After 2008: Old Film Genres in a New Age

1. "La La Land” (2016) - The American musical is a genre that substitutes joy for setback and fantasy for reality. When the actors are beautiful and talented, it is simply magic.
2. “Hell or High Water” (2016) - Bank robbery films and westerns are both separate and overlapping genres. Their theme is invariably raw courage. This film intersects that theme with a now familiar reality — losing your home to a bank.
3. "Whiplash” (2014) - This film, tight and intense, literally captivates. It catches a theme that pervades our society everywhere. To excel at anything, you must sacrifice everything else.
4. “Mad Max: Fury Road” (2015) - This action film destroys the action genre through excess and perfection. Essentially, it extols what has always been the unstated theme of Hollywood film: the strong, silent American male! Always grounded in an earthy reality. It is what has made American pop culture dominant in the world.
5. “The Imitation Game” (2014) - A superbly casted and staged film that proceeds through the intricacies of the English class system. An urbane “social thriller” about the man who broke the German code in WWII and gave us the internet.
6. “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” (2018) - Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland at the pinnacle of what film can do. The story recounts the effect of a child’s death on two happily married people deeply in love with each other. From a story by Daphne du Maurier, the element of precognition, uncanny spiritual knowingness, introduces a riveting “sense of the beyond.”

After 2008: Old Film Genres in a New Age (First Four Weeks Only)

1. "La La Land” (2016) - The American musical is a genre that substitutes joy for setback and fantasy for reality. When the actors are beautiful and talented, it is simply magic.
2. “Hell or High Water” (2016) - Bank robbery films and westerns are both separate and overlapping genres. Their theme is invariably raw courage. This film intersects that theme with a now familiar reality — losing your home to a bank.
3. "Whiplash” (2014) - This film, tight and intense, literally captivates. It catches a theme that pervades our society everywhere. To excel at anything, you must sacrifice everything else.
4. “Mad Max: Fury Road” (2015) - This action film destroys the action genre through excess and perfection. Essentially, it extols what has always been the unstated theme of Hollywood film: the strong, silent American male! Always grounded in an earthy reality. It is what has made American pop culture dominant in the world.

Men and Women: Do They Really Converse?

How Five Films Answer This Question

Love and the Social Contract (Video on Demand)

Falling in Love is Never Private

1. “Blithe Spirit” (1945, English) - This “glorious trifle,” explores the effect of a former wife on the new marriage of the husband. The wit and repartee are unrivaled in this early film by David Lean with Rex Harrison.
2. “Stairway to Heaven” (1946, English) - The word “audacity” hardly describes this marvelous film about a British pilot whose plane crashes in battle. It explores one of the deepest of all human themes — the possibility of a second chance.
3. “Contempt” (1963, French) - This film has been called the “greatest work of art in the 20^th Century.” A film about making an epic film, it devours the lives of its protagonists. These include some of the most famous film figures unable to manage their own lives. The photography, the color and the music are breath-taking.
4. “A Kind of Loving” (1962, English) - Set in the period just before British pop culture burst, the film manages to attract intense emotional sympathy with resolute English understatement. One of the most keenly observed films, starring the inimitable Alan Bates.
5. “Black Narcissus” (1947, English) - Michael Powell’s film brought Deborah Kerr to Hollywood. Set in a palace turned into a convent for English nuns (Protestant) near Mount Everest, the sense of light at a high altitude and its effect on people has never been explored with the beauty and rapture of this film.
6. “The Go-Between” (1971, English) - Julie Christie and Alan Bates in a film straight out of D.H. Lawrence’s “Lady Chatterley’s Lover.” Set in rural, aristocratic England, a young woman falls in love with one of her father’s tenant farmers. No film has caught the fastidious cruelty of the English class system better or more beautifully than this film.

Love and the Social Contract

Falling in Love is Never Private

1. “Blithe Spirit” (1945, English) - This “glorious trifle,” explores the effect of a former wife on the new marriage of the husband. The wit and repartee are unrivaled in this early film by David Lean with Rex Harrison.
2. “Stairway to Heaven” (1946, English) - The word “audacity” hardly describes this marvelous film about a British pilot whose plane crashes in battle. It explores one of the deepest of all human themes — the possibility of a second chance.
3. “Contempt” (1963, French) - This film has been called the “greatest work of art in the 20^th Century.” A film about making an epic film, it devours the lives of its protagonists. These include some of the most famous film figures unable to manage their own lives. The photography, the color and the music are breath-taking.
4. “A Kind of Loving” (1962, English) - Set in the period just before British pop culture burst, the film manages to attract intense emotional sympathy with resolute English understatement. One of the most keenly observed films, starring the inimitable Alan Bates.
5. “Black Narcissus” (1947, English) - Michael Powell’s film brought Deborah Kerr to Hollywood. Set in a palace turned into a convent for English nuns (Protestant) near Mount Everest, the sense of light at a high altitude and its effect on people has never been explored with the beauty and rapture of this film.
6. “The Go-Between” (1971, English) - Julie Christie and Alan Bates in a film straight out of D.H. Lawrence’s “Lady Chatterley’s Lover.” Set in rural, aristocratic England, a young woman falls in love with one of her father’s tenant farmers. No film has caught the fastidious cruelty of the English class system better or more beautifully than this film.