Titus Techera is the executive director of the American Cinema Foundation.
Posts by Titus Techera
March 22, 2023
Hollywood has largely run out of artists and doesn’t seem able or perhaps even interested in producing movies that can hold a candle to the great achievements of its 100-year history.
Continue Reading...
March 01, 2023
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...
February 07, 2023
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...
January 31, 2023
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...
December 29, 2022
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...
December 22, 2022
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...
December 08, 2022
Martin Scorsese turned 80 last month and he deserves celebration. He’s one of perhaps five directors in Hollywood who is respected as a master of the cinematic art, and the one most closely identified with the art itself.
Continue Reading...
November 23, 2022
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...
November 17, 2022
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...
November 08, 2022
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...
