He has been a reviewer since 1965 (long for Time magazine), has written almost forty books on the subject, and has produced and directed thirty documentaries. He has counted as personal friends many of the leading filmmakers of the twentieth century. Call it “obsession,” “lunacy,” or a “grand passion” (Schickel grants all three), but there’s simply no one who knows film better. Now Schickel gives us the ultimate summing up: a history of film as he’s seen—and lived—it, a tour of his favorites, a master class in what makes a film soar or flop. Schickel’s no-holds-barred, often raucously irreverent opinions can range from panning classics, to spotlighting forgotten treasures, to defending the art of “popular” genres such as horror, westerns, screwball comedy, and noir. Beyond his picks and pans, Schickel offers a wealth of behind-the-scenes anecdotes (a love note from Marlene Dietrich, Frank Capra’s unlikely path to success, Annie Hall’s original title), career studies of our greatest performers and auteurs, and candidly intimate glimpses of his own life in pictures (an evening with Greta Garbo, John Ford’s advice on directing, a “dust-up” in defense of Monty Python). Above all, Schickel gives us a collection of the true gems, the immortal moments that have stuck with him over a lifetime of movie watching—the transcendent scenes, characters, lines, shots, scores, even lighting cues that offer, each in their way, pure “movie magic.” Buster Keaton, His Girl Friday, Ingrid Bergman, Taxi Driver, Star Wars, Stanley Kubrick, Pulp Fiction—Schickel reveals all the films and the forces behind them that have kept him coming back for more. An essential addition to any cinephile’s library, Keepers is the curation of a brilliant connoisseur and critic, but more than that, it’s a love letter to film from one of its most dedicated devotees.

    America's favorite girl next door may have projected a wholesome image that led Oscar Levant to quip "I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin," but in Considering Doris Day Tom Santopietro reveals Day's underappreciated and effortless acting and singing range that ran the gamut from musicals to comedy to drama and made Day nothing short of a worldwide icon.             Covering the early Warner Brothers years through Day's triumphs working with artists as varied as Alfred Hitchcock and Bob Fosse, Santopietro's smart and funny book deconstructs the myth of Day as America's perennial virgin, and reveals why her work continues to resonate today, both onscreen as pioneering independent career woman role model, and off, as a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States' highest civilian honor. Praised by James Cagney as "my idea of a great actor" and by James Garner as "the Fred Astaire of comedy," Doris Day became not just America's favorite girl, but the number one film star in the world. Yet after two weekly television series, including a triumphant five year run on CBS, she turned her back on show business forever.             Examining why Day's worldwide success in movies overshadowed the brilliant series of concept recordings she made for Columbia Records in the  '50s and '60s, Tom Santopietro uncovers the unexpected facets of Day's surprisingly sexy acting and singing style that led no less an observer than John Updike to state "She just glowed for me." Placing Day's work within the social context of America in the second half of the twentieth century, Considering Doris Day is the first book that grants Doris Day her rightful place as a singular American artist.

    Scott called a “suave, scholarly tour de force,” J. Hoberman delivers a brilliant and witty look at the decade when politics and pop culture became one.This was the era of the Missile Gap and the Space Race, the Black and Sexual Revolutions, the Vietnam War and Watergate—as well as the tele-saturation of the American market and the advent of Pop art. In “elegant, epigrammatic prose,” as Scott put it, Hoberman moves from the political histories of movies to the theater of wars, national political campaigns, and pop culture events.With entertaining reinterpretations of key Hollywood movies (such as Bonnie and Clyde, The Wild Bunch, and Shampoo), and meditations on personages from Che Guevara, John Wayne, and Patty Hearst to Jane Fonda, Ronald Reagan, and Dirty Harry, Hoberman reconstructs the hidden political history of 1960s cinema and the formation of America’s mass-mediated politics.

    There's no one else like him around. There have been nearly twenty films about him, there are more than sixty Web sites dedicated to him, and it's estimated that more than a quarter of the planet has seen at least one Bond film.Now, fans can enter the world of 007 like never before, with this meticulously researched guide examining all the top secret details of the cinematic Bond missions. Officially endorsed by the Bond film producers, it features fascinating facts and behind-the-scenes stories, as well as more than 250 rare production photos, cinema posters, and product advertisements.It's all here: the missions, the gadgets, the vehicles, the legendary villains, the exotic locals, and the even more exotic Bond women. You can meet the directors, writers, stunt men, and technicians who have contributed to the success of the series and have stories of their own to tell. Additionally, there is a unique chapter devoted to the legacy of James Bond, with an overview of the thrillers and spoofs inspired by 007 over the years, as well as a fitting tribute to Mr. Bond's literary father, Ian Fleming.

    But who was he, really? Here is the first substantive, serious view of a contradictory private and public figure.

    He started out as an actor (he debuted on the stage in his sixth-grade production of Finian’s Rainbow); he watched actors work (he went to the theater every week from the age of thirteen and saw every important show on, or off, Broadway for the next decade); he studied acting, starting at sixteen, with Stella Adler (his work with her became the foundation for all he would ever do as an actor and a director).Now, in his new book, Who the Hell’s in It, Bogdanovich draws upon a lifetime of experience, observation and understanding of the art to write about the actors he came to know along the way; actors he admired from afar; actors he worked with, directed, befriended. Among them: Lauren Bacall, Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, John Cassavetes, Charlie Chaplin, Montgomery Clift, Marlene Dietrich, Henry Fonda, Ben Gazzara, Audrey Hepburn, Boris Karloff, Dean Martin, Marilyn Monroe, River Phoenix, Sidney Poitier, Frank Sinatra, and James Stewart.Bogdanovich captures—in their words and his—their work, their individual styles, what made them who they were, what gave them their appeal and why they’ve continued to be America’s iconic actors.On Lillian Gish: “the first virgin hearth goddess of the screen . . . a valiant and courageous symbol of fortitude and love through all distress.” On Marlon Brando: “He challenged himself never to be the same from picture to picture, refusing to become the kind of film star the studio system had invented and thrived upon—the recognizable human commodity each new film was built around . . . The funny thing is that Brando’s charismatic screen persona was vividly apparent despite the multiplicity of his guises . . . Brando always remains recognizable, a star-actor in spite of himself. ” Jerry Lewis to Bogdanovich on the first laugh Lewis ever got onstage: “I was five years old. My mom and dad had a tux made—I worked in the borscht circuit with them—and I came out and I sang, ‘Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?’ the big hit at the time . . . It was 1931, and I stopped the show—naturally—a five-year-old in a tuxedo is not going to stop the show? And I took a bow and my foot slipped and hit one of the floodlights and it exploded and the smoke and the sound scared me so I started to cry. The audience laughed—they were hysterical . . . So I knew I had to get the rest of my laughs the rest of my life, breaking, sitting, falling, spinning.”John Wayne to Bogdanovich, on the early years of Wayne’s career when he was working as a prop man: “Well, I’ve naturally studied John Ford professionally as well as loving the man. Ever since the first time I walked down his set as a goose-herder in 1927. They needed somebody from the prop department to keep the geese from getting under a fake hill they had for Mother Machree at Fox. I’d been hired because Tom Mix wanted a box seat for the USC football games, and so they promised jobs to Don Williams and myself and a couple of the players. They buried us over in the properties department, and Mr. Ford’s need for a goose-herder just seemed to fit my pistol.”These twenty-six portraits and conversations are unsurpassed in their evocation of a certain kind of great movie star that has vanished. Bogdanovich’s book is a celebration and a farewell.From the Hardcover edition.

    Surpassing the myths and stereotypes of the blond bombshell and sex goddess, this fine biography created a sensitive portrait of Marilyn as a real person--an intelligent woman, a gifted star and, ultimately, a tragic victim of her own fame. A notable achievement.--Maxwell Geismar.

    Allison; Cape Fear; The Longest Day; Farewell, My Lovely; and The Winds of War. Mitchum's powerful presence and simmering violence combined with hard-boiled humor and existential detachment to create a new style in movie acting: the screen's first hipster antihero-before Brando, James Dean, Elvis, or Eastwood-the inventor of big-screen cool.Robert Mitchum: "Baby, I Don't Care" is the first complete biography of Mitchum, and a book as big, colorful, and controversial as the star himself. Exhaustively researched, it makes use of thousands of rare documents from around the world and nearly two hundred in-depth interviews with Mitchum's family, friends, and associates (many going on record for the first time ever) ranging over his seventy-nine years of hard living. Written with great style, and vividly detailed, this is an intimate, comprehensive portrait of an amazing life, comic, tragic, daring, and outrageous.

    From classic Hollywood masterpieces like M (1931) to the recent “torture porn” craze with flicks like the Saw franchise, this collection gives a master’s overview of the genre.

    Brilliant. Brutal. Fiercely talented. Angry. Drug addicted. In reality, he’s all of them. He’s a survivor of the Detroit ghetto, the fifty-year-old father of twin boys, and a veteran of dozens of movies. He’s also now sober, after his addiction took his life just about as far down as any human being could go.Through screen-stealing performances in the 1990s movies True Romance, Heat, and Natural Born Killers, Sizemore was so in demand that even when it was widely known that he had a drug problem, directors like Steven Spielberg were offering him roles and begging him to stay sober for them. Robert De Niro personally recruited him for the role of MichaelCheritto in Heat after asking him to dinner and expressing his admiration. Jack Nicholson, Robert Downey, Jr., and Johnny Depp each went out of their way to befriend him. But this same man went from romancing Elizabeth Hurley and Juliette Lewis to being accused of domestic violence by the world’s most famous madam, and moved from a Beverly Hills mansion to a solitary-confinement cell at Chino State Prison and later a desolate, abandoned cabin in a town best known for being where Charles Manson hid Rosemary LaBianca’s wallet.For years, Sizemore’s days were filled with overdoses, suicide attempts, and homelessness. The simple fact is that people don’t come back from where Tom Sizemore landed—yet miraculously, he did. By Some Miracle I Made It Out of There is a harrowing journey into the heart of addiction, told in riveting and often shocking detail—a terrifying cautionary tale for anyone who’s peered over the abyss of drug abuse. By turns gritty and heartbreaking, it is also one man’s look at a particular moment in entertainment history—a window into the drug-fueled spotlight that sent Robert Downey, Jr., to jail and killed River Phoenix, Heath Ledger, and Chris Farley and many others far before their time.

    Spirited Away, directed by the veteran anime film-maker Hayao Miyazaki, is Japan’s most successful film, and one of the top-grossing ‘foreign language’ films ever released.  Set in modern Japan, the film is a wildly imaginative fantasy, at once personal and universal.  It tells the story of a listless little girl who stumbles into a magical world where gods relax in a palatial bathhouse; where there are giant babies and hard-working soot sprites, and where a train runs across the sea. Andrew Osmond’s insightful study describes how Miyazaki wrote, storyboarded and directed Spirited Away with a degree of creative control undreamt of in most popular cinema, using the film’s delightful, freewheeling visual ideas to explore issues ranging from personal agency and responsibility to what Miyazaki sees as the lamentable state of modern Japan.  Osmond unpacks the film’s visual language, which many Western (and some Japanese) audiences find both beautiful and sometimes bewildering.  He traces connections between Spirited Away and Miyazaki’s prior body of work, and provides an account of the film’s production and the creative differences between Miyazaki and his collaborators, arguing that Spirited Away uses the cartoon medium to create a compellingly immersive drawn world.

    S. Hamrah's film writing for n+1, The Baffler, Bookforum, Harper s, and other publications. Acerbic, insightful, hilarious, and damning, Hamrah s aphoristic capsule reviews and lucid career retrospectives of filmmakers and critics have taken up the mantle of serious American film criticism pioneered by James Agee, Robert Warshow, and Pauline Kael and carried it into the 21st century. Taken together, these reviews and essays represent some of the best film criticism in the English language. The Earth Dies Streaming showcases a remarkable critical intelligence while offering a cultural history of the cinema of our times.

    Not only did it produce many of the greatest films of the American cinema, but it was then that Hollywood itself became firmly established as the nation’s ultimate symbol of glamour and style, its stars almost godlike figures whose dazzling lives were chronicled in countless features in magzazines like Photoplay and Modern Screen.While these features were a standard part of the work of studio publicity departments, they told eager readers little about what life was really like for these celebrities once they stepped out of the public eye. No one is better qualified to tell that story than Robert Wagner, whose own career has spanned more than five decades and whose New York Times bestseller, Pieces of My Heart, was one of the most successful Hollywood memoirs in recent years. You Must Remember This is Wagner’s intimate ode to a bygone time, one of magnificent homes, luxurious hotels, opulent night-clubs and restaurants, and unforgettable parties that were all part of the Hollywood social scene at its peak.From a dinner party at Clifton Webb’s at which Judy Garland sang Gershwin at the piano to golf games with Fred Astaire, from Jimmy Cagney’s humble farmhouse in Coldwater Canyon to the magnificent beach mansion built by William Randolph Hearst for Marion Davies, from famous restaurants like the Brown Derby and Romanoff’s to nightspots like the Trocadero and the Mocambo, Wagner shares his affectionate memories and anec¬dotes about the places and personalities that have all become part of Hollywood legend.As poignant as it is revealing, You Must Remember This is Wagner’s account of Hollywood as he saw it, far from the lights and cameras and gossip columns—and a tender farewell to the people of a mythical place long since transformed, and to a golden age long since passed.

    From the dusty roads of rural Indiana to Manhattan's gay culture, from Broadway to Burbank, here is Dean's troubled life: the tragic death of his mother when he was nine; his tumultous relationship with his father; his rise to stardom in New York and Hollywood and his on-and off-screen exploits.

    Step right up and get your fill of 80s nostalgia with the movie bible to end all movie bibles. We’ve diligently compiled a list of 140 of the most influential movies of the 1980s that’s sure to please popcorn gobblers and highbrow chin-strokers alike. The 80s was a time for adventurers, an era of excess, pomp, and bravado. In the era when mullets and shoulder pads were all the rage, moviegoers got their kicks from flicks as wide-ranging as Blade Runner, When Harry Met Sally, and Blue Velvet. Without a doubt, sci-fi was the most important genre of the decade, with non-human characters like E.T. winning the hearts of millions while the slimy creatures from Aliens became the stuff of nightmares and movies like Ghostbusters and Back to the Future fused comedy and sci-fi to the delight of audiences everywhere. In fact, the 1980s saw the invention of a new reality, a movieworld so convincingly real - no matter now far-fetched - that spectators could not help but abandon hemselves to it. Now that’s entertainment, folks.