#41 ‘King Kong’ (1933)

Beauty, the Beast, and the Birth of Cinematic Misogyny on a Soundstage

King Kong (1933) isn’t just a monster movie—it’s the cinematic origin story of the male gaze dressed up in fur and roaring from the Empire State Building. Marketed as a groundbreaking tale of adventure, spectacle, and tragic wonder, what it actually offers is an uncomfortable stew of colonial fetishism, racial panic, and the oldest narrative in the book: blame the woman.

Let’s start with Ann Darrow (Fay Wray), the original scream queen. She’s poor, blonde, and rescued from starvation on the mean streets of Depression-era New York—not with a job or shelter, of course, but with an offer to be objectified by a film crew on a “mysterious” island full of racist tropes and thinly veiled savagery. Her role in this film? To look terrified, faint beautifully, and exist as a symbol of purity so irresistible that not even a 50-foot ape can resist violating it.

And Kong? Kong is not just a beast—he’s the embodiment of every anxiety white men have ever had about desire, dominance, and the threat of the “other.” He’s black-coded, monstrous, and obsessed with the white woman he can never have. He’s both animal and victim, villain and scapegoat. The film frames his obsession as tragic, yet lingers far too long and lovingly on his giant paw fondling a half-naked Ann to pretend it’s not also deeply, deeply voyeuristic.

Director Carl Denham, the blowhard who drags everyone into this disaster, is the original white male “visionary” who bulldozes ethical boundaries in pursuit of “art.” He captures Kong, exploits him, parades him through Manhattan like a sideshow—and then acts surprised when it all goes to hell. He doesn’t learn a lesson. He delivers the final, famously awful line—“It was beauty killed the beast”—with smug moral finality, as though a woman being desired is somehow the root of all destruction.

The island natives? Painted in thick racist caricature, used as primitive foils to the white explorers’ “civilization.” Their only function is to worship Kong and throw women at him like offerings. They are nameless, voiceless, and entirely disposable—props in a colonial fantasy where the white man always gets to decide what counts as human.

Technically, yes, the stop-motion animation by Willis O’Brien is groundbreaking. The score is thunderous. Kong’s expressions are haunting. But let’s not pretend that King Kong is some innocent popcorn thriller. It’s a mythic spectacle of domination—man over beast, white over Black, masculinity over femininity—and it’s all wrapped up in the lie that “beauty” was to blame.

2.5 out of 5 biplanes
(One for the special effects. One for Fay Wray’s commitment to being perpetually imperiled. Half a star for the sheer audacity of climbing a skyscraper to escape your own metaphor. The rest fell from the top of the Empire State Building, crushed under the weight of imperialism, exploitation, and the world’s most undeserved closing line.)

#40 ‘The Sound of Music’

Twirling Through Patriarchy in a Curtain Dress

The Sound of Music (1965) is the cinematic equivalent of a heavily frosted cake: extravagant, beloved, and a little nauseating if you think too hard about what’s underneath. On the surface, it’s a wholesome story about love, music, and resisting Nazis through the power of song and family unity. But dig a little deeper, and what you’ll find is yet another story where a free-spirited woman is domesticated into submission—this time to a whistle-blowing patriarch and his seven precocious propagators of traditional values.

Julie Andrews plays Maria, the plucky postulate who can't seem to follow the rules of the abbey because—heaven forbid—she has opinions, joy, and a functioning personality. So the Mother Abbess (who, let’s be honest, sees a problem and sends it to someone else’s doorstep) ships her off to play governess to a widowed naval captain’s brood. Cue the curtain dresses, awkward guitar serenades, and a slow march toward marital obedience.

Maria is bright, spontaneous, and independent—until she meets Captain von Trapp, a man so emotionally constipated he needs a uniform just to feel feelings. At first, she challenges him. Then she softens him. And finally, she becomes the perfect maternal figure, no longer threatening the household with chaos or charisma but reinforcing his authority with a hymnal in hand. Her reward? Marriage, motherhood, and the honor of following her husband over a mountain and into exile.

And speaking of the Captain—Christopher Plummer gives a great performance, but let’s not pretend he isn’t the poster boy for “emotionally unavailable until a woman sings to him.” He begins the film treating his children like naval cadets, traumatizing them with whistles and marching orders. But because Maria gets them to yodel in harmony and wear matching outfits, he falls in love—and we’re supposed to find that romantic, not alarming.

Let’s also discuss Baroness Schrader, the only woman in the film who seems to own property, wear pants, and know what birth control is. She’s smart, stylish, and clearly out of place in a movie that punishes female autonomy. So naturally, she’s discarded halfway through in favor of Maria’s warm domestic servitude. You can’t yodel your way into a man’s heart and have a backbone—it’s one or the other.

Yes, the music is iconic. Yes, the Alps are breathtaking. And yes, “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” is basically a power ballad in a habit. But The Sound of Music is not a feminist fairy tale. It’s a cautionary lullaby: sing sweetly, learn to love children who aren’t yours, and eventually, if you behave, the stern man will open his heart and hand you a ring.

3 out of 5 lonely goatherds
(One for the songs. One for Julie Andrews being a literal beam of light. One for the cinematography. The missing stars are stuck in the abbey, whispering that maybe—just maybe—a woman’s destiny could be more than babysitting someone else’s legacy while twirling across fields of conformity.)

#39 ‘Dr. Strangelove’

Men, Missiles, and Mutual Assured Masturbation

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) is Stanley Kubrick’s dark, deranged comedy about nuclear annihilation and the emotionally constipated men who make it possible. It’s a satire, sure, but let’s be honest: it’s also a confession. This isn’t a movie about geopolitics—it’s about how the fate of the world rests in the trembling hands of men with daddy issues, raging paranoia, and a deep-seated fear of female autonomy.

From the moment the film opens on two bombers mid-air refueling in what can only be described as airborne foreplay, it’s clear: this isn’t just Cold War anxiety. This is a cinematic primal scream about male impotence dressed up in military drag.

Peter Sellers (tripling down) plays three roles: the foppish British liaison, the milquetoast U.S. President, and the titular Dr. Strangelove—a Nazi scientist with a rogue hand and a hard-on for fascist fantasy. Each man represents a different flavor of failure: politeness, passivity, perversion. Together, they form a bouquet of masculine inadequacy that somehow feels more terrifying than the bombs themselves.

But the real nightmare fuel? General Jack D. Ripper (subtle, Kubrick). He’s the man who unilaterally launches a nuclear strike because he believes fluoridated water is sapping his “precious bodily fluids.” This is the mind that commands armies. This is the logic that holds the launch codes. Paranoid, unhinged, and sexually terrified, Ripper embodies the film’s core thesis: that war—especially nuclear war—is just a catastrophic compensation ritual for men too scared to admit they’re afraid of their own erections.

And let’s not forget General Buck Turgidson (played with sweaty brilliance by George C. Scott), a cartoon of chest-thumping bravado who seems most excited not by global diplomacy but by the idea of getting to do something with all these toys. He’s not a general. He’s a little boy with nukes and an Oedipal grin.

Women? Technically, there’s one: Miss Scott, Turgidson’s secretary/mistress, who appears in a bikini, takes calls in bed, and vanishes from the narrative like any inconvenient female presence in a boys-only war room. She’s not a person. She’s a set decoration, a punchline, a reminder that in this world, the only feminine energy allowed is inflatable.

Kubrick shoots it all with clinical detachment, the black-and-white palette making everything feel sterile and doomed. The comedy is razor-sharp, the performances iconic, and the ending—a cowboy riding a bomb into oblivion—so perfect it hurts. But beneath the laughter is a very real horror: this isn’t absurdity. It’s barely exaggeration.

Dr. Strangelove is a film that understands men don’t destroy the world because they hate it. They destroy it because they can’t stand not being in control of it—and because no one ever taught them how to cry without dropping bombs.

4 out of 5 doomsday machines
(One for Sellers. One for Kubrick’s precision. One for the script’s acid wit. One for Slim Pickens’ yee-haw into Armageddon. The missing star was revoked due to a dangerously low level of female presence—and no, a pin-up poster doesn’t count.)

#38 ‘The Treasure of the Sierra Madre’

Gold Fever, Beard Sweat, and the Fragile Ego of the American Man

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) is often hailed as a blistering parable of greed and moral decay—a rugged, sun-scorched tale of three men who go into the mountains looking for gold and lose their minds instead. And yes, it’s a gripping, superbly acted descent into paranoia. But strip away the dust and dynamite, and you’re left with another masculine fever dream about how the real treasure was the toxic masculinity we reinforced along the way.

Humphrey Bogart stars as Fred C. Dobbs, a down-and-out grifter in Mexico who, along with two other men—curmudgeonly prospector Howard (Walter Huston, practically chewing peyote) and the noble, forgettable Curtin (Tim Holt)—sets off in search of gold. What begins as rough-edged camaraderie quickly curdles into suspicion, obsession, and monologues about what a man’s gotta do. Spoiler: what a man’s gotta do, apparently, is unravel into a sweaty, paranoid wreck while clinging to a sack of dirt like it’s proof of manhood.

Dobbs is the film’s beating heart and infected wound. He starts off broke but semi-likable, then descends into rabid misanthropy faster than you can say “capitalism is a hellscape.” His greed is grotesque, but it’s also pathologically relatable—because in this world, men don’t just want gold. They want validation, control, and the ability to measure their worth in coins and corpses. The deeper they dig, the more the film gleefully dissects the fantasy that men can cooperate without eventually stabbing each other over perceived slights.

Walter Huston, father of the director and poster child for “cackling old man who knows better,” plays Howard like a mythic goat-herder with all the wisdom of age and none of the moral clarity. He’s the only character who survives with his dignity intact, mostly because he walks away from wealth to go live with peasants who adore him—a fantasy of humble masculinity that feels just as indulgent as Dobbs’ descent into madness.

And the women? Oh right. There aren’t any. This is a world scrubbed clean of femininity, empathy, or domesticity. No mothers, no wives, no barmaids with hearts of gold—just men alone with their ambition, their fear, and their festering egos. It’s as if the presence of a single woman might break the spell of this grim fairy tale. Or worse, introduce accountability.

The film’s final punchline, of course, is that the gold blows away in the wind, the result of hubris and bad luck. The moral? Riches are fleeting, trust is a liability, and the only thing more dangerous than a man with nothing is a man who thinks he deserves everything. It’s brilliant, bleak, and shot through with the kind of masculine self-loathing that Hollywood loves to dress up as profundity.

3.5 out of 5 fool’s gold flakes
(One for Bogart’s sweaty unraveling. One for Huston’s toothless grin. One for the absolute nerve to end the film with a laugh and a gust of irony. Half a star for honesty about the male psyche. The rest vanished with the dust, blown away by the myth of rugged individualism and men who “don’t need women” until they’re talking to vultures.)

#37 ‘The Best Years of Our Lives’

Masculinity Wounded, Femininity Waiting

The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) is Hollywood’s solemn attempt at reckoning with the aftermath of World War II—a prestige weepie that follows three returning veterans as they navigate the chasm between war heroism and civilian irrelevance. It’s earnest, humane, and beautifully made. It’s also an unapologetically gendered vision of recovery, where men get inner turmoil and character arcs, and women get patience, piety, and the privilege of waiting quietly while the boys piece themselves back together.

Directed by William Wyler with grace and gravity, the film follows Fred (Dana Andrews), a decorated pilot turned soda jerk; Al (Fredric March), a banker drowning in whiskey and postwar disillusionment; and Homer (Harold Russell), a sailor who lost both hands and now wears prosthetic hooks. Their stories are stitched together with compassion—but make no mistake, this is a movie about male pain, male reintegration, and male entitlement to sympathy.

Fred’s arc is particularly telling: he returns to find his shallow pin-up wife (a barely sketched caricature of postwar femininity) unsupportive, and quickly transfers his affections to Peggy, the saintly daughter of another veteran, who falls for him after watching him suffer prettily in a diner booth. His trauma makes him desirable. His failure makes him deep. Meanwhile, Peggy is reprimanded for trying to “steal” a married man, even though his wife is more plot device than person.

Then there’s Homer, played by real-life veteran Harold Russell, in a genuinely affecting performance that brings physical disability into the spotlight with rare candor. But even Homer’s struggle is framed in terms of whether his sweetheart Wilma will still love him. She does, of course, because she’s the right kind of woman: self-sacrificing, loyal, eternally understanding. She marries his trauma without hesitation, and the film treats this as noble—because love, in this universe, means never needing anything for yourself.

Al’s wife Milly (Myrna Loy) fares better—she’s warm, wise, and world-weary. But even she exists to absorb her husband’s drunken outbursts, soothe his ego, and be the quiet backbone of his redemption. She doesn't get a monologue. She doesn't get a breakdown. She gets a smile, a dinner table, and the satisfaction of watching him recover into someone vaguely tolerable again.

The film is technically brilliant—Gregg Toland’s deep-focus cinematography, Hugo Friedhofer’s aching score, and the editing all lend gravitas. But under the surface, The Best Years of Our Lives tells us exactly whose years we’re talking about. The title doesn’t refer to the women who kept households afloat, who bore the silence, who aged ten years waiting. It refers to the men—whose years were lost, whose glory faded, and who now expect a soft landing made of unconditional feminine devotion.

3.5 out of 5 discharged medals
(One for Russell’s raw honesty. One for Loy’s quiet excellence. One for the film’s bravery in showing the ugly side of coming home. Half a star for trying to face a broken world with grace. The missing stars are still waiting at the train station, holding casseroles and swallowing their own stories.)

#36 ‘The Bridge on the River Kwai’

War, Honor, and a Very British Breakdown

The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) is David Lean’s lush, slow-burning war epic in which men sweat, suffer, and build monuments to their own delusion—namely, a bridge that becomes less about strategy and more about status, ego, and the colonial wet dream of “discipline as virtue.” It’s a film where nobody wins, except perhaps the jungle itself, which patiently watches as masculinity implodes in khaki.

At the center of this stiff-upper-lip psychodrama is Colonel Nicholson, played by Alec Guinness with such quiet fanaticism you don’t realize until halfway through that he’s not the hero—he’s the warning. As a British officer in a Japanese POW camp, Nicholson insists his men build a bridge not just efficiently, but exceptionally—for the enemy. Why? Because principle. Because order. Because nothing says defiance like aiding the imperial project of your captors while pretending it's a victory for morale.

Nicholson doesn’t care that the bridge will help the Japanese. He cares that it’s well made. That it stands as a testament to British resolve. That the men under his command don't lose their dignity. But dignity, in The Bridge on the River Kwai, is just ego in uniform. Nicholson is less a symbol of resistance than a tragicomic relic of imperial righteousness, blinded by the sound of his own moral superiority. He's the kind of man who'd die for a rulebook before admitting he might be wrong.

And how does the film treat this? With reverence, mostly. Until the last five minutes, when everyone suddenly remembers there's a war going on.

Let’s not forget the Japanese commander, Colonel Saito, played with stern, conflicted dignity by Sessue Hayakawa. The film sets him up as the antagonist, but he fades into the foliage once Nicholson starts unraveling—because ultimately, The Bridge on the River Kwai isn't about war between nations. It's about the war inside British men’s heads, between honor and hubris.

Women, naturally, are absent—unless you count the few Thai villagers who appear just long enough to carry equipment and serve as visual shorthand for “the exotic backdrop.” Their silence isn’t just narrative—it’s thematic. This is a world built entirely on male obsession, and the absence of female voices only sharpens the echo chamber of military pride and delusion.

And then there’s that final moment, the now-iconic line: “Madness!” It lands like a belated epiphany, after nearly three hours of men marching toward oblivion, convinced they’re making history. The bridge explodes, but the point has already been made: empire may crumble, but toxic ideals tend to be overengineered.

Yes, the cinematography is stunning. Yes, the performances are excellent. But what lingers is the film’s uncomfortable truth: war isn’t just fought with guns. It’s fought with pride, rituals, and the unshakable belief that dying for a structure you weren’t even supposed to build is somehow noble.

3 out of 5 marching tunes
(One for Guinness, mastering the art of a man unraveling by standing still. One for the bridge as metaphor. One for the final, glorious explosion of logic. The rest washed away in the river, along with any awareness of who this war actually affected.)

#35 ‘Annie Hall’

Neurotic Men, Disposable Women, and the Audacity of Tweed

Annie Hall (1977) is often hailed as the film that redefined romantic comedy—clever, self-aware, groundbreaking. And yes, it’s all those things. It’s also a 90-minute ode to a man’s ego, wrapped in quips, psychoanalysis, and enough turtlenecks to smother a therapist. It doesn’t so much explore relationships as it dissects them—on her body, through his lens, and entirely on his terms.

Woody Allen plays Alvy Singer, a walking monologue with abandonment issues and a superiority complex, who spends the entire film trying to figure out why the radiant, charming, alive woman who once loved him dared to grow beyond his control. Diane Keaton’s Annie Hall isn’t just the titular character—she’s the film’s sacrificial muse. Her quirks, her style, her energy? All adored, imitated, commodified. Until, of course, she starts wanting things of her own. Then she becomes a project. Then she becomes the problem.

The film pretends to be about love, but it’s really about authorship. Alvy casts himself as the misunderstood genius, the emotionally available intellectual allergic to happiness. Annie is his stage, his mirror, his punchline. We watch their romance in fragmented flashbacks and direct addresses to camera, and through it all, the message is clear: her feelings are subject to his interpretation.

And let’s talk about the power imbalance, shall we? Alvy lectures Annie about art, about therapy, about her taste in music, her vocabulary, her subconscious. He pathologizes her joy and intellectualizes her pain. When she’s high, he mocks her. When she’s sober, he interrogates her. He is the kind of man who brings Marshall McLuhan into a movie theater argument because he can’t bear not being right. It’s iconic. It’s clever. It’s deeply exhausting.

Annie, to her credit, starts to evolve. She sings. She writes. She grows. And the film treats this as a tragedy. Not because she leaves him, but because she stops being knowable. She moves to L.A. She embraces optimism. And in the film’s final moments, Alvy—nostalgic, self-pitying, still incapable of change—rewrites their story as a stage play where she takes him back. Because of course he does. When real women walk away, men make movies where they don't.

Yes, the editing is inventive. Yes, the structure is novel. Yes, Keaton is incandescent. But Annie Hall isn’t a romance. It’s a eulogy for the kind of woman men like Alvy think they deserve: one who is interesting but manageable, luminous but dependent, original but ultimately willing to become a footnote in his memoir.

2.5 out of 5 oversized neckties
(One for Keaton. One for formal innovation. Half a star for the lobster scene. The rest got left behind in Alvy’s rearview mirror, along with his capacity for actual intimacy.)

#34 ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’

Fairest of Them All, But Only If She Keeps Her Mouth Shut and Her House Clean

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) is Disney’s first animated feature, and it shows. A pastel fever dream of giggles, housework, and virginity-as-value, it’s less a fairy tale and more a glittering instructional video on how to smile through gendered servitude until a man with a crown kisses your corpse.

Let’s start with Snow White herself: a girl so sweet she makes saccharin look bitter. Her character arc? She runs away from her abusive stepmother, finds an unpaid domestic position with seven emotionally stunted men, cleans their filthy home, sings at woodland creatures, and waits patiently to be rescued—without ever developing a personality beyond “pleasant.” She has no wants, no flaws, no agency. She is a vessel of virtue with eyelashes.

And what does she fear? Not the forest, not the trauma of being hunted like a fox—no, she fears a messy house. Her first instinct upon discovering the dwarfs’ cottage is to roll up her puffed sleeves and start scrubbing. Snow White doesn’t just lean into the role of domestic goddess—she invents it, while whistling. The dwarfs thank her not with wages or respect, but with a place to sleep and a round of infantilized nicknames.

Let’s talk about those dwarfs. They’re a lineup of male archetypes with the emotional maturity of garden gnomes. Grumpy? Misogynist with a heart of gold. Doc? A mansplainer with no follow-through. Dopey? A grown man in a toddler’s body. But Snow White manages them all with the patience of a Victorian governess, feeding them, tucking them in, and gently reinforcing the idea that male dysfunction is charming when handled by a saintly woman.

And of course, the Evil Queen. Because God forbid there be a woman over thirty in the kingdom who wants power, beauty, or—gasp—agency. She’s painted as monstrous for caring about her appearance, for seeking immortality, for daring to take up space that Snow White could be fluttering around in. Her transformation into an ugly crone is the film’s metaphorical mic drop: Ambition ages you. Stay sweet, stay silent, or die ugly.

The prince? A mannequin with a jawline. He sings once, kisses a literal corpse, and is rewarded with a wife. Romance, in this film, is less about connection and more about possession: if she’s beautiful and unconscious, that’s good enough for marriage.

Yes, the animation was groundbreaking. Yes, the artistry is lush. But Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is the founding document of Disney’s patriarchal handbook: women are decorative, goodness is passive, and your value peaks at seventeen and a half.

2 out of 5 poisoned apples
(One for the historic animation. One for the Queen’s iconic drag energy. The rest choked on the idea that a woman’s greatest act of rebellion is baking a pie and dying prettily.)

#33 ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’

Rebellion, Redemption, and the Institutional Mutilation of the Feminine

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) is widely hailed as a masterwork of American cinema—an anti-authoritarian triumph about individuality versus the system. And, yes, it’s powerful. It’s devastating. It’s unforgettable. But it’s also a deeply gendered fairy tale, in which freedom looks like a sweaty, sexually aggressive man yelling in a room, and oppression looks like a cold, emotionally competent woman doing her job.

Jack Nicholson plays R.P. McMurphy, a grinning cyclone of chaos dropped into a mental institution full of medicated docility. He drinks, he gambles, he sexually harasses the nurses. He’s “fun.” The film wants us to love him—wants us to see him as a necessary force of liberation. Never mind that he’s in the institution for statutory rape. That detail is shrugged off like a colorful backstory. Boys will be boys, even if the girl was 15.

McMurphy immediately locks horns with Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher), the head nurse and symbolic she-devil of institutional authority. She’s calm, controlled, and emotionally impenetrable—so naturally, she’s the villain. The film portrays her as a castrating force, stripping the men of their agency, their joy, their… erections? Her sin isn’t cruelty. It’s that she doesn’t coddle. She won’t let the men run wild. She upholds structure. She enforces rules. And for this, the film burns her in effigy.

This isn’t a story about mental health. It’s a story about how fragile masculinity feels about women who say no. McMurphy’s rebellion is framed as noble—even when it includes smuggling in prostitutes and liquor. Nurse Ratched’s discipline is framed as evil—even when it’s literally her job. The climactic battle between them isn’t just philosophical. It’s gendered war. And the cost? A woman sexually assaulted, a man lobotomized, and a room full of traumatized patients treated as set dressing for one man’s Christ-like martyrdom.

Let’s talk about that assault: in a fit of rage after a beloved patient commits suicide, McMurphy strangles Nurse Ratched to near-death. It’s brutal. Visceral. And filmed in a way that clearly expects the audience to cheer. A woman enforces the rules of a broken system, so she must be physically punished—her blouse torn open, her control shattered. Justice, apparently.

Yes, the performances are brilliant. Nicholson seethes charisma. Fletcher is a masterclass in minimalist menace. The cinematography turns the ward into a battleground of the soul. But One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest isn’t just anti-institution—it’s anti-feminine authority, anti-boundary, anti-anything that tells the rebel man-child to grow up.

In the end, McMurphy loses his mind but gains myth. He’s lobotomized, murdered in an act of mercy, and transformed into legend. Meanwhile, Nurse Ratched returns—wounded, weakened, silent. The film calls this balance. I call it a warning.

3.5 out of 5 stolen cigarettes
(One for the performances. One for the score. One for Chief’s final, wordless liberation. Half a star for being gutsy enough to turn male rage into religion—but deducting the rest for throwing every woman in its way under the bus and calling it freedom.)

#32 ‘The Godfather Part II’

Bloodlines, Brooding, and the Slow Death of the Feminine

The Godfather Part II (1974) is often praised as the rare sequel that transcends its predecessor—epic in scale, operatic in tone, and more introspective in its dissection of power, loyalty, and moral corrosion. But let’s not get lost in the rich mahogany of its production design: this is three-and-a-half hours of watching men mutter, murder, and manipulate each other while women sob offscreen or vanish entirely. It’s not just a tragedy—it’s a eulogy for anything tender, maternal, or humane.

We follow two timelines: young Vito Corleone (Robert De Niro) rising through the criminal ranks with quiet resolve and paternal charm, and his son Michael (Al Pacino) sliding deeper into the abyss of paranoia and patriarchal psychosis. Vito’s story is full of texture—immigration, survival, community. Michael’s? It’s a cold, clinical autopsy of a man who mistakes power for purpose and isolation for strength.

And it is exhausting.

Al Pacino is brilliant, yes, in that haunted-statue sort of way, but watching Michael glare at people from behind curtains and silently orchestrate betrayals is like being trapped in a therapy session for someone else’s deeply repressed father complex. He’s lost everything that made him human, and the film treats that as inevitable, even admirable. Ruthlessness, we’re told, is the natural endpoint of responsibility. And God forbid you question the throne.

Women? Forget it. Kay (Diane Keaton) is given a single moment of defiance—the iconic “I aborted your child” bombshell—and the film punishes her instantly. Michael slaps her, throws her out, cuts her off from the children, and we’re supposed to accept this as justice for her daring to assert control over her own body. Her absence from the rest of the film is less a narrative gap and more a moral vacuum. She’s not a character—she’s a consequence.

Connie, once a shrieking symbol of family dysfunction, returns in this installment as a docile, remorseful sister begging to be let back into Michael’s good graces. What growth! She went from rebellious widow to handmaiden of patriarchal consolidation. The Corleone women are not allowed arcs. They are allowed reactions.

Meanwhile, the film’s emotional high points are reserved for brother-on-brother betrayal. Fredo, the black sheep with a heart and a brain half the size of Michael’s, is sacrificed not for a crime—but for being a weak link. And in this world, weakness is death. Compassion is death. Memory is a weapon. Michael hugs his brother on New Year’s Eve and then has him executed while staring at Lake Tahoe like he’s contemplating God, not orchestrating fratricide.

Yes, the cinematography is masterful. The script is spare and cutting. The score haunts you like a Sicilian ghost. But make no mistake: The Godfather Part II is a requiem for everything human that was left in this saga. It mythologizes the masculine wound and leaves the rest to die quietly in the shadows.

3.5 out of 5 oranges
(One for the filmmaking. One for De Niro’s silent rage. One for Keaton’s final scream of agency. Half a star for having the guts to kill the soul of the first film—if only to prove power doesn’t just corrupt, it obliterates.)

#31 ‘The Maltese Falcon’

Men Lying, Women Dying, and a Bird That’s Just a Metaphor for Misogyny

The Maltese Falcon (1941) is the granddaddy of film noir, the blueprint for every trench-coated tough guy and cigarette-smoking femme fatale who ever exchanged meaningful glances in a shadowy alley. John Huston’s directorial debut is a landmark, sure—but it’s also a deeply cynical, suffocatingly male parable about how women can’t be trusted, truth doesn’t matter, and the only thing worth chasing is a shiny object you’ll never actually get to hold.

Humphrey Bogart plays Sam Spade, the archetypal private eye with a moral compass that only works when he’s not horny. He’s smirking, snarling, and speaking exclusively in sentences that sound like they were written on a typewriter soaked in gin. He doesn’t care about justice, doesn’t care about people—he cares about control. Spade is the kind of man who sees grief as a weakness and women as either playthings or threats, depending on how well they lie.

Enter Brigid O’Shaughnessy, played by Mary Astor with trembling eyes and weaponized vulnerability. She’s the original noir femme fatale, which is code for “a woman who wants something.” The film frames her as dangerous because she’s manipulative—but in a world where every man is already lying, scheming, and double-crossing for personal gain, only the woman is punished for playing the same game.

Brigid lies. So does Spade. So does Gutman. So does Cairo. The whole cast lies, cheats, and shoots their way through a tangled plot over a jewel-encrusted MacGuffin, and somehow it’s Brigid who ends up in handcuffs, moral condemnation ringing in her ears while Spade gets to wax poetic about honor and “doing what a man’s gotta do.”

Let’s be clear: the film is not about the falcon. The falcon is a stand-in for everything these men want and will never have—wealth, control, certainty, power. And Brigid? She’s the real falcon: dazzling, mysterious, and ultimately reduced to an object lesson. Her fate is sealed not by justice, but by Spade’s need to assert moral superiority in a world where morality has already packed up and left town.

The dialogue crackles, the cinematography is tight and moody, and Bogart is iconic. But The Maltese Falcon is less a mystery than a ritualistic display of masculine authority—where men decide the rules, enforce the consequences, and cast the woman out at the end, not because she’s the worst, but because she dared to play.

3 out of 5 black birds
(One for the dialogue. One for Bogart’s trench-coated charisma. One for the way it shaped an entire genre. The missing two? Melted down and sold as a warning to any woman who thinks she can outplay the patriarchy at its own game.)

#30 ‘Apocalypse Now’

Sweat, Madness, and the Erotic Power of White Male Breakdown

Apocalypse Now (1979) is Francis Ford Coppola’s hallucinatory descent into the heart of darkness—by which, of course, we mean the sweaty inner monologue of a brooding white man staring at other people’s suffering and calling it enlightenment. Ostensibly a Vietnam War film, it’s really just a jungle opera of masculine unraveling, where bombs explode, ethics disintegrate, and the women are either dead, naked, or French.

Martin Sheen plays Captain Willard, a haunted assassin sent to terminate—with extreme prejudice—one Colonel Kurtz, a rogue officer who’s gone full Nietzsche in the jungle. Willard drinks, broods, and voiceovers his way down the river, passing through increasingly absurd vignettes of military lunacy. Each stop is a fever dream of testosterone, war crimes, and cultural erasure—because nothing says “anti-war” like turning Southeast Asia into your personal acid trip set design.

Kurtz, played by Marlon Brando in a mumbling fog of colonial regret and ego worship, is the film’s final boss—a bald, sweaty whisperer in the dark who reads T.S. Eliot and murders people for vaguely poetic reasons. He’s presented not as a villain, but as an oracle. The horror, indeed.

The Vietnamese? Barely present, mostly silent, or dead. The Cambodians? Props in Kurtz’s god-fantasy. Women? Let’s count: there are some Playboy bunnies airlifted in for the boys’ pleasure and promptly forgotten, a French plantation widow who exists to provide some tragic colonial eye candy, and an anonymous Vietnamese woman who is shot in the gut so Willard can look sad. That’s it. That’s the female presence in this three-hour war epic about moral decay: breasts, ghosts, and bullet wounds.

The film pretends to be about the madness of war, but it’s really about the aestheticization of it. Coppola doesn’t condemn the violence—he renders it operatic. Flaming jungles to Wagner. Surfing during a bombing run. Severed heads as home décor. It’s not a critique—it’s a vibe. An orgy of masculine crisis framed as profundity. Willard isn’t just witnessing war, he’s discovering himself through it. How brave. How boring.

Yes, the cinematography is ravishing. Yes, the sound design is immersive. And yes, it’s a landmark of 20th-century cinema. But it’s also a textbook case of white male storytelling: other cultures used as metaphors, other people’s trauma mined for aesthetic intensity, and women reduced to punctuation marks in a soliloquy about the cost of man’s soul.

3 out of 5 napalm sunrises
(One for Vittorio Storaro’s cinematography. One for the sound of the helicopters. One for the sheer, absurd ambition. The rest drowned somewhere in the Mekong, weighed down by Brando’s ego and a thousand pounds of colonial self-pity.)

#29 ‘Double Indemnity’

Femme Fatale, Fall Guy, and the Fine Art of Blaming the Blonde

Double Indemnity (1944) is the original “it’s her fault I killed a man” noir—slick, shadowy, and soaked in sweaty male guilt disguised as hardboiled wisdom. It’s a masterclass in style: razor-sharp dialogue, venetian blind lighting, voiceover dripping with doom. But let’s not mistake technical brilliance for moral clarity. This isn’t a movie about murder. It’s a movie about how men love to wrap their bad decisions in a woman’s perfume and call it destiny.

Fred MacMurray plays Walter Neff, a fast-talking insurance salesman who struts into a house one afternoon, sees Barbara Stanwyck in an anklet and bad intentions, and promptly decides to commit murder. He thinks he’s in control. He thinks he’s the seducer. But no—he’s just another patsy in a fedora with more libido than sense. The film wants us to believe Walter’s a tragic figure, a good man dragged down by desire. Please. He falls faster than a policyholder down a flight of stairs.

And Phyllis Dietrichson—let’s talk about her. Barbara Stanwyck plays her with steel beneath silk, all sultry eyes and calculated pauses. She’s one of the most iconic femme fatales in cinema history, which in noir language means she has the audacity to want out of a miserable marriage and doesn’t feel bad about it. The horror. She uses sex and smarts to manipulate Neff into killing her husband, and the film spends the rest of its runtime punishing her for it—while pretending to be shocked, shocked that a woman might want power.

Phyllis isn’t a character, she’s a warning label: “Don’t trust women who know what they want.” She’s punished not for murder, but for autonomy. She dies not because she’s evil, but because she didn’t cry about it. And Walter? He gets a redemption arc and a cigarette with his best bro before bleeding out into the moral sunset. Masculine guilt? Tragic. Female agency? Fatal.

Meanwhile, there’s Keyes (Edward G. Robinson), the real beating heart of the film—a relentless, rumpled truth-hound who exists to sniff out deception and give the film its moral spine. He’s loyal, honest, and completely sidelined once the plot kicks into gear, because what’s justice compared to watching two hot people destroy themselves for bad reasons?

Billy Wilder directs with precision, and the script—co-written with Raymond Chandler—crackles like a live wire dipped in bourbon. But under the noir cool is a story as old as patriarchy: a woman is dangerous, a man is weak, and the only thing that can fix either is violence. It’s sold as romantic doom. It’s really just gender politics in a trench coat.

3.5 out of 5 venetian blinds
(One for Stanwyck. One for the dialogue. One for the shadows. Half a star for giving us the blueprint of the femme fatale, even if it’s a trap. The missing stars were last seen scribbled on a fraudulent insurance claim, signed by patriarchy.)

#28 ‘All About Eve’

Ambition in Heels, Bitchcraft in the Wings

All About Eve (1950) is a martini-dry, backhanded love letter to the theatre—and a high-heeled takedown of female ambition so laced with wit you almost forget it's blaming women for wanting anything. On the surface, it’s a film about stardom, betrayal, and backstage drama. But peel back the clever dialogue and dramatic lighting and you’ll find a cautionary tale dressed as empowerment: trust no woman, and if she’s talented, definitely don’t trust her.

Bette Davis is Margo Channing, a 40-something Broadway star who drinks too much, feels too much, and monologues like she’s being paid by the syllable. She’s magnificent—sharp, vulnerable, imperious—and for all her fire, the film makes it painfully clear she’s a woman at the end of her shelf life. Her greatest crime? Aging. Her punishment? Being stalked, flattered, and slowly replaced by a younger, hungrier version of herself in kitten heels.

That version is Eve Harrington, played with porcelain menace by Anne Baxter, a masterclass in faux-innocence and quiet manipulation. Eve appears backstage with a sob story and dead eyes, slowly worming her way into Margo’s dressing room, social circle, career, and man. And the film loves this dynamic—pitting woman against woman, talent against legacy, youth against experience—as if competition is the natural state of female existence.

Eve doesn’t just want success. She wants it without aging, without waiting, and without apology. And in this film, that makes her monstrous. Her ambition is treated not as understandable or inevitable, but as predatory. She’s not driven, she’s demonic. Margo, meanwhile, is redeemed not through fighting back, but through softening. By the end, she’s basically handed her crown to the next generation like a weary, weepy Miss America. Grow old gracefully, the film says, and maybe—maybe—we’ll still let you attend the party.

Let’s not forget Addison DeWitt, the acid-tongued critic who operates like the film’s Greek chorus and its puppet master. He’s the one who sees through Eve and controls her fate, and the film treats this as justice. A woman overreaches, so a man reins her in with threats and power. Classic.

And then there's Karen (Celeste Holm), the nice, “good” woman who exists to reflect Margo’s humanity and Eve’s treachery. She’s kind, supportive, and utterly disposable. A reminder that in this world, women come in only three flavors: saint, star, or snake.

Yes, the dialogue sparkles like a diamond with a grudge. Yes, the performances are iconic. But All About Eve is not feminist. It’s anti-feminine. It dresses up its misogyny in pearls and powder, but at its core, it’s a paranoid fantasy about women who want too much—and the social necessity of cutting them down.

4 out of 5 broken heels
(One for Bette Davis, aging like dynamite. One for George Sanders’ delicious venom. One for the script, dripping acid in every direction. One for Thelma Ritter, because obviously. The missing fifth star? Swallowed whole by the film’s fear of what women might do when they stop apologizing.)

#27 ‘High Noon’

Masculinity in Crisis, and Everyone Else Is a Coward (Especially the Women)

High Noon (1952) is the cinematic equivalent of a man staring into a mirror for 85 minutes, waiting for someone—anyone—to validate his moral superiority before the clock strikes noon. Hailed as a masterpiece of tension and allegory (and by “allegory,” we mean Hollywood patting itself on the back for pretending to confront McCarthyism), this grim little Western is less about justice and more about one man’s public performance of virtue while everyone else fails him—especially, of course, the women.

Gary Cooper plays Marshal Will Kane, a man so noble, so upright, so painfully principled, he spends his wedding day brooding, pacing, and judging the entire town for not offering to die alongside him. He learns that a criminal he once jailed is returning on the noon train with vengeance in mind. Does he flee with his new Quaker bride? Of course not. He stays—because to abandon his post would be to abandon his manhood. And God forbid we let a Western go by without a tortured man wrestling with his own self-worth via gun violence.

What follows is a masterclass in martyrdom. Kane begs, pleads, and guilt-trips every man in town to stand with him. They all say no, and we’re meant to scorn them: weak, fearful, selfish. The townspeople become a Greek chorus of cowardice, there only to reinforce the idea that true courage is lone, male, and morally absolute. Never mind the fact that they’re untrained civilians being asked to die over someone else’s personal vendetta.

Then there’s Grace Kelly as Amy, Kane’s young, pacifist bride—a Quaker with a spine made of meringue. She spends the film trying to convince her new husband not to throw himself into a gunfight, which the film treats as emotional betrayal. Because of course: a woman asking a man not to die needlessly is weak. She’s punished for her compassion, shamed for her fear, and only redeemed when she literally shoots a man in the back. Only then does the film decide she’s worthy of standing beside her husband.

Meanwhile, there’s Helen Ramírez, played by the glorious Katy Jurado—the only woman in the film with actual grit. She’s Kane’s former lover, a Mexican businesswoman with her own moral clarity, and the film treats her with a mix of exoticism, suspicion, and weary respect. She knows how this story ends: with men proving points and women cleaning up the mess. So, naturally, she’s shipped off before the final showdown, because there’s no room for nuance once the guns come out.

And what does Kane do after he wins? After his moral crisis reaches its climax and he defeats the villain in a shootout that’s less cathartic than inevitable? He throws his badge in the dirt and walks away. A big, bold “I’m done with this thankless town” gesture that plays less like justice served and more like a man who spent the whole movie begging for help and then sulking when no one volunteered to die for him.

2.5 out of 5 ticking clocks
(One for Katy Jurado. One for the tight editing and real-time tension. Half a star for Grace Kelly's shot heard ‘round the gender binary. The rest? Left on the train platform with the myth of lone-wolf masculinity and a pile of discarded civic responsibility.)

#26 ‘Mr. Smith Goes to Washington’

Filibustering for Freedom While the Women Take Notes

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) is Frank Capra’s masturbatory love letter to American idealism, starring Jimmy Stewart as a wide-eyed hayseed who stumbles into the Senate like a deer into oncoming traffic—and proceeds to gum up democracy with the power of earnestness and male tears. It’s supposed to be a heartwarming tale of one man’s moral courage against a corrupt system. What it is, in reality, is a two-hour lecture on civics through the mouth of a sanctimonious man-child, while the women type quietly in the background.

Stewart plays Jefferson Smith, a wholesome Boy Ranger leader who’s appointed to the U.S. Senate as a political pawn, but instead of playing ball, he decides to read the Constitution out loud to grown men until they admit he’s right. And somehow, this is framed as heroism. Smith is woefully unqualified, emotionally unsteady, and allergic to nuance—but because he’s honest, he’s instantly more virtuous than the experienced politicians who actually understand how legislation works.

Cue the grandstanding.

Smith filibusters for liberty, the press, the youth of America, and whatever other sepia-toned virtues Capra can cram into a monologue. He sweats. He collapses. He shakes a stack of papers like it’s a sacred text. Meanwhile, the women—specifically Jean Arthur as Clarissa Saunders, a brilliant, cynical secretary who’s seen it all—are expected to hold their applause, their tongues, and their own ambitions while Smith has his big emotional breakthrough.

Clarissa is the only adult in the room. She’s smart, savvy, and capable of dismantling the entire plot in three sentences. But she’s also a woman in a Capra film, which means her role is to fall in love with the overgrown boy scout once he proves his heart is pure—never mind that he’s been whining and stumbling through Senate protocol like a toddler in a marble hallway.

Let’s not forget the villain, Senator Paine, a father-figure-turned-betrayer, whose great crime is being pragmatic. In Capra’s world, realism is corruption, and idealism—particularly when it’s voiced by a white man with a warble in his throat—is the cure for everything from graft to despair.

The film wants to be a David-and-Goliath tale of one man standing against the machine. But it ends up being yet another paean to male innocence, where moral clarity is found in naiveté, women are relegated to the shadows, and systemic change is reduced to a really good speech. Spoiler: a real filibuster doesn’t end corruption. It ends bathroom access.

Yes, it’s gorgeously shot. Yes, Stewart delivers a performance that shaped a thousand civics class daydreams. But Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is not a radical film. It’s a bedtime story for a democracy that never really existed, told from the point of view of a man who has never had to listen, compromise, or share the podium.

2.5 out of 5 American flags
(One for Jean Arthur, wasted but radiant. One for the cinematography. Half a star for Stewart’s commitment to the bit. The rest? Lost in the echo chamber of moralizing men who believe the system works if they just yell into it long enough.)

#25 ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’

White Nobility in the Shadow of Racism

To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) is the kind of film white America loves to clutch to its breast like a moral security blanket: a courtroom drama soaked in sepia-toned righteousness, where injustice is condemned—but only as long as it doesn’t really disrupt the status quo. Adapted from Harper Lee’s novel, it tells the story of a black man wrongfully accused, a small Southern town steeped in racism, and the one good white man brave enough to gently object.

Gregory Peck plays Atticus Finch, the most patient, soft-spoken martyr ever committed to film. He’s not just a lawyer; he’s a walking sermon in a three-piece suit. His speeches are slow, deliberate, and full of Reasonable White Man Gravitas™. He defends Tom Robinson, an innocent Black man falsely accused of raping a white woman—and he does it with grace, dignity, and zero impact on the actual outcome. But don’t worry, the town children learn a lesson.

And that’s the crux of this revered morality play: it’s a film about racism in which the white people are centered, canonized, and morally polished to a gleam. Atticus loses the case, Tom dies, and yet somehow the film leaves us feeling like Atticus wins. Why? Because he tried. Because he taught his children about fairness. Because he didn’t yell while the system devoured an innocent man. Moral victory by inaction, sanitized for your suburban soul.

Tom Robinson (Brock Peters) barely gets screen time, and when he does, he’s gentle, passive, and heartbreakingly polite—because God forbid a Black man in a white film express anger about being railroaded toward death. His fate is sealed not by the justice system but by the film’s need to preserve its central thesis: racism is a shame, but isn’t Atticus lovely?

Scout, the narrator, is charmingly precocious in that classic literary-child-who-asks-awkward-questions kind of way. She’s meant to represent innocence, but in reality, she’s the vessel for white audiences to confront racism without confronting themselves. She’s allowed to grow. Tom is not.

And let’s not forget Boo Radley, the pale shut-in next door, who somehow gets more redemption arc than the Black man falsely accused and murdered. Boo is misunderstood, tragic, and ultimately rescues the white children—earning the kind of narrative closure denied to every Black character in the story.

Yes, the film is beautifully shot. Yes, the score is tender. And yes, Gregory Peck is excellent at portraying quiet dignity. But let’s not confuse a liberal bedtime story for radical storytelling. To Kill a Mockingbird condemns racism just enough to soothe its audience, but never enough to provoke actual reckoning. It’s a courtroom drama where the system is broken, but the hero still gets to tuck his kids in at night, safely above the wreckage.

3 out of 5 mockingbirds
(One for Peck’s performance. One for Brock Peters, silently carrying the weight of the narrative. One for the cinematography. The rest flew away with any chance of a story that actually centered Black voices, justice, or truth beyond white liberal comfort.)

#24 ‘E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial’

Capitalism, Codependence, and the Needy Little Man-Child From Space

E.T., the 1982 Spielbergian sugar rush that convinced an entire generation to trust alien strangers, cry over glowing fingers, and believe that codependency is the purest form of childhood magic. It’s a story about friendship, empathy, and wonder—but let’s not pretend it’s anything more than suburban escapism with a heavy dose of soft-focus patriarchal grief and emotionally manipulative alien goo.

Elliott, our pint-sized protagonist with the emotional range of a mood ring, is the middle child of a recently divorced mom trying her best while her children build intergalactic escape plans in the backyard. His world is one of bike rides, bullies, and absentee fathers—until a waddling, bug-eyed, moist-skinned alien with the voice of a lifelong smoker stumbles into his tool shed and becomes his everything.

E.T., the titular alien, is basically a bald toddler with divine healing powers and the emotional boundaries of a golden retriever. He imprints on Elliott like a baby duck, and what unfolds is a mutual obsession that’s framed as transcendent love but reads more like mutual emotional collapse. Elliott gets physically ill when E.T. does. They scream together. They cry together. At one point, Elliott releases frogs from a science classroom in an act of psychic empathy, and we're meant to cheer like he just liberated Paris.

Meanwhile, Elliott’s mom (Dee Wallace, sainted and exhausted) runs around in a state of perpetual near-awareness. She cooks, cleans, drives carpools, and is never once informed that her son is harboring a government-grade biological anomaly in the closet. The film treats her like comic relief and emotional wallpaper—there to show just how serious the children are and how clueless the grown women can be.

Of course, the real villain here isn’t E.T. or even Elliott—it’s the cold, bureaucratic government, with their keys, walkie-talkies, and total lack of childlike wonder. Spielberg shoots them like stormtroopers invading Neverland. The implication? Trust children. Trust boys. Adults are either corrupt or irrelevant. Especially women.

Let’s talk about that ending: E.T. resurrects himself (Jesus parallels, anyone?), builds a glowing phallic spaceship out of scrap metal, and tells Elliott “I’ll be right here” by lighting up his heart like a Valentine’s Day card on fire. It’s Spielbergian sentimentality at full throttle, and audiences sobbed like they’d just been dumped by a celestial boyfriend. But step back, and what’s the takeaway? Your best friend leaves you, your government fails you, and your family still doesn’t understand what the hell just happened—but don’t worry, you’ve grown. Emotionally. Spiritually. Alone.

E.T. is a gorgeously shot, emotionally manipulative fairy tale about boyhood, loneliness, and the belief that love is real if it makes you sick. It’s not science fiction—it’s therapy for Spielberg’s inner child, with Reese’s Pieces product placement.

3 out of 5 glowing fingers
(One for the John Williams score. One for the cinematography. One for Dee Wallace, holding together a household while the men—terrestrial and extra—run away from accountability. The rest boarded that spaceship and left us sobbing on the lawn, again.)

#23 ‘The Grapes of Wrath’

Noble Suffering and the Masculine Myth of Moral Poverty

The Grapes of Wrath (1940) is Hollywood’s stab at Steinbeck, a black-and-white dust storm of noble hardship and Depression-era despair, shot through with aching Americana and enough stoic jaw-clenching to crack a molar. It’s a beautifully filmed, tightly acted ode to endurance—but like all Depression dramas filtered through the male gaze, it insists that moral clarity belongs to the working man, while the women just keep the coffee hot and the grief quiet.

Henry Fonda plays Tom Joad, recently paroled and spiritually simmering, who joins his family on a migration from the desolate dustbowl of Oklahoma to the alleged promise of California. What unfolds is a slow burn of exploitation, injustice, and that peculiar American faith in dignity-through-suffering. You see, when working-class men are beaten down by capitalism, they don’t organize—they look off into the horizon and monologue.

Let’s be clear: this film wants to say something radical. It flirts with class consciousness, labor solidarity, and the cruelty of the system. But in true 1940s Hollywood fashion, it reins it all back in with platitudes and patriarchal piety. The Joads don’t rise up. They endure. And the film, instead of interrogating the system that crushes them, romanticizes their resilience like it’s a folk song with dirt under its fingernails.

The women, of course, are sainted specters of sacrifice. Ma Joad, played by Jane Darwell in an Oscar-winning performance, is the emotional core of the film—but she’s less a character than a symbol. Earth mother. Moral rock. Tireless matriarch. She cries quietly when no one’s looking and delivers wisdom in between serving beans. Her strength is in not complaining, not resisting, not desiring. Feminine virtue here is silence, patience, and spiritual endurance while the men get to rage, wander, and become metaphors.

John Ford’s direction is elegiac, full of deep shadows and faces lined with poetic grit. Every shot screams “this is IMPORTANT”—which it is, to a degree. The film helped shape cinematic language around poverty and labor, and its heart is in the right place. But its politics are softened, its fury aestheticized, and its women sanctified into irrelevance.

And don’t forget the ending—Steinbeck’s bleak, radical conclusion scrubbed clean for an audience that just wanted to feel uplifted through other people’s despair. Instead of a starving infant and a mother’s radical mercy, we get hope, resilience, and the open road. Because apparently nothing is more American than rewriting suffering into moral victory while ignoring who actually gets to write the ending.

3 out of 5 dusty horizons
(One for Fonda’s righteous pout. One for Ford’s eye. One for Jane Darwell, holding up the world while everyone else finds themselves. The rest was buried in the sand along with the last shreds of working-class rage.)

#22 ‘Some Like It Hot’

Cross-Dressing, Cat-Calling, and the Cult of Male ‘Charm’

Some Like It Hot (1959) is Billy Wilder’s fizzy, fast-talking farce in which two men dress as women to escape the mob, infiltrate an all-female band, sexually harass Marilyn Monroe, and somehow walk away as heroes. It’s regularly voted one of the greatest comedies of all time by people who confuse gendered humiliation with progress and think putting Tony Curtis in heels is a brave act of political theater.

Let’s break it down: Joe (Curtis) and Jerry (Jack Lemmon), two musicians on the run after witnessing a gangland murder, don wigs and falsies and become Josephine and Daphne. Their goal? Survival. But almost immediately, their survival turns into sport—sneaking into women's hotel rooms, groping instruments (and women), and ogling every curve that jiggles past them. It’s Tootsie meets Rear Window, only with saxophones and a bottomless pit of male entitlement.

Marilyn Monroe plays Sugar Kane, the band’s singer and ukulele-playing dreamgirl, who drips vulnerability from every pore while being groped, kissed, and lied to with exhausting regularity. She’s luminous, tragic, and funny—and utterly disrespected by every character in the film, especially the ones the audience is supposed to root for. Joe, in particular, is repulsive: he impersonates a millionaire with a fake accent to seduce her, gaslights her into thinking she’s in love, and the film frames it all as a grand romantic gesture.

Sugar, of course, has no agency. She’s a damaged party girl looking for security, and the movie’s solution is to hand her over to a compulsive liar in drag. Hilarious.

Jerry’s storyline is played for laughs—he’s the one who “accidentally” gets wooed by a rich old man and starts enjoying the perks of female objectification. Isn’t it funny? A man realizing what women go through and still being the butt of the joke? Gender commentary? Barely. The film skirts any meaningful reflection in favor of pratfalls and punchlines, all while perpetuating the idea that men pretending to be women is inherently comedic, titillating, and transgressive—without ever examining why.

And let’s not forget the final line, “Nobody’s perfect,” offered after the big reveal that Daphne is a dude. It’s supposed to be a progressive mic-drop—a love-conquers-all shrug at gender expectations. But it reads more like: “We’ve lied to everyone, sexually manipulated our way into romance, and now we’re asking for applause.” Cool.

Yes, the dialogue sparkles. Yes, Monroe is electric. And yes, Wilder knew how to orchestrate chaos with surgical precision. But that doesn’t excuse the fact that this is a film where women are background noise, femininity is a costume, and manipulation is passed off as charm.

2.5 out of 5 sax solos
(One for Monroe. One for Lemmon’s comic timing. Half a star for that final line, which flirts with progress but ends up in drag.)