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.

    Peek inside the homes of longtime enthusiasts and dedicated newcomers that reflect not just a sport or passion, but also a way of life. Blake and Heather Mycoskie of TOMS, hotelier Sean MacPherson, Gypset author Julia Chaplin, and others have set up their spaces to embrace a casual ease and be the break between the waves. With vibrant photographs of design details and bright beaches—from Malibu to the Rockaways, from Japan to Australia—this book captures the soulful milieu of a lifestyle we all aspire to."Surfers are a breed onto themselves and their homes . . . Nina Freudenberger has taken a good look at not only a number of these vastly different abodes but also a quick glimpse into the particular and even peculiar lives that are lived there. Because after all, to a surfer at least, surfing is the only life." –Gerry Lopez, renowned surfer, innovator, and author of Surf is Where You Find It

    From Billy Wilder, Douglas Sirk, Robert Aldrich, and Howard Hawkes to Martin Scorsese, Roman Polanski, and Paul Schrader, the noir themes of dread, paranoia, steamy sex, double-crossing women, and menacing cityscapes have held a fascination. The features that make Burt Lancaster, Joan Crawford, Robert Mitchum, and Humphrey Bogart into noir heroes and heroines are carefully detailed here, as well as those camera angles, lighting effects, and story lines that characterize Fritz Lang, Samuel Fuller, and Orson Welles as noir directors.For the current rediscovery of film noir, this comprehensive history with its list of credits to 112 outstanding films and its many illustrations will be a valuable reference and a source of inspiration for further research.