Titus Techera

Titus Techera is the executive director of the American Cinema Foundation.

Posts by Titus Techera

Tár Falls Just Short of Greatness

One of this year’s Oscar darlings, Tár, also turns out to be the only major movie since #metoo to mount an attack on cancel culture. This is paradoxical, of course, as we see from the three nominations—Best Picture, Best Direction, and Best Original Screenplay—received by the artist behind the movie, Todd Field. Continue Reading...

Top Gun: Maverick: Our America Is Back

The surprise hit of 2022 was Top Gun: Maverick, a man and machine heroic picture, sentimental and nostalgic, the sort of thing Hollywood just doesn’t do anymore. At first glance it seemed way too old-fashioned, yet it made more than $700 million in America and just a bit more than that in the rest of the world, without even opening in China. Continue Reading...

The Success of Avatar Is Nothing to Celebrate

The biggest box office success in cinema history, strictly in dollars taken in, is Avatar, the 2009 movie that made 3D a technology audiences would finally flock to. The movie made some $785 million in America, more than another $2 billion in the rest of the world, adding up to about $2.9 billion. Continue Reading...

Sunset Blvd. Is Your New Year’s Sanity Test

Last New Year’s Eve, I wrote about Billy Wilder’s The Apartment. It’s the best movie on the ambivalence with which we welcome the end of one year and the coming of a new one, worrying whether it promises that our dreams will come true, whether we will live up to our resolutions to be better. Continue Reading...

Sinners, Saints, and Grace in We’re No Angels

Michael Curtiz, famed director of Casablanca, made a Christmas movie in 1955, starring Humphrey Bogart, called We’re No Angels, about the power of innocence and moral decency to transform even hardened criminals—of whom Bogart is one, the other two played by the famous British actor-director Peter Ustinov and the American son of Italian immigrants Aldo Ray. Continue Reading...

Avalon Is Thanksgiving for America

Barry Levinson was one of the most successful directors in America around 1990, when he made Avalon, an immigrant Thanksgiving movie trying to sum up the transformation of the American family in the 20th century. Continue Reading...

The Collapse of a Cryptocurrency Guru

At the beginning of the year, I wrote a piece for Acton on Elizabeth Holmes, the con artist behind Theranos, the fake tech startup promising a revolution in blood tests and, thus, the beginning of a solution to the problem of healthcare costs. Continue Reading...

House of the Dragon Is Nihilism for Teens

I recently wrote about what has come of Disney, whose new Pinocchio seems to be all about getting rid of morality as we have understood it. Instead of learning that actions have consequences and how to behave with a view to growing up, children are supposed to be flattered until they get into trouble, and then further flattered by being told that the rest of the world is causing their problems. Continue Reading...