Amazon.com description: Product Description: Some of the movies’ greatest figures, some of the most important issues raised by the medium, come under close, highly personal, and deeply informed reflection in this new book by one of our most prominent and influential critics. Readers of Time magazine have been familiar with Richard Schickel’s film reviews for many years; but the pieces in Matinee Idylls are more often about the movie past than the movie present. Mr. Schickel seizes the opportunity here “to delve into less pressing matters, to try to put careers and issues into some kind of perspective, to see a body of work or an aspect of the movie past with a fullness that journalistic rounds don’t permit.” The result is a wonderfully intelligent and entertaining collection, with subjects ranging from Garbo to Fellini, and stops in between for Bette Davis, Frank Capra, Charles Laughton, Sam Fuller, and many others, and the exploring of such matters as censorship, celebrity power, and the current crisis in narration. Witty, passionate, independent in his judgments, and a compulsively readable stylist, Mr. Schickel has made Matinee Idylls a book that everyone who cares about the movies will want to read and reread.