Some stories are about class whether they admit it or not; the best ones admit it with style. This tag collects reviews of films and fiction built on class allegory: upstairs, downstairs, and the machinery between them.
1980sStreetwalkin' (1985) rates 3 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A Concorde Pictures production shot in New York in about three weeks, with Melissa Leo in her first lead role eight years before her career started, and a structure…
1970sStreet Girls (1975) rates 3 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A father searches Eugene, Oregon for a daughter who has disappeared into the local trade, in a film co-written by Barry Levinson a decade before he directed anything,…
1980sAvenging Angel (1985) rates 3 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. The sequel recast its lead, aged the character to university student, and converted a squalid character piece into a revenge picture with a real estate conspiracy. It is…
2000sDark Blue (2002) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Kurt Russell plays a third-generation LAPD officer who plants evidence as a matter of routine, set in the week before the Rodney King verdict. James Ellroy wrote the…
1980sAngel (1984) rates 4 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. New World Pictures built a film around the tagline about a high school honour student who works Hollywood Boulevard at night, and the premise is the problem. What is…
1980sDo the Right Thing (1989) rates 10 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. One block in Bedford-Stuyvesant on the hottest day of the year, a pizzeria, a wall of photographs, and a film that refuses to tell the audience…
1950sGiant (1956) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Three hours and twenty-one minutes of Texas across roughly twenty-five years, James Dean's last completed performance, and a film that starts as a marriage drama and ends as an…
2000sPrecious (2009) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A sixteen-year-old in Harlem in 1987 is transferred to an alternative school and learns to read. Gabourey Sidibe had never acted and Mo'Nique won Supporting Actress for a performance…
2000sThe Blind Side (2009) rates 4 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A competently made film in which a wealthy white family takes in a homeless Black teenager, told almost entirely from the family's position, and Sandra Bullock won…
1990sPhiladelphia (1993) rates 7 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. The first major studio film about AIDS, made deliberately as a courtroom drama so that a mainstream audience would watch it, and Tom Hanks won Best Actor over Daniel…
2010sRoma (2018) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Cuaron wrote, directed, shot and co-edited a black and white film about the domestic worker who raised him, in Spanish and Mixtec, with a non-professional lead. It won Director,…
1940sHow Green Was My Valley (1941) rates 7 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. John Ford's film about a Welsh mining family across roughly twenty years is a good film that has spent eighty-four years being the answer to…
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