Titus Techera

Titus Techera is the Executive Director of the American Cinema Foundation and a culture critic for think tanks including Liberty Fund and the Acton Institute. He teaches in the Manhattan Institute Logos Fellowship and is a Visiting Fellow at the Mattias Corvinus Collegium in Budapest.

Posts by Titus Techera

Sound of Freedom Is a Clarion Call for More Christians in the Arts

This year’s Fourth of July moviegoing experience was a surprise. The top draw at the box office was not a feel-good blockbuster but a thriller about child sex trafficking. It’s called Sound of Freedom and stars Jim Caviezel, of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ fame and the Jonathan Nolan AI-and-vigilantes CBS series Person of Interest. Continue Reading...

Disney and Human Flourishing

Sometime in the last decade, the collegiate class were led by their dedicated sophists to start talking about “the narrative,” which hadn’t concerned them before. Soon they also started complaining about propaganda, “misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation.” Continue Reading...

Keep The Covenant on Your Moviegoing Radar This Memorial Day

This Memorial Day, there is one movie in theaters that addresses directly the experiences of veterans. While American families are entertained by the Super Mario Bros. movie, now a billion-dollar proposition worldwide, people who prefer more true-to-life action can see the movie I recommend, Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant, which has barely made any money, even though it’s an exciting, gripping experience, and it’s got a star, Jake Gyllenhaal. Continue Reading...

Shrinking and the Rebirth of Manliness

Harrison Ford has suddenly returned to acting at the age of 80, after a decade of mostly forgettable cameos. He’s now making movies and even TV series that are bound to get quite a bit of critical attention and renewed popularity. Continue Reading...

Dungeons & Dragons and the Death of Honor

The most popular entertainment for boys not yet overtaken by the miserable ideology of our times is the tabletop game Dungeons & Dragons, a source of friendship and adventure. It became a part of pop culture with Stranger Things recently but turned out to be of little importance to that show. Continue Reading...

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...