The 25 Best Film Noirs

Following up my screwball comedy essay with another type of film that holds up well on the small screen.

Freshman year of college, I took a film course, and as an example of noir — a term that was only then making the rounds of academic circles — the professor screened The Big Sleep. The title proved prophetic; I nodded off halfway through. Was this, I wondered, a style of film that did nothing for me?

The 10 Best Screwball Comedies

In 1967, Pauline Kael wrote a seminal piece in The New Yorker entitled “Movies on Television,” examining what it was like to revisit films on the small screen: which ones survived the transfer largely unscathed, and which lost much of their majesty and meaning reduced to screens a fraction of their original size.