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 22, 2023
Every Christmas, I try to write about Christmas movies, especially about old Hollywood, because the best directors at the time considered it worthwhile to make movies that would chastise and cheer up the nation, indeed remind people of the spirit of Christmas and thus try to fit Christianity into the new entertainment that dominated the American imagination.
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November 07, 2023
On the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the Yom Kippur War, Hamas launched an attack on Israel, killing more than 1,500 people and taking hostages, committing, filming, and publicizing on social media acts of terror that the citizens of democracies are simply unprepared to watch or understand.
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October 11, 2023
Conservatism doesn’t really produce or nurture writers nowadays. The notable exception in the past couple of generations is Tom Wolfe, who died in 2018. Wolfe was universally beloved. He sold millions of copies of his various writings.
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September 20, 2023
The Wheel of Time is a series of 14 novels by Robert Jordan, which debuted in 1990. You may never have heard of them, but they’ve sold 100 million copies and add up to more than 4 million words.
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August 23, 2023
Miloš Forman was an incredibly famous director in the 1980s, when his
Amadeus (1984) won eight Oscars out of 11 nominations, and
Ragtime (1981) also received eight nominations, period pieces about music’s potential for social transformation, overcoming prejudices or conventions, and making a new world.
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July 28, 2023
When I was a college boy, one of my history professors argued persuasively, if self-interestedly, that pink was the medieval European color of manliness—it was the color of living flesh, of manly health.
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July 21, 2023
The last major director we have is Christopher Nolan. As you watch his movies, you think about what it means for there to be masters of the art: people who seem to know the tools of the art so well that they are in complete control of what they’re doing, yet when you see their work, you can hardly tell how they did it.
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July 13, 2023
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.
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June 27, 2023
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.”
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May 26, 2023
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.
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