Essays, lists, deep dives — all written with a point of view, none written to game the algorithm.
Harrison Ford zooms into a photograph in Blade Runner and it gets sharper. Forty years later the police in every TV show are still doing it. A field guide to cinema's imaginary scientists.
Tobey, Andrew, Tom, and then Miles Morales walked in and made all three look like practice. Why Sony has to keep making Spider-Man films whether anyone asked or not.
Billy Wilder had the streets of Los Angeles hosed down before every night shot. Rain, smoke and a venetian blind are not decoration in noir. They are the plot, and here is how to read them.
Four Batmen, four decades, four different fears. The character has never changed. What the audience is worried about has, and you can read it straight off the suit.
From Alan Rickman to Tom Hiddleston, Hollywood has decided that evil sounds posh. Here's why the Brits always play the baddies.
The first ten minutes of Up are better than most winning films in their entirety. Why the Academy built a separate room for animation and how it keeps the best films out of the main one.
In 2020 a nine-year-old pandemic thriller turned out to be the most accurate film ever made. Ten horror and disaster films graded on the science, from the terrifyingly right to the gleefully wrong.
The best-loved film on the internet made 16 million dollars in cinemas. Cats hid the cats. John Carter hid Mars. How marketing departments sank the films they were paid to sell.
The Mummy Returns is a lovely film for ninety minutes and then The Rock's head appears on a scorpion. Nine effects shots that a great movie had to survive.
For two decades, every blockbuster got a rushed video game adaptation. Most were terrible. A few were brilliant. All of them are gone now.
Hackers, Swordfish, the traffic lights in The Italian Job. I asked people who do this for a living which scenes hurt most. They had a list ready.
While everyone's banging on about Ari Aster and Jordan Peele, these filmmakers are quietly making the scariest stuff out there.
Some films are great once. Some you can join at any minute on any channel and stay to the end. Ten from the 2000s that pass the second test, with a British one at the top.
You can draw the fedora from memory. You have no idea who Deborah Nadoolman is. Eight costumes that outlived their films, and the people who actually made them.
Adjust for inflation and add the marketing spend and the all-time list of Hollywood disasters looks nothing like the one you have read. A 1963 film is still at the top.
No blood, one F-word, keep the sex off screen and you can do what you like to a child's nervous system. The films that read the rating rules and found the gap.