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
October 31, 2022
Halloween has somehow become a celebration of America becoming American, a New World unlike the Old World, a place where horror is a literary or cinematic genre rather than a memory—the dimly recollected past stretching back millennia through seemingly endless suffering, man’s inhumanity to man, older than civilization.
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October 20, 2022
If there’s anything close to national mythology in America nowadays, it’s Marvel. This may be depressing, but we should nevertheless face the fact and make the best of it. Before that, it was
Star Wars, which is still an incredibly profitable business, even as it is failing.
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October 11, 2022
American parents used to trust Disney to charm their kids with beautiful fairy tales. Most such tales were European in origin, but Disney Americanized them, made them more democratic, less bloody minded, and ultimately hopeful.
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September 28, 2022
Jean-Luc Godard died on September 13, 2022, and the news in the world of cinema and culture was received as confirmation that cinema itself was dead. Godard had a remarkable influence on cinema in the ’60s, but his fame went beyond that.
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September 13, 2022
When Bill Rivers put a copy of his debut novel,
Last Summer Boys, in my hand earlier this summer, he didn’t tell me it came with blurbs from former Secretary of Defense James Mattis, for whom he had been a speechwriter, and Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia.
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August 24, 2022
This year, at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival, the major film attraction in Eastern Europe, there was a memento of the Prague Spring: a newly restored version of the 1969 movie
The Joke, directed by Jaromil Jireš and adapted by him and Milan Kundera from the latter’s eponymous debut novel.
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July 26, 2022
The best comedian America has produced in the post–Cold War era is Dave Chappelle, and if you listen to his new Netflix show,
What’s in a Name: Speech at Duke Ellington School of the Arts, he’ll tell you that himself.
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June 30, 2022
This month the Tribeca Film Festival celebrated the 50th anniversary of the premiere of
The Godfather, an important movie, a movie we at some point got in the habit of calling iconic, and we might remember it made stars of a number of actors, starting with Al Pacino.
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June 23, 2022
There’s a new
Jurassic World movie out in theaters, to round up the post-Spielberg trilogy that began in 2015 and continued in 2018, a long time for a trilogy these days—the
Star Wars sequel trilogy came out in four years, as do many of these blockbusters (for example, three Kong & Godzilla movies 2017–2021).
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June 15, 2022
Norm Macdonald was the funniest comedian in his time among those who stayed out of political controversies. His specialty was pointing out how uncomfortable we are facing the reality of our human limits, moral and intellectual, as opposed to the fantasies we embrace eagerly in our flight from mortality.
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