she’s a womb with eyeliner.

Then there’s the infamous “snails and oysters” scene, which delicately hints at bisexuality between Laurence Olivier’s Crassus and his slave Antoninus (Tony Curtis). It's one of the only moments in early Hollywood to acknowledge queerness—even as it couches it in euphemism and makes sure the gay-coded character is also a sadistic tyrant. Progress, if you squint, and if you ignore how quickly Antoninus becomes Spartacus’s less sexy sidekick.

Kubrick’s direction is oddly restrained, likely because Douglas hired him late in production to replace the original director and then kept a tight grip on creative control. The result is a film that looks expensive, feels important, and yet often plays like a Greatest Hits album of Western Civilisation clichés: freedom is noble, death is meaningful, and revolution only matters if the man leading it looks good crucified.

3.5 out of 5 loaves of Roman propaganda
(One for Peter Ustinov’s oily genius. One for the cinematography. One for being just queer and subversive enough to raise eyebrows in 1960. Half a star for the unintentional camp of watching slaves form perfect phalanxes of male bonding. The missing stars? Left on the battlefield with the women who had no lines, the slaves who had no names, and the revolution that was reduced to a vanity project in sandals.)

#80 ‘The Apartment’

Keyholes, Capitalism, and the Cost of Being a Good Man in a Bad System

The Apartment (1960) is Billy Wilder’s velvet-wrapped gut punch: a romantic comedy that slips a suicide attempt between the meet-cute and the New Year’s kiss, and somehow pulls it off. It’s tender, biting, and devastatingly modern. But let’s not pretend it’s just a love story. It’s a capitalist horror film in sheep’s clothing—where ambition runs on exploitation, women are currency, and the only way to survive is to hand over your dignity along with your apartment key.

Jack Lemmon plays C.C. Baxter, a company man in the most literal sense: a lonely insurance clerk who loans out his apartment to executives for their extramarital affairs in exchange for career advancement. He’s sweet, yes. Likable, sure. But also complicit. He lets men cheat, lie, and discard women in his own bed just so he can maybe sit closer to the elevator in a beige office building filled with drones. It’s not just middle management—it’s moral erosion by paperwork.

Enter Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine), the elevator operator with a sad smile and a sharp tongue, who’s having an affair with one of those executives—Baxter’s boss, no less. She’s radiant and resigned, funny and fragile. And when she overdoses on sleeping pills in Baxter’s apartment, the film stops being a comedy and becomes something else entirely: a reckoning.

Fran is not your typical ingénue. She’s not quirky, not cloying, not waiting to be rescued. She’s exhausted. And for good reason: she’s smart enough to know what she’s worth to men in power, and broken enough to keep accepting it. The film doesn’t punish her for this—but it does frame her recovery as something that can only happen through a nicer man’s affection. Baxter may not be a predator, but he’s still part of the system that chewed her up.

Wilder directs with elegance and acid. The tone flips between tragic and comic with precision. And Lemmon is extraordinary—neurotic, tender, increasingly aware of the cost of being “nice” in a world where kindness is treated like a currency to be manipulated. But the film’s real brilliance lies in how it weaponizes charm against itself. Every joke lands, but each one cuts deeper. You laugh, then wince, then realize the punchline is your own complicity.

Yes, the ending is hopeful. Fran leaves the boss. Baxter quits his job. But it’s a small revolution. Two people opt out of a corrupt system, but the building is still there. The men are still laughing. And the women? They’re still being passed around on punch cards.

4 out of 5 used towels
(One for MacLaine’s luminous sorrow. One for Lemmon’s tragic sweetness. One for Wilder’s perfect tonal alchemy. One for daring to show that love isn’t enough to fix the world—but it might be enough to fix two broken people inside it. The missing star? Still waiting in the hallway, holding a key that opens doors but never offers safety.)

#79 ‘The Wild Bunch’

Bullets, Bloodlust, and the Last Stand of the Masculine Delusion

The Wild Bunch (1969) is a scorched-earth elegy for the American cowboy—an operatic bloodbath where aging outlaws cling to their code like a whiskey-soaked security blanket while the 20th century quietly reloads behind their backs. Directed by Sam Peckinpah with both reverence and rage, the film is hailed as a masterpiece of revisionist Westerns. And it is—if your definition of revisionist includes replacing romanticism with nihilism, but keeping the women disposable and the guns fully loaded.

The titular “bunch” is a band of grizzled men out of time: Pike Bishop (William Holden), Dutch (Ernest Borgnine), and a handful of other war-scarred, emotionally bankrupt bros who rob, drink, kill, and wax nostalgic about the Good Old Days—when murder came with a handshake and a moral code. They’re being hunted by Pike’s former partner-turned-lapdog Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan), a man who’s basically been deputized to sell out his past in exchange for a future that doesn’t want him either.

The plot? Thin. The violence? Operatic. The real story here is about decay—of men, of honor, of a mythic West that never really existed but sure looks poetic in slow motion. Peckinpah films every shootout like a ballet choreographed by a war criminal. Blood spurts. Children cheer. Men die in glorious, gut-ripping agony. It’s not gratuitous—it’s sacred. Masculine suffering turned into myth.

But let’s talk about who’s missing from the myth. Women in The Wild Bunch are prostitutes, victims, or both. They exist only to be ogled, assaulted, or executed—tools of male rage or consequence-free pleasure. There is no interiority. No narrative space. Just background detail to emphasize how far the men have fallen or how justified they are in falling further. Peckinpah’s women aren’t characters. They’re corpses with timing.

The film tries to critique the violence it depicts—but it also fetishizes it. Pike’s final stand isn’t tragic because it’s brutal. It’s glorious because it’s brutal. The film pretends to condemn the bloodshed while shooting it in high art slow motion with a choir of gunfire. It’s like watching someone denounce alcoholism through a martini-soaked monologue.

And yet, the film’s self-awareness is real. The Wild Bunch knows its men are relics. It knows they’re broken. But it also loves them too much to let them grow. Their loyalty, their code, their desperate need for meaning in a world that’s moved on without them—it’s all played straight. And in that straightness lies the most dangerous lie of all: that self-destruction is a form of virtue, as long as it’s done with grit and a shotgun.

3.5 out of 5 morally ambiguous shootouts
(One for Holden’s haunted gravitas. One for Peckinpah’s uncompromising direction. One for the brutal choreography of disintegration. Half a star for having the guts to say goodbye to the Western, even if it didn’t burn the myth as thoroughly as it wanted to. The missing stars? Gunned down alongside the women who were never offered names, arcs, or the dignity of surviving someone else’s redemption story.)

#78 ‘Modern Times’

Cogs, Capitalism, and the Little Tramp Who Refused to Be Assimilated

Modern Times (1936) is Charlie Chaplin’s last hurrah for his Little Tramp—and it’s a masterpiece of silent protest dressed in slapstick, a love letter to the dignity of the individual, and a not-so-subtle middle finger to industrial capitalism. It’s brilliant, biting, and oddly adorable. But while Chaplin juggles wrenches and revolution with astonishing grace, let’s not pretend he wasn’t also doing a full-on pantomime of the working class without inviting many of them to speak for themselves.

The film opens with a visual thesis statement: sheep being herded, then factory workers punching in. Chaplin’s Tramp is immediately swallowed by the machine—literally. He becomes a twitching, oil-slicked cog in a system that sees humans as extensions of levers, gears, and bottom lines. The famous scene of him being fed by a malfunctioning automatic lunch machine? Hilarious. Horrifying. A mechanical force-feeding of efficiency that still plays like every algorithmic nightmare in today’s gig economy.

Chaplin, as always, is a physical genius. He performs anxiety like ballet, resistance like jazz. But what makes Modern Times so radical is that he doesn’t just laugh at the system—he names it. This isn’t just a comedy about hard times. It’s about the violence of capitalism, the dehumanization of labor, and the quiet heroism of refusing to be broken.

And yet, as with many of Chaplin’s social critiques, the lens is almost exclusively male. The Tramp suffers, yes—but he’s allowed to suffer. His story is centered, stylized, mythologized. The Gamin, played by Paulette Goddard, is radiant and rebellious, but she’s written as pure reaction. Her father is murdered, her sisters taken, her future bleak—but she exists mostly to be Chaplin’s mirror and reward. Her arc? Survive long enough to be rescued by a man with a mustache and no stable income.

To the film’s credit, Goddard gets more grit and screen time than most female characters of the era. She’s resourceful, angry, and capable of joy. But there’s no real critique of gender in Modern Times—just a wistful nod to the idea that poor women are either barefoot angels or streetwise ornaments to male suffering.

Chaplin also sidesteps race entirely. The Great Depression impacted everyone, yes, but not equally. In Modern Times, poverty is universal—but in reality, it was—and still is—shaped by racial capitalism, something this white, European immigrant narrative politely ignores.

Still, Modern Times is astonishing. It’s a silent film made in the age of talkies that says more than most scripts ever manage. It’s a comedy that critiques labor without punching down. And it dares to end not with triumph, but with resilience: two people, hand in hand, walking into uncertainty with nothing but each other and a refusal to give in.

4 out of 5 factory levers
(One for the satire. One for the physical comedy. One for the score Chaplin composed himself. One for the quiet radicalism of turning a laugh into a protest. The missing star? Jammed in the gears of a system that still doesn’t give women or workers enough space to do anything but survive—and smile.)

#77 ‘All the President’s Men’

Typewriters, Truth, and the Sexiest Thing Two White Men Ever Did Was Believe Women

All the President’s Men (1976) is journalism’s wet dream—a tense, methodical descent into America’s political rot, carried out by two impossibly earnest reporters in crisp shirts and serious expressions. It’s a film with no explosions, no car chases, no romance, and not a single wasted breath. Just dogged research, whispered phone calls, and the radical 1970s idea that facts might still matter. Also: the entire U.S. government falling apart because someone broke into an office with a roll of duct tape.

Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman play Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the Washington Post reporters who unraveled the Watergate scandal one phone call at a time. They’re opposites—Redford’s Woodward is the clean-cut all-American golden boy, while Hoffman’s Bernstein is the chain-smoking, streetwise scruffball. They finish each other’s sentences. They drink each other’s coffee. They might be the most romantic onscreen pairing of the decade, if your idea of intimacy involves cross-referencing campaign donations and passive-aggressive editorial meetings.

Director Alan J. Pakula shoots the newsroom like a secular cathedral: all fluorescence and silence, the holy hum of typewriters replacing a score. Gordon Willis’s cinematography—the so-called “Prince of Darkness”—makes every parking garage meeting look like a noir séance. And Jason Robards as Ben Bradlee growls through the smoke like a man who’s one misquote away from divine retribution.

But let’s talk about what really happens here: two white men get famous for listening. They knock on doors. They take notes. And—brace yourself—they believe the women. The whole thing cracks open because a bookkeeper hints at financial irregularities. Because secretaries don’t hang up. Because wives talk when their husbands won’t. The patriarchy failed to protect its secrets, and the fourth estate showed up with a notepad and a deadline.

That said, the women themselves? Ghosts. Anonymous. Side characters in their own betrayals. They’re sources, not subjects—valuable only as long as they provide access. Once the quotes are typed, they disappear. The film doesn’t linger on their risk, their fear, or the fact that whistleblowing as a woman in 1972 could cost you everything. This is their story too, but you’d never know it by the end credits.

Still, All the President’s Men remains a high watermark for films about power, process, and the slow grind of truth through bureaucracy. It doesn’t glamorize journalism—it ritualizes it. The breakthroughs are small. The tension builds from silence. And the final scene—just a teletype machine hammering away as Nixon is re-elected—lands like a gut punch. Victory is coming, but it hasn’t arrived yet. That’s real suspense.

4 out of 5 rotary phones
(One for Redford’s jawline of integrity. One for Hoffman’s twitchy brilliance. One for the way the film makes typing look like an act of rebellion. One for the rare depiction of journalism as sacred labor. The missing star? Reserved for every unnamed woman whose voice cracked the case but never made the byline.)

#76 ‘Forrest Gump’

Shrimp, Sentiment, and the Slow March of American History as Told by a Man Who Doesn’t Understand It

Forrest Gump (1994) is a glossy, Oscar-slicked fairy tale wrapped in Americana, where history happens to people while one man with a low IQ and high luck stumbles through the 20th century like a well-meaning ghost. Directed by Robert Zemeckis and carried by Tom Hanks doing his most earnest “aw shucks” affectation, the film is beloved by boomers, weaponized by conservatives, and deeply suspicious of anyone with a protest sign or a uterus.

Hanks plays Forrest, a man with a learning disability and a heart of gold, who drifts through nearly every major historical event between the 1950s and the 1980s. Desegregation? Vietnam? Watergate? No problem—he just happens to be there, smiling softly, never questioning anything, always doing what he’s told. He becomes a football star, a war hero, a ping-pong prodigy, and a shrimp tycoon—because in Forrest Gump, the moral is clear: if you don’t question authority, think critically, or engage with the world in any meaningful way, you will be rewarded.

The film is obsessed with nostalgia, but not the complicated kind. It romanticizes a vision of America where the white, male, Southern everyman floats safely above conflict. Meanwhile, anyone who does engage with history—anyone who protests, struggles, or suffers—is punished. Jenny (Robin Wright), Forrest’s childhood friend and eventual martyr, is the film’s punching bag for the counterculture. She’s the avatar of feminism, drugs, sexual liberation, and trauma—and the film treats her like a cautionary tale wrapped in a halter top.

Jenny’s arc is tragic, yes—but it’s also deeply condescending. She’s abused, discarded, and pathologized, only to return to Forrest when she’s dying, as if the film can finally forgive her once she’s no longer inconvenient. Forrest gets a son and a legacy. Jenny gets AIDS and a grave. The message? Purity and obedience will save you. Questioning the system gets you dead.

The film’s portrayal of race isn’t offensive so much as absent. Black characters are background figures—servants, fellow soldiers, or historical stand-ins. The Civil Rights Movement is a visual cameo. There’s no interiority, no exploration, no voice—just a drive-by tour of suffering, narrated by a man who doesn’t understand what he’s looking at.

Technically, the film is impressive. Zemeckis uses CGI to weave Forrest into archival footage with seamless flair. Alan Silvestri’s score is sweeping, and the soundtrack is a boomer playlist designed to make you cry on cue. Hanks is committed—sweet, sincere, and totally swallowed by a character who, by design, cannot grow.

But at its core, Forrest Gump is a fable of anti-intellectualism. It rewards passivity, punishes rebellion, and turns trauma into a soft-focus montage. It’s not about resilience—it’s about obedience. The world changes, but Forrest doesn’t. And somehow, we’re supposed to believe that’s a virtue.

3 out of 5 running shoes
(One for the visual innovation. One for Hanks’ performance. One for the soundtrack doing most of the emotional labor. The missing stars? Buried under Jenny’s tombstone and every critique the film never had the guts to make.)

#75 ‘In the Heat of the Night’

Sweat, Southern Guilt, and the Black Man Who Solved Racism (For a Minute)

In the Heat of the Night (1967) is a pressure cooker of a film—racism simmering under the surface, then boiling over every time a Black man refuses to apologize for existing. Directed by Norman Jewison and anchored by Sidney Poitier’s razor-wire dignity, the film wants to be a social thriller. What it often is, though, is a morality play where a Black man proves his worth by performing unpaid labor for a town that wants him dead before breakfast.

Poitier plays Virgil Tibbs, a Philadelphia homicide detective who just happens to be passing through a fictional Mississippi town when a murder drops into the plot like a body into a well-lit frame. The local sheriff, Gillespie (Rod Steiger, all sweat and spittle), arrests him on sight—because of course he does. Tibbs isn’t just wrongly accused. He’s presumed guilty by default, because his skin is a crime scene.

What follows is part murder mystery, part reluctant buddy cop drama, and part cinematic therapy session for Southern white men who want to be reassured they’re not all that bad. Tibbs, despite being insulted, threatened, slapped, and generally treated like an invasive species, stays to solve the murder. Not because anyone deserves it—but because the script demands he play the better man.

Poitier’s performance is transcendent. He holds every line like it’s loaded. His most famous retort—“They call me Mister Tibbs!”—isn’t just iconic, it’s volcanic. A demand for humanity in a world that still confuses civility with submission. But the film is less interested in his interior world than in how his presence catalyzes Gillespie’s moral awakening.

Ah yes, the sheriff. Gillespie starts as a racist caricature and ends as… a slightly more polite racist caricature. He’s given a redemption arc powered entirely by proximity to Black excellence. His growth comes not from reckoning with his own violence, but from standing next to a man who keeps saving his reputation. The emotional labor is entirely Tibbs’s. Gillespie just has to stop yelling long enough to look thoughtful.

And the women? Don’t worry—you won’t miss them. They’re barely in the film. The murdered man’s widow exists to cry, the local girls exist to be ogled or scorned, and not a single woman has an interior life. It’s a man’s world, and they’re just sweating in it.

The film thinks it’s about justice. What it’s really about is decorum—about asking a Black man to dress, speak, and solve things nicely enough that white people will consider not lynching him before dinner. It’s powerful. It’s important. But it’s also built on the fantasy that racism can be undone with good manners and a solved case file.

4 out of 5 broken thermometers
(One for Poitier’s incandescent restraint. One for the tension that doesn’t let up. One for the slap heard round the world. One for daring to name the rot without flinching. The missing star? With Tibbs—because he leaves town alone, dignity intact, but still burdened with the weight of making a hostile world feel just a little less guilty.)

#74 ‘The Silence of the Lambs’

Serial Killers, Staring Contests, and the Female Gaze Held Hostage

The Silence of the Lambs (1991) is a psychological thriller disguised as a feminist triumph, a horror film that slathers its misogyny in prestige and calls it subtext. It’s a masterclass in tension, performance, and camera work—and also a case study in how Hollywood pats itself on the back for “strong female characters” as long as they’re surrounded by men explaining how they’d skin them.

Jodie Foster plays Clarice Starling, an FBI trainee with more emotional intelligence than her superiors and better instincts than the entire Bureau. She’s young, brilliant, and constantly surrounded by men who speak over her, leer at her, or metaphorically pat her on the head before asking her to walk into the basement of the American psyche. She’s the closest the genre gets to a female hero who isn’t supernatural, suicidal, or screaming. But to get there, she has to earn the approval of not one, but two paternal monsters.

Enter Dr. Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins), the cannibal psychiatrist with exquisite taste and a creepy affection for fava beans and boundaries violations. He’s terrifying, yes—but refined. The film fetishizes him. His intellect, his manners, his monstrous discipline. He isn’t just the villain; he’s the brand. Lecter doesn’t murder—he curates. And he becomes Clarice’s greatest mentor, because apparently the fastest path to female empowerment is through a man who could filet you like a trout.

Their relationship is framed as one of mutual respect—but make no mistake: he’s always in control. Even caged, masked, and strapped to a dolly, he’s the one calling the shots, peeling back Clarice’s trauma like it’s foie gras. And the film lets him. It romanticizes their twisted dynamic, selling us the idea that emotional vulnerability with a serial killer is a mark of strength.

Then there’s Buffalo Bill—a killer who butchers women to make a suit out of their skin, and whose identity is a grab bag of transphobic tropes wrapped in Norman Bates leftovers. The film tries to separate Bill’s violence from trans identity (“he’s not really trans,” the script insists), but it’s too late. The damage is done. Audiences leave with one more reason to fear gender nonconformity and another pop culture boogeyman to hang it on.

Director Jonathan Demme shoots the film in tight, head-on close-ups, forcing the viewer into Clarice’s perspective—and it works. You feel her discomfort. Her claustrophobia. Her quiet defiance. Foster’s performance is astonishing: restrained, intelligent, endlessly human. She makes Starling real in a world that wants her reduced to prey.

And yet, the film gives her so little space to be anything but strong. No softness. No pleasure. No rest. Her reward for surviving the male gaze, the literal monster, and the bureaucratic swamp of the FBI? A handshake from a boss and a phone call from her nightmare. “The lambs have stopped screaming,” she says—but the audience never gets to know what she’ll do without them.

4 out of 5 censored autopsies
(One for Foster’s quiet brilliance. One for the oppressive, perfect cinematography. One for the cold thrill of Hopkins. One for the rare attempt at a female-centered thriller that doesn’t end in a refrigerator. The missing star? Left in a pit with the truth about how much power the film still gives to the man who wants to devour her.)

#73 ‘Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’

Charm, Crime, and the Ballad of Boys Who Can’t Quit Each Other (or Capitalism)

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) is the buddy movie that launched a thousand smirks and a million slow-motion death scenes. It’s all sun-drenched landscapes, ragtime anachronisms, and manly camaraderie wrapped in enough charm to sell you armed robbery as a form of flirtation. George Roy Hill directs it like a swan song for the Old West, but let’s be clear: this isn’t a western. It’s a capitalist break-up comedy between two men who love each other too much to admit it and a system too violent to let them leave without a bullet-riddled goodbye.

Paul Newman’s Butch is a fast-talking idea man with a twinkle in his eye and no intention of doing hard labor, while Robert Redford’s Sundance is the strong, silent marksman who probably doesn’t know what a feeling is unless it’s attached to a bullet. Together, they rob banks, dodge Pinkertons, and charm their way into the sunset with nothing but charisma and a convenient lack of accountability.

And then there’s Etta Place (Katharine Ross), the woman who exists in the film like a sigh. She’s a schoolteacher, a lover, a third wheel on a bicycle built for two. She gets one song, one scene of sensuality, and then she’s quietly written out before the final shootout—as if the film knows there’s no room for feminine subjectivity once the bullets start flying. Etta is not a person so much as a postcard: beautiful, passive, and destined to be mailed home while the boys chase glory.

The film’s tone is breezy, even when it shouldn’t be. It cuts from gunfights to vaudeville, from exile to banter. It treats violence like a game, even as the stakes mount. When Butch and Sundance flee to Bolivia (because apparently imperialism is fine if the vistas are pretty), the film dares to make foreign poverty a punchline and local people a faceless backdrop to their legend. The myth of the noble outlaw is preserved, but only at the cost of everyone else’s realism.

And yet, it’s all so watchable. Newman and Redford are magnetic—two sides of a tarnished coin flipping through history with nothing but a six-shooter and a punchline. Their chemistry is the heart of the film, their emotional intimacy deeper than any romance the genre dares to explore. Their final freeze-frame is iconic not because they’re brave, but because it’s the moment the film admits: these men will never grow up, never change, and never survive in a world that demands accountability over charisma.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid wants to mourn the West, but it also wants to kiss it on the mouth before it dies. It critiques the end of an era while making that end look like the world’s most handsome tragedy. It’s fun, but it’s also cowardly. It lets the boys off the hook with a bang and a freeze, without ever asking who pays the price when men mistake charm for justice.

3.5 out of 5 stolen payrolls
(One for Newman’s smirk. One for Redford’s brooding magnetism. One for the cinematography. Half a star for the sheer homoerotic tension no one was brave enough to write down. The missing stars? Shot offscreen in Bolivia, alongside the film’s conscience and the woman who was never given a last line.)

#72 ‘The Shawshank Redemption’

Hope, Bromance, and the Holy Ascent of the Gentle White Man

The Shawshank Redemption (1994) is the world’s favorite inspirational poster with a prison yard attached. It’s the feel-good story of institutional dehumanization, prolonged male suffering, and—of course—salvation through tunnel digging. It’s beautifully acted, expertly scored, and soaked in so much sentimental male bonding that you half expect the final scene to feature a wedding on that beach in Zihuatanejo. And yet, for all its lofty musings about hope and freedom, it remains a film where systemic injustice is healed not by uprising, reform, or solidarity—but by one quietly exceptional man with a rock hammer and impeccable manners.

Tim Robbins plays Andy Dufresne, a mild-mannered banker falsely convicted of murdering his wife and her lover. He arrives at Shawshank prison like a lamb among wolves, only to reveal himself as a financial whiz, Renaissance man, and literal tunnel visionary. Over two decades, he launders money for the corrupt warden, builds a library, and earns the unwavering respect of every man within fifty yards—especially Ellis “Red” Redding, played by Morgan Freeman in the world’s most beloved role as Wise Black Narrator Who Exists to Observe White Man’s Growth.

Let’s talk about Red. Freeman’s voiceover is butter, yes. His performance is graceful and grounded. But the film keeps him in the passenger seat. Red doesn’t change—he reacts to Andy. He doesn’t escape—he follows Andy. He’s the moral witness to a redemption that isn’t really his. The system crushes him, until Andy—magically, benevolently—gives him back his belief in life. It’s moving, sure. But it’s also the kind of cinematic dynamic where Black characters exist to reflect white virtue, not to pursue their own.

And the women? Blink and you’ll miss them. Andy’s wife? Dead, barely sketched. Other women? Nonexistent. In Shawshank, women are either the cause of a man’s downfall or the imagined endpoint of his redemption. It’s a man’s world, and we’re all just watching men cry in it.

The prison system itself is painted in broad, Dickensian strokes—brutal guards, sadistic wardens, solitary confinement, and the occasional redemption-through-literacy subplot. It’s not untrue, but it’s emotionally convenient. The film isn't interested in abolition. It wants to elevate one man’s triumph as proof that the system can be outwitted, outlasted, and ultimately escaped—with just enough sweat, smarts, and Morgan Freeman narration.

And yet, Shawshank works. Frank Darabont directs with restraint. The score by Thomas Newman soars like a dove released in slow motion. The film builds to a climax that’s satisfying, even if it’s dishonest. It’s not a story about prison—it’s a story about mythology: how suffering sanctifies, how goodness wins, and how white male virtue can’t be contained by four stone walls.

3.5 out of 5 Rita Hayworth posters
(One for Freeman’s gravitas. One for the quietly devastating supporting cast. One for the masterful pacing. Half a star for making millions of men cry without once questioning the system that created their tears. The missing stars? Still locked in a cell with every character who wasn’t offered a beach, a bank account, or the luxury of being quietly exceptional.)

#71 ‘Saving Private Ryan’

Blood, Brotherhood, and the Redemption of White Male Grief Through War Porn

Saving Private Ryan (1998) opens with a bang—more specifically, with limbs flying across Omaha Beach like confetti at a fascist funeral. Spielberg’s 27-minute D-Day sequence is a masterclass in chaos, brutality, and technical brilliance. It’s also the cinematic equivalent of trauma porn: immersive, relentless, and somehow still patriotic. Because no matter how horrifying the war is, Saving Private Ryan still believes it’s a sacred crucible for forging American masculinity.

The plot is simple. One grieving mother is about to lose all four sons in World War II, and the U.S. Army decides to send a squad of men behind enemy lines to save the last one—Private James Francis Ryan. It's a noble mission built on a sentimental premise: that a single life, when wrapped in the right amount of motherly longing and American exceptionalism, is worth the deaths of many. The question the film poses is whether that’s right. The answer it gives? Yes, but only if you cry about it later.

Tom Hanks plays Captain Miller, a soft-spoken schoolteacher turned soldier, tasked with leading the rescue. He’s the moral compass, the embodiment of reluctant valor—until he’s gunned down by the very war that made him noble in the first place. He’s not allowed to survive, because martyrdom is the only acceptable conclusion for sensitive, competent men in combat narratives. His death isn’t a tragedy—it’s a benediction.

The squad? A grab bag of war movie archetypes: the wisecracking New Yorker, the religious sniper, the cowardly translator, the angry ethnic guy. Each is given just enough personality to become emotionally legible before they’re sacrificed to the altar of Ryan’s right to go home and make babies in the Iowa countryside. And that’s the real kicker—Ryan (Matt Damon) barely appears in the film, yet he becomes the receptacle for everyone else’s virtue. He doesn’t earn their sacrifice. He inherits it.

And what of the women? Oh, honey. This is a Steven Spielberg war movie. Women exist in Saving Private Ryan solely as letters, memories, or offscreen mothers in empty farmhouses. They’re the reason men fight, the reward for survival, or the emotional punctuation at the end of someone else’s arc. They don’t speak. They don’t bleed. They don’t get to ask what it means when an entire war is filmed without them.

Spielberg shoots the film in desaturated tones and handheld chaos, lending everything a sense of grim authenticity. But beneath the grime and gore is a deeply conservative message: war is hell, but it’s our hell, and it forges our heroes. It wants to show you suffering while still selling you nobility. It pretends to question sacrifice while choreographing every death for maximum emotional uplift.

By the end, an elderly Ryan sobs over Miller’s grave and begs to be told he’s “earned it.” But the film doesn’t want you to ask what “earning” really means—it wants you to salute. To weep. To feel patriotic without ever being political.

3.5 out of 5 blood-streaked dog tags
(One for the visceral power of the opening. One for Hanks’ restrained gravitas. One for the technical craft. Half a star for pretending to ask hard questions. The missing stars? Buried in a cemetery of unnamed women, civilian collateral, and every soldier who didn’t get a violin cue or a close-up before dying for someone else’s symbolism.)

#70 ‘A Clockwork Orange’

Violence, Virtue, and the Cult of the Charming Sociopath

A Clockwork Orange (1971) is Stanley Kubrick’s cold, gleaming provocation—a dystopian nightmare of Beethoven, ultraviolence, and choreographed rape, wrapped in a philosophy term paper and narrated by a teenage sadist with a posh accent and a codpiece. It wants to shock you, unsettle you, and make you question the very nature of free will. But mostly, it wants you to watch a woman get brutalized in slow motion while the camera marvels at its own aesthetic choices.

Malcolm McDowell plays Alex DeLarge, a sociopathic teenager who leads a gang of “droogs” through a carnival of depravity—beatings, home invasions, sexual assaults—all delivered with stylized glee and fourth-wall-breaking smirks. He’s an unrepentant monster who becomes the state’s test subject in a behavior modification experiment designed to strip him of violent impulses. The film’s thesis is that in making him “good,” the government also strips him of his humanity. And so begins the moral conundrum: is it better to be a monster by choice or a good citizen by force?

Let’s pause and ask a more urgent question: why are we so concerned about Alex’s autonomy when the film barely spares a thought for his victims? The women he rapes are set dressing. The men he brutalizes are props for his transformation. Their trauma is irrelevant, their pain a backdrop for his philosophical awakening. Because apparently, in Kubrick’s future, only the suffering of men counts as existential.

Yes, the film is visually stunning. The production design is retro-fascist pop-art perfection. Walter Carlos’s synth-heavy reinterpretations of classical music create an auditory unease that lingers. And McDowell? He’s magnetic in the worst way—a black hole of charisma that makes you almost forget he’s grinning through scenes of horrifying misogyny. Almost.

Kubrick’s direction is controlled, deliberate, and clinical—so clinical, in fact, that the satire sometimes curdles into complicity. When you stylize rape with classical music and slow motion, are you critiquing violence or fetishizing it? The line blurs, and Kubrick doesn't seem particularly interested in drawing it clearly.

Women in A Clockwork Orange exist for two reasons: to be sexualized or to be destroyed. There is no female character with agency. None with interiority. Their naked bodies fill frame after frame, often lifeless, usually silent. The film claims to critique dehumanization, but it dehumanizes women to make the point. That’s not subversion—it’s narrative hypocrisy.

And the state? No better than Alex. Bureaucrats who torture under the guise of order. Psychologists who reduce morality to stimulus and response. The film wants us to see the system as more monstrous than the individual—but only because it dares to interrupt the male antihero’s spree.

By the end, when Alex grins and declares he’s been “cured all right,” the audience is supposed to feel discomfort, even horror. But Kubrick’s gaze remains infatuated with him. And so does the film.

3 out of 5 milk-plus hallucinations
(One for McDowell’s fearless performance. One for the set design and score. One for raising questions that still matter. The missing stars? Left behind with the unnamed, unremembered women whose violated bodies were used not as commentary, but as canvas.)

#69 ‘Tootsie’

Wigs, Wokeness, and the Man Who Had to Be a Woman to Respect One

Tootsie (1982) is often hailed as a feminist comedy, a progressive farce, a “sensitive” satire where Dustin Hoffman learns what it’s like to be treated like a woman. Which, of course, begs the question: Why do men only believe misogyny exists after they try on pantyhose?

Hoffman plays Michael Dorsey, an insufferable, unemployed actor whose reputation for being “difficult” (read: arrogant, manipulative, and allergic to direction) gets him blacklisted. So what does he do? Reflect? Apologize? Grow? Of course not. He puts on a dress and lies his way into a soap opera role as “Dorothy Michaels,” a no-nonsense, empowered Southern nurse—and is immediately applauded for being the strong female character women apparently couldn’t write for themselves.

The film spins this as redemptive. Michael, living as Dorothy, finally sees the sexism women face: being dismissed, patronized, objectified. And we, the audience, are supposed to clap for his epiphany like he just cracked cold fusion. Yes, Dustin. Women are treated like garbage. But they didn’t need your cross-dressing intervention to find that out.Jessica Lange plays Julie, Michael’s co-star and eventual love interest, whose biggest narrative function is to fall for Dorothy, get confused, and then forgive Michael once he rips off his wig and monologues about how she “taught him to be a better man.” And let’s be clear: she does the emotional labor. He gets the character arc. She gets gaslit on national television and is expected to swoon because he learned something.

The film’s central joke—that a man in a dress becomes a better person—is delivered with charm, yes, but also condescension. Michael doesn’t become a woman. He performs one. And somehow, that’s framed as more subversive and powerful than anything the actual women in the story manage to accomplish. Teri Garr’s Sandy is neurotic and expendable. Lange’s Julie is saintly and two-dimensional. The real story is the man behind the mask, as always.

To its credit, Tootsie has sharp writing (thank you, Elaine May, ghostwriting uncredited miracles as usual), a killer supporting cast (Bill Murray is a deadpan gift), and enough screwball pacing to keep the manipulation moving. And yes, Hoffman gives a layered performance, toggling between ego and empathy. But the film congratulates itself too loudly for noticing sexism, then takes a bow without cleaning up the mess.

3 out of 5 falsies
(One for the script’s wit. One for Lange’s grace under narrative pressure. One for the moments of real insight that slip through the self-congratulation. The missing stars? Still waiting for a version of this story where a woman gets to be funny, flawed, and free without needing a man in drag to tell her how strong she is.)

#68 ‘Unforgiven’

Guns, Guilt, and the Revisionist Western That Still Can’t Quit Its Misogyny

Unforgiven (1992) is Clint Eastwood’s gravel-throated elegy to the Wild West—a somber, blood-soaked deconstruction of cowboy mythology where no one rides off into the sunset without dragging a corpse or two behind them. It’s brooding, self-aware, and beautifully shot, a film that tries to interrogate the sins of the genre while still indulging in just enough violence and masculine myth-making to keep the ghosts fed. But for all its grit and gravitas, let’s not pretend it isn’t still a story where women’s pain exists solely to motivate men’s redemption.

Eastwood plays William Munny, a reformed killer turned pig farmer who’s drawn back into violence for one last job: avenging a prostitute who was brutally mutilated by a cowboy who thought “no” was optional. The sheriff (Gene Hackman, electrifying in his cruelty) won’t punish the attacker. The law is corrupt. The women, led by a weary Frances Fisher, pool their money and put out a bounty. And just like that, Munny’s off again—haunted, reluctant, lethal.

This is where Unforgiven wants to break the Western mold. Munny isn’t cool. He’s broken. He vomits after his first kill. He stumbles. He shakes. He isn’t a hero—he’s a man who’s been running from his own legend, only to find it waiting with a loaded rifle. The violence is ugly, the consequences real, and the film makes sure you feel every gunshot like a moral reckoning.

But let’s talk about who gets to do the reckoning. Not the women. They start the plot, yes. But once the men show up, they’re shuffled to the sidelines—mourners, motivators, metaphors. The prostitute whose assault catalyzes everything? Barely speaks. Her body is defiled, her face slashed, and the film’s real question is: How do the men feel about it? The women may pay the bounty, but the emotional stakes belong entirely to the gunslingers.

The film positions itself as anti-violence, but it still fetishizes the last stand. When Munny finally snaps—truly, fully—he becomes the very myth the film pretends to critique. The climactic massacre in the saloon is framed as inevitable, righteous, and iconic. So much for moral ambiguity. In the end, violence doesn’t solve the problem—it just restores a masculine sense of order.

Unforgiven is a technical triumph. Jack Green’s cinematography is bleakly stunning. The score is minimal and mournful. Every performance hums with tension. But its revisionism only goes so far. It’s not that it questions the Western myth—it mourns the loss of it, as if decentering white male violence is a tragedy. There’s no real reckoning, just resignation.

3.5 out of 5 empty graves
(One for Eastwood’s raw stillness. One for Hackman’s menace. One for the cinematography. Half a star for daring to say the quiet part of the Western out loud. The missing stars? Left with the women whose trauma built the plot but never earned a name, a voice, or a shot of their own.)

#67 ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’

Booze, Bile, and the Theater of Marital Evisceration

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) is a beautifully lit knife fight disguised as a cocktail party. It’s Edward Albee’s war-of-words stage play brought to vicious, bristling life on screen, with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton weaponizing every line of dialogue like it’s tipped with arsenic. It’s a film about marriage, truth, illusion, and the long, slow psychic cannibalism that happens when two people mistake emotional destruction for intimacy. Also, there’s yelling. So much yelling.

Taylor plays Martha, the university president’s daughter and the patron saint of angry women forced to smile through decades of academic mansplaining. She’s loud, sexual, brilliant, and angry—a combination that makes the film treat her as dangerous, as if female fury is more transgressive than male violence. Burton is George, her withering, self-loathing husband, who matches her insult for insult, hiding his sadism behind a tattered tweed suit and enough internalized resentment to level a small liberal arts college.

Together, they drag a younger couple—Nick and Honey, played with pitch-perfect discomfort by George Segal and Sandy Dennis—into their private hellscape under the guise of post-party drinks. What follows is a psychological demolition derby: secrets exposed, illusions shattered, social norms gutted and left twitching on the shag carpet. The entire film is one long dare: how much emotional damage can you stomach before someone breaks character?

And yet, despite its brilliance, Virginia Woolf is still a deeply gendered chamber of horrors. George gets to be complex. His bitterness is academic, his cruelty philosophical. Martha? She’s hysterical, monstrous, a cautionary tale about what happens when a woman dares to age and outtalk her husband. Her sexuality is played as grotesque, her desire for truth framed as instability. She’s punished for needing, punished for knowing, punished for being too much.

The film strips its characters of every social pretense, but it never quite lets Martha escape the trap of being “the shrew.” Taylor delivers a volcanic performance—raw, ugly, and brilliant—but the narrative still demands she be broken by the end, reduced to weeping vulnerability while George gets to sip his bourbon and bask in the aftermath of emotional napalm.

Mike Nichols’ direction is unflinching and intimate, and Haskell Wexler’s cinematography turns every grimace and glare into gothic poetry. It’s theater, yes, but it’s also emotional voyeurism—the kind of film where the camera stays just long enough to make you feel complicit.

4 out of 5 broken illusions
(One for Taylor’s fury. One for Burton’s corrosive charm. One for Nichols’ claustrophobic direction. One for Albee’s dialogue, which cuts cleaner than any blade. The missing star? Lost in the rubble of Martha’s psyche—because in this world, even the strongest women must be shattered to be seen as human.)

#66 ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’

Whips, Quips, and the Colonialist Archaeologist Fantasy We Can’t Quit

Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) is the cinematic equivalent of a rollercoaster built on looted artifacts and male entitlement—fast, thrilling, occasionally nauseating, and entirely constructed atop centuries of imperial theft. It’s fun, yes. It’s iconic, sure. But let’s not pretend Indiana Jones isn’t just a sexier, sassier version of every white man who ever put a sacred object in a museum and called it “preservation.”

Harrison Ford plays Indy, a fedora-wearing academic with the ethics of a raccoon and the charisma of someone who knows he’ll never face consequences. He’s introduced stealing an idol from a booby-trapped temple like he’s running late for a Sotheby’s auction, and the film instantly frames this theft as heroic. Because apparently, when a white man steals from a non-white culture, it’s called adventure.

Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen), our lone female lead, is introduced in a bar, drinking men under the table and punching Indy in the face—which is promising. Then we find out she was his teenage girlfriend. Yes, let’s linger on that: Indiana Jones slept with a teenager. And the film’s idea of character development? Turning her from a furious, independent survivor into yet another damsel in distress with great eyebrows and limited dialogue. She’s strong, until the plot decides she needs to be kidnapped again.

The villains are Nazis, because of course they are—nothing gets an American audience more comfortable with moral ambiguity than putting a swastika on the other guy’s forehead. But here’s the twist: Indy’s race to beat the Nazis to the Ark isn’t about saving the world. It’s about professional one-upmanship. He’s not a hero. He’s a competitor. The Ark is never treated as a religious artifact deserving reverence. It’s a trophy, a bragging right, a box with face-melting powers if you open it incorrectly (which, let’s be honest, is also how most men treat relationships).

And let’s talk about that final act: Indy doesn’t defeat evil with courage or intellect. He wins by… not looking. That’s it. The Ark opens, Nazis explode, and Indy keeps his eyes shut like a toddler in a thunderstorm. It’s not clever. It’s not earned. It’s divine intervention brought to you by plot convenience and the moral of every 1980s blockbuster: don’t worry, the good guy will survive as long as he feels bad about killing people.

Spielberg’s direction is tight, the pacing electric, and John Williams’ score does more heavy lifting than a cursed boulder. But let’s not forget: Raiders is a love letter to pulp colonialism. It fetishizes “exotic” lands, reduces entire cultures to backdrops or traps, and frames cultural theft as heroism—just with better lighting and a PG rating.

3.5 out of 5 stolen relics
(One for the direction. One for Ford’s undeniable charisma. One for the action choreography. Half a star for Karen Allen being better than the script allows. The missing stars? Sitting in a dusty museum display case labeled “Recovered from indigenous peoples,” next to a whip and a smirk.)

#65 ‘The African Queen’

Colonialism, Courting, and the Sanctification of Stubborn White People

The African Queen (1951) is often described as a charming adventure, a romance forged in fire, mud, and gin-soaked grime. But scratch the surface of this riverboat romp and you’ll find a colonial fantasy paddling furiously beneath: a story where imperialism is background noise, brown bodies are scenery, and the central tension is whether a missionary spinster can domesticate an alcoholic boatman before they both become symbols of Christian fortitude.

Katherine Hepburn plays Rose Sayer, a tightly wound English missionary stranded in German East Africa at the outbreak of World War I. After her brother dies (read: conveniently exits the narrative), she’s left in the care of Charlie Allnut, played by Humphrey Bogart, who slurs, sweats, and grumbles through every scene like he’s auditioning for Drunk History: The Empire Edition. Together, they set off on a perilous river journey with one goal: sink a German gunboat using torpedoes, God, and a makeshift flirtation.

The film sells this as heroic. What it is is a fever dream of white exceptionalism, where two bickering Brits repurpose a chunk of stolen Africa into their personal self-actualization cruise. The African continent? A backdrop. Its people? Largely invisible, except when they’re needed to row, threaten, or die offscreen. Colonialism? Not interrogated. Just there, like malaria and hippos.

And yet, The African Queen still manages to charm—largely because of Hepburn, who performs sanctimony like it’s an Olympic sport, and Bogart, whose Academy Award feels more like a lifetime achievement in playing lovable wrecks. Their chemistry is crackling in a weird, leathery, "please God don't kiss yet" kind of way. It’s less romance than war correspondence. She’s trying to purify him; he’s trying to keep her from dying of stubbornness.

Rose’s transformation from pious scold to wartime daredevil is supposed to be inspiring. In truth, it’s a case study in how women were historically permitted to be “strong” only if they weaponized it in service of men and Empire. And Charlie? He gets sober, shaves, and finds purpose in Rose’s belief in him—which would be touching if it weren’t unfolding against a backdrop of colonial violence and wild rivers conveniently emptied of native voices.

John Huston’s direction is rugged and reverent, the location shooting (on actual African rivers) still impressive. But The African Queen remains a film deeply uninterested in the world it uses as a stage. Africa is exotic, dangerous, and mute. The war is abstract. And the real drama lies in whether a woman can let her hair down just enough to make a man stop drinking long enough to blow something up.

3 out of 5 gin bottles overboard
(One for Hepburn’s steel spine. One for Bogart’s sweaty charisma. One for the muddy, method-shot authenticity. The missing stars? Lost somewhere in the reeds—along with any acknowledgment that this “adventure” rests entirely on a foundation of imperial delusion and cinematic myopia.)

#64 ‘Network’

Ratings, Rage, and the Rise of the Mediated Male Meltdown

Network (1976) is a prophetic howl of a film, a blistering satire about television’s moral decay that now plays more like a documentary. Written by Paddy Chayefsky with venom-dipped precision and directed by Sidney Lumet with grim theatricality, it’s an outrage machine that skewers capitalism, media, and the attention economy before those terms were even in fashion. But for all its brilliance, it’s still another story about an old white man screaming into the void while women and people of color are shoved aside—or shoved off cliffs—to make room for his collapse.

Peter Finch plays Howard Beale, a washed-up news anchor who suffers a very public on-air breakdown and, in doing so, becomes the hottest thing on television. His cry of “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!” is meant to be a primal scream against societal numbness. And it is—but it’s also the birth of the performative male breakdown as content. Beale doesn’t heal, he broadcasts. His pain isn’t addressed, it’s monetized. And the network execs don’t care if he’s mentally unraveling—as long as the ratings are up.

And then there’s Faye Dunaway’s Diana Christensen, the only major female character and the film’s sacrificial lamb to the god of critique. She’s brilliant, ruthless, and completely hollowed out by ambition. The film presents her as a symptom of the disease: a woman who thinks in Nielsen numbers, who dreams of a programming slate powered by terrorism and tabloidism. But unlike the male characters—who are tragic, noble, even lovable in their decay—Diana is monstrous. Her drive is never allowed complexity. Her desire is pathological. She’s punished not just for playing the game, but for winning it.

Max Schumacher (William Holden), Howard’s old friend and the film’s aging conscience, gets to moralize while cheating on his wife and delivering endless monologues about integrity. He’s the kind of man the film wants you to admire: disillusioned, nostalgic, literate. He berates Diana for being soulless, but never questions the system that made him her boss, her lover, and her judge. Their affair is framed as a clash of worlds—his crumbling idealism vs. her gleaming amorality—but guess who gets to walk away with dignity? (Hint: not the woman left sobbing under fluorescent lights.)

Meanwhile, Beale’s messianic descent ends not with redemption, but assassination—engineered by corporate overlords who fear he’s finally telling too much truth. It’s a brilliant, cynical ending. But it also cements the film’s thesis: media will consume you, sell you, and discard you, especially if you’re unstable, sincere, or female.

Yes, Network is brilliant. The performances are volcanic. The writing is blistering. The themes are terrifyingly relevant. But it’s also a product of its time—worshipping at the altar of male collapse, while sneering at women who dare to play with the same tools. It asks, “What hath television wrought?”—and then answers, “A mad prophet and a heartless woman,” as if those are the only two options.

4 out of 5 cathode ray tubes set to combust
(One for Chayefsky’s script. One for Lumet’s direction. One for Dunaway, devouring her role like a starving wolf. One for the still-too-real satire of media as spectacle. The missing star? Exploited for ratings, discarded in a boardroom, and never given a severance package—because nobody gets out alive once the camera starts rolling.)

#63 ‘Cabaret’

Glitter, Gaslight, and the Fall of the Weimar Dream

Cabaret (1972) is a sequined dirge, a decadent last gasp of liberal denial as fascism creeps in through the stage door. Bob Fosse directs this jazz-soaked apocalypse with a cigarette in one hand and a raised eyebrow in the other, never letting you forget that while the music plays, the world outside is quietly going to hell. It’s dazzling, yes—but it’s also devastating, especially if you’re a woman, a queer person, or just someone who thought Berlin might be fun before the brownshirts showed up.

Liza Minnelli’s Sally Bowles is a chaotic masterpiece: charming, reckless, heartbreaking. She sings, she flirts, she spirals—always on the verge of greatness or ruin. She’s a woman who lives like the future doesn’t exist, because deep down, she knows it probably doesn’t. Her cabaret performances aren’t just musical numbers—they’re acts of defiance, breakdowns with choreography. And yet, she’s never allowed to be right. She’s punished for her freedom, her ambition, her refusal to become palatable. The more she insists on her own story, the more the film insists on making her a tragic footnote in someone else’s.

That someone else is Brian (Michael York), an English academic who claims to be sexually inexperienced, then slides into bisexuality like he’s taste-testing rebellion. His relationship with Sally is tender, confusing, and deeply unequal. She’s vibrant chaos; he’s repressed analysis. She wants to live; he wants to study it. And when things get messy—emotionally, politically—he gets to leave. Because of course he does.

The real magic (and menace) of Cabaret is Joel Grey’s Emcee: a painted goblin of glee and menace who grins through every number like he knows exactly how this ends. He doesn’t exist in the “real world,” but his shadow stretches across it. Every time we cut to the Kit Kat Club, we’re reminded that entertainment doesn’t distract from politics—it reflects it, feeds on it, seduces you into complicity with it.

Fosse’s direction is tight and cynical, stripping away sentimentality and exposing the bones underneath. The musical numbers are barbed wire in a feather boa: “Money” is a capitalist nightmare in duet form; “If You Could See Her” is a joke with a punchline that lands like a Nazi boot. And “Tomorrow Belongs to Me”? That one stops the movie cold—because the future does belong to someone, and it’s not the people singing jazz in a dive bar.

Yes, the film is iconic. Yes, Liza is electrifying. But don’t mistake glamour for comfort. Cabaret isn’t a celebration. It’s a warning. The party doesn’t last. The queers get crushed. The women get discarded. And the men? They board trains, leave love behind, and tell themselves they were never really part of it anyway.

4.5 out of 5 monocles shattered on the dance floor
(One for Minnelli. One for Grey’s grinning nihilism. One for Fosse’s razor-sharp choreography. One for the film’s refusal to blink. The half star? For daring to sing as the world burns. The missing half? Left behind with Sally, who was too much, too bright, and never quite enough—for a world that was already building the camps before the curtain fell.)

#62 ‘American Graffiti’

Cruisin’, Confusin’, and the Endless Adolescence of the American Male

American Graffiti (1973) is George Lucas’s nostalgia-soaked mixtape of a film, a love letter to the early ’60s—before Vietnam, before counterculture, before any self-awareness about how boring white teenage boys can be when given a full tank of gas and no emotional vocabulary. It’s all tailfins and Top 40, drive-ins and drag races, a time when men were boys and women were barely people. And we’re supposed to miss it.

Set over the course of one long night in Modesto, California, the film follows a gaggle of post-high school guys loitering on the edge of adulthood, unsure if they should go to college, stay home, or just keep circling the same damn diner until their egos expire from lack of attention. There’s Steve (Ron Howard), the golden boy with commitment issues. Curt (Richard Dreyfuss), the neurotic proto-Luke Skywalker looking for meaning in billboards and blonde phantoms. John (Paul Le Mat), the too-old-for-this drag racer with a jailbait passenger. And Toad (Charles Martin Smith), the designated nerd, comic relief, and avatar of every man who thinks a girl owes him a smile for existing.

Let’s be clear: the film looks great. It glows. The cars gleam, the soundtrack is wall-to-wall hits, and the pacing hums with late-night indecision. It captures a mood. But that mood is deeply male—mopey, self-important, and terminally unaware of how tiresome these dudes are when they’re not being propelled by teenage hormones and borrowed masculinity.

The women? Oh, honey. Laurie (Cindy Williams) exists to absorb Steve’s emotional flailing. Debbie (Candy Clark) is thrown at Toad like a consolation prize for surviving puberty. Carol (Mackenzie Phillips) is a literal child riding shotgun with a grown man—and the film treats their odd-couple energy as quirky, not queasy. And the mysterious blonde in the T-Bird? She’s not a woman. She’s a metaphor. Of course she is.

And what’s the film’s big message? That growing up is scary, that change is inevitable, that maybe the best nights are the ones where nothing really happens except a lot of insecure men projecting their crises onto everyone around them. At the end, we get a grim little epilogue telling us what happened to each character: one dies in Vietnam, one goes missing, one becomes an insurance agent—because nothing says “meaningful narrative arc” like reducing your characters to future tragedies in Helvetica.

Yes, American Graffiti is technically impressive. It helped launch the careers of several future stars. It invented the jukebox movie. It made cruising cinematic. But let’s not pretend it's deep. It’s a reverie for arrested development, a slow dance with male entitlement, and a reminder that the good old days were only good if you had a dick and a driver’s license.

3 out of 5 cheeseburgers in paradise
(One for the cinematography. One for the soundtrack. One for the way it captures the emptiness of small-town nights with eerie accuracy. The missing stars? Stuck in the backseat, wondering if anyone’s going to ask the girls what they want before the engine cuts out.)