Malick, in other words, is a director who established himself during the transition from Old Hollywood to New Hollywood, where experimenting became the norm, and it is while experimenting at[…]
Books · Crime · Directors · Drama · Franchises & Series · War
Coppola not only lived for his films but also lived in and through them, in a constant process of inventing and reinventing himself both as an artist and as a[…]
Books · Drama · German Cinema · LGBT & Queer · Melodrama
Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors by Ian Penman (Semiotext(e), May 2023, pp. 200, $11.99. * * * In William Motley’s best-selling 1947 novel Knock on Any Door, the author cites an adage that[…]
African · African American · Books · Hollywood · Horror
Clive Dawson, I Walked with a Zombie. Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 2023. 120 pages. Available in hardback and e-book. * * * At a time when education and culture are increasingly[…]
Books · Directors · Writers & Critics
It would be easy – and fun – to focus entirely on the good and to co-sign his [Tarantino’s] praise for films that are also favorites of mine such as[…]
Lester D. Friedman. Citizen Spielberg. 2nd ed. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2022. $24.95. Calling him “our foremost practitioner of reel American history,” Friedman draws our attention to Spielberg’s determination[…]
David Fincher’s Zodiac: Cinema of Investigation and (Mis)Interpretation, edited by Matthew Sorrento and David Ryan. 259 pp. Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2022. 2007 was a good year for American film, with[…]
Books · French Cinema · Thrillers & Action
Gemma King, Jacques Audiard. Manchester University Press, 2021. * * * In the first book-length exploration of the controversial director’s filmography, part of Manchester University Press’s French Film Directors series,[…]
Books · Crime · TV & Streaming
Shooting Columbo: The Lives and Deaths of TV’s Rumpled Detective, by David Koenig. 248pp. Bonaventure Press, 2021. The story of Columbo is the story of Peter Falk. Not Richard Levinson[…]
Books · Experimental & Underground · Philosophy
It is, ostensibly, a story about a truck. The 32-ton Saviem truck of Marguerite Duras’ 1977 experimental film Le Camion moves relentlessly forward, steered by a faceless driver, to an[…]
Books · Directors · Women in Film
Anna Backman Rogers, Sofia Coppola: The Politics of Visual Pleasure (New York: Berghahn Books, 2019). The Coppola who emerges from Rogers’s study is therefore something of a double agent. On[…]
Books · Theory · Work and Workplace
Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky, The Process Genre: Cinema and the Aesthetic of Labor. 2020. Duke University Press, $28.95. Watching someone work is hypnotizing. We might not always enjoy working, but something[…]
Books · Noir · Uncategorized
Leon Lewis (Ed.), John Alton: Essays on the Cinematographer’s Art and Craft (McFarland, 2020) * * * Widely regarded as epitomizing the visual style of high film noir as it[…]
Actors & Personalities · Books · Characters · Hollywood
David Lazar, Celeste Holm Syndrome: On Character Actors from Hollywood’s Golden Age (Omaha: University of Nebraska Press, October 2020) * * * I’d have to say that the best definition[…]
Sam Wasson, The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood (New York: Flatiron Books, 2020). * * * Sam Wasson’s The Big Goodbye tells the irresistible tale of[…]
Books · Directors · Documentaries · Experimental & Underground · Women in Film
From the same desert, toward the same dark sky, my tired eyes open on the silver star, forever; but the Three Wise Men never stir, the Kings of life, the[…]
Actors & Personalities · Books
Big picture book is a fun peruse for cineastes * * * Stephen Tapert’s Best Actress: The History of Oscar-Winning Women (2020, Rutgers University Press, 504 pages) is a coffee[…]
It’s OK with Me: Hollywood, the 1970s, and the Return of the Private Eye, by Jason Bailey. $11.99, 78 pp. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2018. Across individual analysis of about[…]
Books · Comics · Franchises & Series
Make Ours Marvel: Media Convergence and a Comics Universe, edited by Matt Yockey. $29.95, 364pp. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017. In August this year, Netflix released The Defenders, the[…]
Fucking Innocent: The Early Films of Wes Anderson, by John Andrew Fredrick. $15.95, 288 pp. Rare Bird Books, 2017. The first thing to note about John Andrew Fredrick’s book is[…]
