Los Angeles Movies and Culture

Digital Trends • May 2022

Darkness and dystopia: The sci-fi movie summer of 1982

The Road Warrior, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, The Thing, Blade Runner, and Tron were so special that they are still considered classics 40 years later.

Bright Lights Film Journal • May 2017

Los Angeles Cinema and the Utopia of La La Land

Few movies have represented LA with such fawning reverence and nostalgia as La La Land. There is little traffic (after the opening scene), no crime (other than Ryan Gosling’s singing), no industrialism, no poverty, no homelessness, and very little cultural or geographical diversity.

Digital Trends • December 2023

Forget Die Hard; this 1980s action film is the most underrated Christmas movie ever

Forget Die Hard; this 1980s action film is the most underrated Christmas movie ever

Digital Trends • October 2023

This underrated 2016 action comedy is just as good as Chinatown. Here's why you should watch it

Shane Black’s The Nice Guys, starring Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe, is a comedic homage to classic LA films like Chinatown, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and L.A. Confidential.

Digital Trends • October 2022

The legacy of New Black Cinema

From Boyz n the Hood to Malcolm X: The Legacy of the 1990s New Black Cinema

Film International • July 2019

The Replicant Singularity in Blade Runner 2049

While other sci-fi movies dramatize the singularity as occurring through a transcendence away from the biological, Blade Runner 2049 shows AIs achieving the singularity by becoming more biological.

Senses of Cinema • October 2014

Cinema, Race and the Zeitgeist: On Pulp Fiction Twenty Years Later

Generation X was primed for a movie like Pulp Fiction. Its narrative and visual and aural pastiche, spitting pop cultural allusions like sparks from a grinding wheel, spoke a language we instinctively understood. Pulp Fiction didn’t define us so much as it revealed us, by dramatizing our sensibilities to the world.