Reverse Shot: Twenty Years of Film Criticism in Four Movements: The Way of the Dinosaur Tony McKibbin November 2024 Book Reviews Reverse Shot is a magazine that has for the last twenty years hazardously found for itself a place between the journalistic review and the academic essay. It is the sort of place and space allowing room for the...
Modulating the Rhetorical: The Eloquent Screen, by Gilberto Perez Tony McKibbin January 2024 Book Reviews Gilberto Perez’s The Eloquent Screen has less a thesis than a theme. It doesn’t argue for the importance of rhetoric in film; more it muses over how it can allow us to see films in a particular way with the aid...
The Rebellious and the Rigorous: The Red Years of Cahiers du cinéma (1968-1973), by Daniel Fairfax Tony McKibbin August 2023 Book Reviews There are so many ways into Daniel Fairfax’s vast and very impressive account of Cahiers du cinéma during the properly tumultuous period between 1968 and 1973. How could they not have been clamorous when France...
The Depths of Empiricism: Werner Herzog: Ecstatic Truth and Other Useless Conquests, by Kristoffer Hegnsvad Tony McKibbin January 2022 Book Reviews A beautifully presented account of Herzog’s work, Kristoffer Hegnsvad’s book finds its purpose in both its design and in its sense of affiliation. Hegnsvad is a documentary filmmaker as well as a writer, and so...
The Perfect Conditional: Philippe Garrel by Michael Leonard Tony McKibbin October 2020 Book Reviews 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...
Creating the Appearance of Being: The Art of American Screen Acting 1960 to Today, by Dan Callahan Tony McKibbin July 2020 Book Reviews 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 ...
The Past Is Not Even Past: Afterimages, by Laura Mulvey Tony McKibbin April 2020 Book Reviews 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...
Styles of Substance: The Extraordinary Image: Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, and the Reimagining of Cinema, by Robert P. Kolker Tony McKibbin June 2018 Book Reviews 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...
Speaking of the Dead Tony McKibbin June 2018 Stardust Memories: Cinephilia and Nostalgia 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...
The Cinema Hypothesis: Teaching Cinema in the Classroom and Beyond, by Alain Bergala Tony McKibbin March 2018 Book Reviews 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...
Sceptical Oscillations: Abbas Kiarostami and Film-Philosophy, by Matthew Abbott Tony McKibbin September 2017 Book Reviews 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 ...
Archiving the Unforgettable: “Night and Fog”: A Film in History, by Sylvie Lindeperg Tony McKibbin December 2015 Book Reviews 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...
Size Matters: The Aesthetics of the Small Screen: André Bazin’s New Media by Dudley Andrew (ed.) Tony McKibbin June 2015 Book Reviews 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...
Confronting the Future: Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno, by Miriam Bratu Hansen Tony McKibbin December 2014 Book Reviews 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...
Alain Robbe-Grillet:Teasing the Real Tony McKibbin October 2014 Feature Articles 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...
Representing Identity: Finding Ourselves at the Movies: Philosophy for A New Generation, by Paul W. Kahn Tony McKibbin June 2014 Book Reviews 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...
This Was Now: Camera Historica by Antoine de Baecque Tony McKibbin September 2013 Book Reviews When we think of cinema filming history perhaps our default position is to imagine Ben Hur (Wyler, 1959) and Spartacus (Kubrick, 1960) through to Ride the with the Devil (Lee, 1999) and Lincoln (Spielberg, 2012...
The Confessions of a Justified Filmgoer Tony McKibbin March 2013 Book Reviews J. Hoberman's Film After Film: Or, What Became of 21st Century Cinema? In Totally, Tenderly, Tragically, critic and essayist Phillip Lopate says, “it isn’t that I’m opposed to film theory; actually I’ve re...
Miniaturist Manoeuvres: Noriko Smiling by Adam Mars-Jones Tony McKibbin September 2012 Book Reviews One can be an expert of many things, but what about becoming the world’s expert not on a particular filmmaker, a filmmaking movement or a national cinema, but on just one film? Adam Mars-Jones is a man of more ...
Irreverent Irrelevancies: Zona by Geoff Dyer Tony McKibbin June 2012 Book Reviews Few writers seem to do facetious erudition with the obtrusively self-aggrandizing more completely than Geoff Dyer. Whether it is calling a novel Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, or the references in Zona to K...
A Process of Purification: Badiou and Cinema by Alex Ling Tony McKibbin December 2011 Book Reviews A few years back in The Cinema Book, Rob White proposed that one reason why it took so long for Anglo-American academics to absorb Gilles Deleuze was theory “fatigue”(1). After working their way through structu...
Minding Movies: Observations on the Art, Craft, and Business of Filmmaking by David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson Tony McKibbin October 2011 Book Reviews David Bordwell is undeniably one of the great “quantitative” critics in the world, one of those writers who trust strongly in common sense and what is in front of his eyes, and yet to call Bordwell a critic see...
Encountering Cinema: Casablanca: Movies and Memory by Marc Augé Tony McKibbin July 2010 Book Reviews “Some strange destiny”, John Thompson claims in The Cinema Book, “seems to have determined that the cinema is written about in France with superior perceptiveness and intelligence than elsewhere.” (1) Part of t...
Following The Law of One’s Own Being: The Crying Woman in The Green Ray Tony McKibbin April 2010 Eric Rohmer Dossier, Feature Articles, Special Dossiers A discursive exploration on the philosophic significance of the figure of ‘the crying woman’ in this most radiant of films.
Brando and the Bounty Tony McKibbin September 2009 Feature Articles At the centre of McKibbin’s article is a re-evalution of Marlon Brando’s performance as Fletcher Christian in Lewis Milestone’s 1962 production of Mutiny on the Bounty. But there is much else on offer.
Generalising from the Particular: Masculine Singular: French New Wave Cinema” by Geneviève Sellier and “Making Waves: New Cinemas of the 1960s” by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith Tony McKibbin July 2009 Book Reviews It seems the Nouvelle Vague will not go away, and we may wonder if there has been any other film movement in history - from Neorealism to Dogme, from New Hollywood to New German Cinema - that has held such a fa...
The Imp of Mischief: “Have You Seen…?” A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films by David Thomson Tony McKibbin April 2009 Book Reviews If Pauline Kael is often pugnacious, Jonathan Rosenbaum belligerent, Anthony Lane frivolous, then what word should we bestow upon David Thomson? Perhaps impertinence fits best, as Thomson so often takes a small...
Naked Bodies and Troubled Souls: Antonioni and the Ways of the Flesh Tony McKibbin February 2009 Feature Articles Tony McKibbin examines what he calls the “ontological problem of nudity in Michelangelo Antonioni’s work”. A refreshing focus on an aspect of Antonioni’s films not often discussed in commentaries on his work.
The Future is Now: The Virtual Life of Film by D.N. Rodowick Tony McKibbin May 2008 Book Reviews If cinema as a celluloid form allowed us to meditate on the issue of scepticism, does the age of digital demand something closer to suspicion? This isn’t quite the question at the heart of D.N. Rodowick’s The V...
A Partial World Viewed: Film Fables and The Future of the Image by Jacques Rancière Tony McKibbin March 2008 Book Reviews Jacques Rancière’s books, Film Fables and The Future of the Image, are really trying to do what his work in politics often does. If his collection of essays, On The Shores of Politics (1), proposes that we shou...
The Grocer Who Dreams: Postcards from the Cinema by Serge Daney Tony McKibbin August 2007 Book Reviews In Being and Nothingness, Jean-Paul Sartre says a grocer who dreams is offensive to the buyer, because such a grocer is not wholly a grocer. Etiquette requires that he limit himself to his function as a grocer...
Filmosophy by Daniel Frampton Tony McKibbin May 2007 Book Reviews Sometimes when reading Daniel Frampton’s book about a brave new frontier called “filmosophy” you get the feeling it’s yesterday’s news offering itself up as tomorrow’s world. Though Frampton is at pains to poin...
Art Variables and Life Variables in La Belle noiseuse Tony McKibbin February 2007 The Moral of the Auteur Theory An extensive reappraisal of Jacques Rivette’s mesmerising study of a painter and his model, and the ethical divide between life and art.
Situations over Stories: Café Lumière and Hou Hsiao-hsien Tony McKibbin May 2006 Special Dossiers, Spotlight on Hou Hsiao-hsien Made in homage to the cinema of Ozu, McKibbin argues that the film is far more than a simple tribute to the legacy of the Japanese master.
Pragmatic Identities and Irrationalist Modernism in 4 Tony McKibbin May 2006 On Recent Films McKibbin puts contemporary Russian society as depicted in Ilya Khrzhanovsky's 4 under the microscope.
Cinema of Damnation: Negative Capabilities in Contemporary Central and Eastern European Film Tony McKibbin February 2005 Feature Articles The possibility of spiritual or epiphanic release often found in Tarkovskyís oeuvre is absent from the contemporary generation of Eastern European films.