Presents a collection of essays that combine history, analysis, and love for movies covering such films as 'All About Eve,' 'Casablanca,' 'Lawrence of Arabia,' and 'Schindler's List.'

"Film criticism is exciting just because there is no formula to apply," Pauline Kael once observed, "just because you must use everything you are and everything you know." Between 1968 and 1991, as regular film reviewer for The New Yorker, Kael used those formidable tools to shape the tastes of a generation, enthralling readers with her gift for capturing, with force and fluency, the essence of an actor's gesture or the full implication of a cinematic image. Kael called movies "the most total and encompassing art form we have," and she made her reviews a platform for considering both film and the worlds it engages, crafting in the process a prose style of extraordinary wit, precision, and improvisatory grace. To read The Age of Movies, the first new selection in more than a generation, is to be swept up into an endlessly revealing and entertaining dialogue with Kael at her witty, exhilarating, and opinionated best. Her ability to evoke the essence of a great artist-an Orson Welles or a Robert Altman-or to celebrate the way even seeming trash could tap deeply into our emotions was matched by her unwavering eye for the scams and self-deceptions of a corrupt movie industry. Here in this career spanning collection are her appraisals of the films that defined an era-among them Breathless, Bonnie and Clyde, The Leopard, The Godfather, Last Tango in Paris, Nashville-along with many others, some awaiting rediscovery, all providing the occasion for masterpieces of observation and insight, alive on every page.

Product Description: Manny Farber (1917–2008) was a unique figure among American movie critics. Champion of what he called "termite art" (focused, often eccentric virtuosity as opposed to "white elephant" monumentality), master of a one-of-a-kind prose style whose jazz-like phrasing and incandescent twists and turns made every review an adventure, he has long been revered by his peers...read more

Product Description: In this first collection of film writing from Evergreen Review, the legendary publication's important contributions to film culture are available in a single volume. Featuring such legendary writers as Nat Hentoff, Norman Mailer, Parker Tyler, and Amos Vogel, the book presents writing on the films of Jean-Luc Godard, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ousmane Sembene, Andy Warhol, and others and offers incisive essays and interviews from the late 1950s to early 1970s...read more

Product Description: André Bazin is renowned for almost single-handedly establishing the study of film as an accepted intellectual pursuit, as well as for being the spiritual father of the French New Wave. In 1951 he cofounded and became editor-in-chief of Cahiers du cinéma, the most influential critical periodical in the history of cinema...read more

Product Description: Sometime between the advent of rock 'n' roll and the birth of MTV, rock stars took to making feature-length films to showcase their talent, and in the process rock 'n' roll movies became a genre of their own. Recording artist and rock historian Marshall Crenshaw has compiled an appropriately irreverent guide to over 850 rock 'n' roll movies...read more

Product Description: Finding wholesome, uplifting movies can be a daunting task---especially when Hollywood s values are so far from the Church's. 250 Great Movies for Latter-day Families offers a broad selection of edifying options for your family's next movie night...read more

Product Description: The wire-thin line that separates movies rated PG and R has been crossed over so many times in both directions that industry observers are questioning whether the rating system carries any validity at all. As a movie reviewer for more than thirty years and as a watchful, caretaker parent, author Chris Hicks learned pretty quickly that Hollywood movers and shakers like to "push the envelope," as they put it, and it doesn't seem to matter whether it's a children's film or an adult movie...read more

Product Description: From American Beauty (overrated) to The Night of the Hunter (masterpiece), this collection of Peter Rainer's film criticism spans the course of his illustrious thirty-year career, which dates back to the early 1980s. It is drawn from a wide range of publications, including the Christian Science Monitor, the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, Los Angeles magazine, the Los Angeles Times, New Times, and New York magazine, and is arranged thematically with chapters such as "Overrated, Underseen," "Some Masterpieces," "Documentaries," "Issues (Mostly Hot Button)," "Comedies (Intentional and Unintentional)," and "Literary and Theatrical Adaptations...read more

Product Description: This engaging collection of Bruce F. Kawin’s most important film essays (1977–2011) is accompanied by his interviews with Lillian Gish (1978) and Howard Hawks (1976).  The Hawks interview is particularly concerned with his work with William Faulkner and their friendship...read more

Product Description: Ten important essays on films from Potemkin to Some Like It Hot.

Product Description: Siegfried Kracauer (1889–1966), friend and colleague of Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, was one of the most influential film critics of the mid-twentieth century. In this book, Johannes von Moltke and Kristy Rawson have, for the first time assembled essays in cultural criticism, film, literature, and media theory that Kracauer wrote during the quarter century he spent in America after fleeing Nazi-occupied Europe...read more

Product Description: With a critical eye that mirrors his subject's, Todd Rendleman explores the values, temperament, character, and style that have made Roger Ebert the most trusted and influential film critic in America. Introducing the one critic whom so many moviegoers recognize, argue with, and love, Rule of Thumb illuminates Ebert's critical strengths and blind spots...read more