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
December 17, 2021
I continue my series on old Hollywood Christmas movies. After a movie about church as a community,
The Bishop’s Wife(1947), and the workplace as a community,
The Shop Around the Corner (1940), I turn to a movie about family, the smallest but most natural community:
Christmas in Connecticut (1945), starring Barbara Stanwyck, one of the great Hollywood stars, Sydney Greenstreet (the Fat Man from
The Maltese Falcon and
Casablanca), and Dennis Morgan.
Continue Reading...
December 09, 2021
I began a series of essays on Christmas movies last week with
The Bishop’s Wife (1947), a story about church, the community of the faithful, and spiritual responsibility. This week, I’m writing about a less lofty subject, the community of the workplace and the life of commerce, but a much better movie,
The Shop Around the Corner (1940), one of the classics of old Hollywood, directed by Ernst Lubitsch and starring Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullavan as shopkeepers who fall in love over Christmas.
Continue Reading...
December 03, 2021
I try to write every year on old Christmas movies, and this year I’m doing an entire series on ’40s movies remade in the ’90s, which suggests we can bring back some of those heartwarming stories.
Continue Reading...
November 23, 2021
Thanksgiving is a distinctively American holiday, unlike Christmas, and yet we have very few popular movies about it. Maybe this is a good thing—it’s a family affair, not necessarily a public spectacle.
Continue Reading...
November 15, 2021
Beauty has the power to spellbind everyone—the proof is Canadian director Denis Villeneuve. His last three movies,
Dune (2021),
Blade Runner 2049 (2017), and
Arrival (2016), have earned him a reputation as a visionary and a sensitive director, despite science fiction as his genre, which normally is considered either too sophisticated for the broad audience to follow or too simplistic to be worth attention, instantly forgotten.
Continue Reading...
