“To put it bluntly, Scotland is, on the filmmaking front, a third world country, but this is tragically misrecognised by those holding the purse strings north of the border” (p. 219). So offers Colin McArthur i...

While the cinema of the ‘70s often focused on the ambivalent status of its characters, with anti-heroes common, and outright heroism a sign of naivety, by the mid-‘80s American film was indeed all about making...

Reverse Shot is a magazine that has for the last twenty years hazardously found for itself a place between the journalistic review and the academic essay. It is the sort of place and space allowing room for the...

Gilberto Perez’s The Eloquent Screen has less a thesis than a theme. It doesn’t argue for the importance of rhetoric in film; more it muses over how it can allow us to see films in a particular way with the aid...

There are so many ways into Daniel Fairfax’s vast and very impressive account of Cahiers du cinéma during the properly tumultuous period between 1968 and 1973. How could they not have been clamorous when France...

A beautifully presented account of Herzog’s work, Kristoffer Hegnsvad’s book finds its purpose in both its design and in its sense of affiliation. Hegnsvad is a documentary filmmaker as well as a writer, and so...

Philippe Garrel is now in his seventies and has behind him a body of work that looked initially like it might have become no more (and no less) than an avant-garde skeleton. Those early films which included Cic...

There are very good books and articles on actors, about stardom, about performance, on acting and about acting. David Thomson and Pauline Kael have often been astute concerning the thin line between the person...

It could almost be a parlour game to try to talk about Laura Mulvey without mentioning her famous essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, with its more than fifteen thousand citations and the phrase the m...

Robert Philip Kolker has given us two very useful film books: The Altering Eye and A Cinema of Loneliness are excellent accounts of post-war European cinema (which take in other parts of the world too), and 197...

Cinema certainly has many films that are happy to fall under the nostalgic, and even has plenty of devices to convey it. The use of songs from the period, a fond voice-over recollecting in tranquillity, the tri...

If Bazin's classic essay collection was titled What is Cinema?, along comes contemporary French critic Alain Bergala asking how the subject should be taught. The answer would rest partly in one of the many conc...

Abbas Kiarostami would seem to make films that suggest philosophical enquiry. But, in his fine book, Matthew Abbott makes clear that the philosophical content of the director's work does not mean this is where...

There have been numerous books about the making of a film: from Final Cut, a book detailing the production history of Heaven's Gate (Michael Cimino, 1980), to Picture, about the making of The Red Badge of Coura...

A glance at the title of André Bazin’s New Media might make us think that the writer has been resurrected, but the truth is that, since his death in 1958, this most important of French critics and theorists h...

Halfway through Cinema and Experience, Miriam Bratu Hansen quotes László Moholy-Nagy’s comment: “It is not the person ignorant of writing but the one ignorant of photography who will be the illiterate of the fu...

In the DVD extras to the new BFI Alain Robbe-Grillet box set, the interviewer Frédéric Taddeï asks the novelist and filmmaker what it felt like filming his fantasies as Robbe-Grillet shows in Trans-Europ-Expres...

Like Stanley Cavell’s relatively recent Cities of Words and Robert B. Pippin’s Hollywood Westerns, Paul W. Kahn’s Finding Ourselves at the Movies is a work of philosophical wisdom contained within theoretical n...

When we think of cinema filming history perhaps our default position is to imagine Ben Hur (Wyler, 1959) and Spartacus (Kubrick, 1960) through to Ride the with the Devil (Lee, 1999) and Lincoln (Spielberg, 2012...

J. Hoberman's Film After Film: Or, What Became of 21st Century Cinema?In Totally, Tenderly, Tragically, critic and essayist Phillip Lopate says, “it isn’t that I’m opposed to film theory; actually I’ve re...

One can be an expert of many things, but what about becoming the world’s expert not on a particular filmmaker, a filmmaking movement or a national cinema, but on just one film? Adam Mars-Jones is a man of more...

Few writers seem to do facetious erudition with the obtrusively self-aggrandizing more completely than Geoff Dyer. Whether it is calling a novel Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, or the references in Zona to K...

A few years back in The Cinema Book, Rob White proposed that one reason why it took so long for Anglo-American academics to absorb Gilles Deleuze was theory “fatigue”(1). After working their way through structu...

David Bordwell is undeniably one of the great “quantitative” critics in the world, one of those writers who trust strongly in common sense and what is in front of his eyes, and yet to call Bordwell a critic see...

“Some strange destiny”, John Thompson claims in The Cinema Book, “seems to have determined that the cinema is written about in France with superior perceptiveness and intelligence than elsewhere.” (1) Part of t...

A discursive exploration on the philosophic significance of the figure of ‘the crying woman’ in this most radiant of films.

At the centre of McKibbin’s article is a re-evalution of Marlon Brando’s performance as Fletcher Christian in Lewis Milestone’s 1962 production ofMutiny on the Bounty. But there is much else on offer.

It seems the Nouvelle Vague will not go away, and we may wonder if there has been any other film movement in history - from Neorealism to Dogme, from New Hollywood to New German Cinema - that has held such a fa...

If Pauline Kael is often pugnacious, Jonathan Rosenbaum belligerent, Anthony Lane frivolous, then what word should we bestow upon David Thomson? Perhaps impertinence fits best, as Thomson so often takes a small...

Tony McKibbin examines what he calls the “ontological problem of nudity in Michelangelo Antonioni’s work”. A refreshing focus on an aspect of Antonioni’s films not often discussed in commentaries on his work.

If cinema as a celluloid form allowed us to meditate on the issue of scepticism, does the age of digital demand something closer to suspicion? This isn’t quite the question at the heart of D.N. Rodowick’s The V...

Jacques Rancière’s books, Film Fables and The Future of the Image, are really trying to do what his work in politics often does. If his collection of essays, On The Shores of Politics (1), proposes that we shou...

In Being and Nothingness, Jean-Paul Sartre saysa grocer who dreams is offensive to the buyer, because such a grocer is not wholly a grocer. Etiquette requires that he limit himself to his function as a grocer...

Sometimes when reading Daniel Frampton’s book about a brave new frontier called “filmosophy” you get the feeling it’s yesterday’s news offering itself up as tomorrow’s world. Though Frampton is at pains to poin...

An extensive reappraisal of Jacques Rivette’s mesmerising study of a painter and his model, and the ethical divide between life and art.

Made in homage to the cinema of Ozu, McKibbin argues that the film is far more than a simple tribute to the legacy of the Japanese master.