Once Upon a Time…: Beauty and the Beast (Jean Cocteau, 1946) Dominic Lash July 2020 Book Reviews Scrawling the opening credits on a chalkboard, Jean Cocteau begins his 1946 romantic fantasy La Belle et la Bête (Beauty and the Beast) by immediately...
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 of...
The Restless Spectator: Anxious Cinephilia: Pleasure and Peril at the Movies, by Sarah Keller Joshua Heaps July 2020 Book Reviews In a recent blog post for Columbia University Press – “Anxious Afterthoughts on Anxious Cinephilia” – Sarah Keller provides her latest book with a cas...
Engaged Vision: Critical Mass: Social Documentary in France from the Silent Era to the New Wave, by Steven Ungar Ivan Cerecina July 2020 Book Reviews Steven Ungar’s Critical Mass groups together and examines three-and-a-half decades worth of non-fiction filmmaking in France, making a compelling case...
Reagan at the Movies: Make My Day: Movie Culture in the Age of Reagan, by J. Hoberman Nafis Shafizadeh July 2020 Book Reviews My concern is with a general movement of reaction and conservative reassurance in the contemporary Hollywood cinema. — Andrew Britton in Blissing O...
Hidden Faces, Hidden Identities: Masks in Horror Cinema: Eyes without Faces, by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas Shannon Scott July 2020 Book Reviews Alexandra Heller-Nicholas’ Masks in Horror Cinema does not begin like a horror film, at least not in the sense of an attention-grabbing opening scene ...
The Big Goodbye: “Chinatown” and the Last Years of Hollywood, by Sam Wasson Fabrice Ziolkowski April 2020 Book Reviews I’ve had a quasi-symbiotic relationship to Roman Polanski’s Chinatown ever since I first laid eyes on it in May 1974. It was at a preview screening of...
Reading Film: Light into Ink: A Critical Survey of 50 Film Novelizations, by S. M. Guariento Deborah Allison April 2020 Book Reviews Film novelisations have been circulating in substantial numbers for well over a century. To say they have been underrepresented in critical studies of...
A meet and happy conversation: Stanley Cavell and Film: Scepticism and Self-Reliance at the Cinema by Catherine Wheatley Dominic Lash April 2020 Book Reviews The philosopher Stanley Cavell (1926-2018) was the author of a relatively small but extremely rich collection of books and articles on film, mostly co...
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 i...
This Is Not Another Reading of a Master: The Invention of Robert Bresson: the Auteur and his Market, by Colin Burnett Dudley Andrew October 2019 Book Reviews The Invention of Robert Bresson is a book to take as seriously as its subject demands. Guided by a natural sensitivity to the films – something shared...
From April! April! to Imitation of Life: The Films of Douglas Sirk, by Tom Ryan Bruce Hodsdon October 2019 Book Reviews The book length interview by Jon Halliday with Douglas Sirk published in 1971 was the catalyst for the reappraisal of his contributions to the cinema....
