Both an introduction to film study and a practical writing guide, this brief text introduces students to film terms and the major film theories, enabling them to write more critically. With numerous student and professional examples along the way, this engaging and practical guide progresses from taking notes and writing first drafts to creating polished essays and comprehensive research projects. Moving from movie reviews to theoretical and critical essays, the text demonstrates how an analysis of a film becomes more subtle and rigorous as part of a compositional process.

    1946) is perhaps the best known of all cult directors, whose Mulholland Drive marks cinema's arrival to the 21st century. His career began more than 30 years ago, with the groundbreaking, mystifying "Eraserhead" (1977). With "Blue Velvet" (1986), "Wild at Heart" (1990) and "Lost Highway" (1997) Lynch breathed new life into the sensory experiences of film audiences and disrupted narrative logic to mysterious and mystifying effect. In the early 1990s, he invented a new TV series genre with "Twin Peaks". Although he is a Hollywood director, Lynch works at the edges of the studio system, exploring the many facets of his artistic talent, whose creations, including photography, painting and music, are now making their way into museums and galleries.

    Fans of finer films have to count on catching up with them on video and DVD, but even the most hard-core devotees have trouble remembering what sounded good when a film was originally released. Never Coming to a Theater Near You will remedy that situation. This selection of renowned film critic Kenneth Turan's absorbing and illuminating reviews, now revised and updated to factor in the tests of time, point viewers toward the films they can't quite remember, but should not miss.Moviegoers know they can trust Turan's impeccable taste. His eclectic selection represents the kind of sophisticated, adult, and entertaining films intelligent viewers are hungry for. More importantly, Turan shows readers what makes these unusual films so great, revealing how talented filmmakers and actors have managed to create the wonderful highs we experience in front of the silver screen.

    Resolved to fix up the place, Sorel began pulling up the linoleum on his kitchen floor, tearing away layer after layer until he discovered a hidden treasure: issues of the New York Daily News and Daily Mirror from 1936, each ablaze with a scandalous child custody trial taking place in Hollywood and starring the actress Mary Astor. Sorel forgot about his kitchen and lost himself in the story that had pushed Hitler and Franco off the front pages.At the time of the trial, Mary Astor was still only a supporting player in movies, but enough of a star to make headlines when it came out that George S. Kaufman, then the most successful playwright on Broadway and a married man to boot, had been her lover. The scandal revolved around Mary’s diary, which her ex-husband, Dr. Franklyn Thorpe, had found when they were still together. Its incriminating contents had forced Mary to give up custody of their daughter in order to obtain a divorce. By 1936 she had decided to challenge the arrangement, even though Thorpe planned to use the diary to prove she was an unfit mother. Mary, he claimed, had not only kept a tally of all her extramarital affairs but graded them—and he’d already alerted the press. Enraptured by this sensational case and the actress at the heart of it, Sorel began a life-long obsession that now reaches its apex.Featuring over sixty original illustrations, Mary Astor's Purple Diary narrates and illustrates the travails of the Oscar-winning actress alongside Sorel’s own personal story of discovering an unlikely muse. Throughout, we get his wry take on all the juicy details of this particular slice of Hollywood Babylon, including Mary's life as a child star—her career in silent films began at age fourteen—presided over by her tyrannical father, Otto, who "managed" her full-time and treated his daughter like an ATM machine. Sorel also animates her teenage love affair with probably the biggest star of the silent era, the much older John Barrymore, who seduced her on the set of a movie and convinced her parents to allow her to be alone with him for private "acting lessons."Sorel imbues Mary Astor's life with the kind of wit and eye for character that his art is famous for, but here he also emerges as a writer, creating a compassionate character study of Astor, a woman who ultimately achieved a life of independence after spending so much of it bullied by others.Featuring ribald and rapturous art throughout, Mary Astor's Purple Diary is a passion project that becomes the masterpiece of one of America’s greatest illustrators.

    With new entries on several films, it also revisits, revises and expands the commentary on every film in the 1982 and 1986 two-volume edition. In addition to a detailed plot synopsis, cast and credit listings, and an overview of each film's critical reception, Warren delivers richly informative assessments of the films and a wealth of insights and anecdotes about their making, often drawing on remarks by the filmmakers that have emerged in the quarter century since the original edition. The book is arranged by film title, contains 273 photographs (many rare, some in color), has seven useful appendices, and concludes with an enormous index.

    It also explores the real Woody Allen, the critically acclaimed filmmaker from the Upper East Side, and his amusing movie persona of a neurotic and lovable loser.Shrewdly and effectively deconstructing Woody, John Baxter's biography illuminates Allen's preoccupation with sex and mortality, his personal quirks and obsessions, his manipulation of celebrity, and his cinematic achievement as chronicler and court jester of Manhattan's intellectual elite."A splendidly written, exhaustive account and a major achievement" - The Observer"Astute and highly entertaining biography" - Daily Telegraph"A bracing corrective to the usual po-faced, sycophantic studies of the cult of Woody" - Mail on Sunday"Full of interesting information for cinema enthusiasts" - The Spectator"The saga [of Woody and Mia] makes compulsive reading" - The Guardian

    Although she made her name as a star of the silent screen, she found her calling as a gossip columnist, where she had the ear of the most powerful force in show business: the public. With a readership of 20,000,000 people, Hopper turned nobodies into stars, and brought stars to their knees. And in this sensational memoir, she tells all. In her career, Hopper crossed some of Hollywood’s biggest bold-faced names, from Joan Crawford and Bette Davis to Charlie Chaplin and Katherine Hepburn, and her feud with rival gossip columnist Louella Parsons became the stuff of legend. In The Whole Truth and Nothing But, we get Hedda’s side of the story—and what a story it is. Hedda Hopper is portrayed by Judy Davis in the Ryan Murphy TV series Feud.

    Wiley and Mr. Bona have found just the right tone for writing about this most particular of American phenomena.

    Whether posing kittenishly in a pinup shot or dramatically for a classic portrait, this shy, vulnerable, enormously insecure woman was transformed by the lens.Marilyn posed for nearly every major photographer of her day, and this pictoral chronicle of her affair with the camera, featuring shots from Richard Avedon, Cecil Beaton, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Alfred Eisentaedt, Elliott Erwitt, Philippe Halsman, Weegee, and thirty other artists, brings together the most beautiful and unusual images available. From her early days as a "fashion model" for ads and pinup calendars, through the film stills that follow her career as a minor actress and then major starlit, to the now-famous portraits by Avedon, and Cecil Beaton, as well as the paparazzi shots from the hordes of photographers who trailed her every move -- Marilyn emerges in all her many moods: girlish and gay, sexy and serious, glamorous and girl-next-door. And, in a fascinating and revealing interview with French writer George Belmont, Marilyn sets the record straight about much of her early life, and about her ambitions, fears, and dreams. Jane Russell, Marilyn's friend and costar in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, enhances this portrait with an affectionate foreword that describes what it was like to work with the young actress. Although we will never know the "real" Marilyn, this sumptuous volume goes a long way toward preserving the memory of an utterly unforgettable woman.

    Professor Barsam's clear writing, thorough presentation of fundamental film principles, and unique pedagogical additions to the traditional introductory text-- including an entire chapter devoted to analytical writing-- ensure that students approach screenings and writing assignments equipped with the analytical tools necessary to be active, insightful interpreters of movies. "Looking at Movies" is accompanied by two outstanding multimedia resources, the Student website and CD-ROM, both of which are integrated directly with the text.

    He studies Lynch's talent for blending the bizarre and the normal to emphasize the odd nature of normality itself. Hollywood is often criticized for distorting reality and providing escapist fantasies, but in Lynch's movies, fantasy becomes a means through which the viewer is encouraged to build a revolutionary relationship with the world.Considering the filmmaker's entire career, McGowan examines Lynch's play with fantasy and traces the political, cultural, and existential impact of his unique style. Each chapter discusses the idea of impossibility in one of Lynch's films, including the critically acclaimed Blue Velvet and The Elephant Man; the densely plotted Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive; the cult favorite Eraserhead; and the commercially unsuccessful Dune. McGowan engages with theorists from the "golden age" of film studies (Christian Metz, Laura Mulvey, and Jean-Louis Baudry) and with the thought of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, and Hegel. By using Lynch's weirdness as a point of departure, McGowan adds a new dimension to the field of auteur studies and reveals Lynch to be the source of a new and radical conception of fantasy.

    It is full of glamorous moments, heart-warming episodes, and exciting personalities.

    Eight autobiographical essays by Brooks, on topics ranging from her childhood in Kansas and her early days as a Denishawn and Ziegfeld Follies dancer to her friendships with Martha Graham, Charles Chaplin, W. C. Fields, Humphrey Bogart, and others are collected here. Originally published: New York: Knopf, 1982.

    At the forefront of that movement were six innovative and daring directors whose films pushed the boundaries of moviemaking and announced to the world that something exciting was happening in Hollywood. Sharon Waxman of the New York Times spent the decade covering these young filmmakers, and in Rebels on the Backlot she weaves together the lives and careers of Quentin Tarantino, Pulp Fiction; Steven Soderbergh, Traffic; David Fincher, Fight Club; Paul Thomas Anderson, Boogie Nights; David O. Russell, Three Kings; and Spike Jonze, Being John Malkovich.

    Then two stars came along: Greta Garbo, who turned the femme fatale into a woman whose capacity for love and sacrifice made all other human emotions seem pale; and Norma Shearer, who succeeded in taking the ingenue to a place she'd never been: the bedroom. In their wake came a deluge of other complicated women-Marlene Dietrich, Jean Harlow, and Mae West, to name a few. Then, in July 1934, the draconian Production Code became the law in Hollywood and these modern women of the screen were banished, not to be seen again until the code was repealed three decades later.A thorough survey and a tribute to these films, Complicated Women reveals how this was the true Golden Age of women's films.