Hollywood makes films about itself more honestly than it makes them about anything else. This tag collects reviews and essays on the studio system, the business behind the picture, and the films that turned the camera on the industry.
Crime FictionRaymond Chandler was an oil company vice president until he was fired for drinking at forty-four. He taught himself to write for the pulps, published The Big Sleep at fifty, and gave American crime fiction the voice it still borrows.
2010sJudy (2019) rates 5 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Renee Zellweger won Best Actress for a technically accomplished transformation inside a film that exists to contain it, covering Judy Garland's five-week London run five months before her death.
1950sThe Greatest Show on Earth (1952) rates 4 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. DeMille filmed the Ringling Brothers circus for two and a half hours, wrapped it in a love triangle nobody remembers, and it beat High Noon.…
2020sBabylon (2022) rates 6 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. It does not belong on a page called Modern Movie Slop and I am reviewing it here because that is where it was ranked. It is a three-hour failure…
2000sThe Adventures of Pluto Nash (2002) rates 2 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A hundred million dollars was spent on a lunar nightclub comedy that took about four and a half million worldwide, which is among the worst…
1980sHeaven's Gate (1980) rates 6 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Cimino shot two hundred and twenty hours of film for forty-four million dollars, took three and a half million at the box office, and ended the era that…
2020sWarner Bros. finished Coyote vs. Acme, shelved it for a tax write-off, and refused to sell it at a sane price for eighteen months. Ketchup Entertainment released it anyway, and the film is holding three weekends deep. Rated 9 out…
Author PlatformUCLA's 2026 Hollywood Diversity Report found that films reflecting the real makeup of the country earn the most, while the industry funded fewer of them in 2025, with people of color and women losing ground as leads, directors, and writers…
1950sThe genre's late masterpiece. Touch of Evil is Orson Welles's 1958 American film noir adapting Whit Masterson's 1956 novel Badge of Evil.
1930sCurtiz's 1935 pirate film that launched both Flynn and Olivia de Havilland. Blood escapes and becomes a pirate captain raiding Spanish vessels in the Caribbean before eventually serving King William III after the Glorious Revolution restores his civil rights.
1930sCurtiz-Keighley 1938 Technicolor swashbuckler. Errol Flynn defining swashbuckler.
1960sStanley Kubrick's 1960 Roman epic. Kirk Douglas as the slave revolt leader.
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