Author Tony McKibbin

Philippe Garrel is now in his seventies and has behind him a body of work that looked initially like it might have become no more (and no less) than an avant-garde skeleton. Those early films which included Cic...

There are very good books and articles on actors, about stardom, about performance, on acting and about acting. David Thomson and Pauline Kael have often been astute concerning the thin line between the person ...

It could almost be a parlour game to try to talk about Laura Mulvey without mentioning her famous essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, with its more than fifteen thousand citations and the phrase the m...

Robert Philip Kolker has given us two very useful film books: The Altering Eye and A Cinema of Loneliness are excellent accounts of post-war European cinema (which take in other parts of the world too), and 197...

Cinema certainly has many films that are happy to fall under the nostalgic, and even has plenty of devices to convey it. The use of songs from the period, a fond voice-over recollecting in tranquillity, the tri...

If Bazin's classic essay collection was titled What is Cinema?, along comes contemporary French critic Alain Bergala asking how the subject should be taught. The answer would rest partly in one of the many conc...

Abbas Kiarostami would seem to make films that suggest philosophical enquiry. But, in his fine book, Matthew Abbott makes clear that the philosophical content of the director's work does not mean this is where ...

There have been numerous books about the making of a film: from Final Cut, a book detailing the production history of Heaven's Gate (Michael Cimino, 1980), to Picture, about the making of The Red Badge of Coura...

A glance at the title of André Bazin’s New Media might make us think that the writer has been resurrected, but the truth is that, since his death in 1958, this most important of French critics and theorists h...

Halfway through Cinema and Experience, Miriam Bratu Hansen quotes László Moholy-Nagy’s comment: “It is not the person ignorant of writing but the one ignorant of photography who will be the illiterate of the fu...

In the DVD extras to the new BFI Alain Robbe-Grillet box set, the interviewer Frédéric Taddeï asks the novelist and filmmaker what it felt like filming his fantasies as Robbe-Grillet shows in Trans-Europ-Expres...

Like Stanley Cavell’s relatively recent Cities of Words and Robert B. Pippin’s Hollywood Westerns, Paul W. Kahn’s Finding Ourselves at the Movies is a work of philosophical wisdom contained within theoretical n...