Michael Mann: the TV writer who hacked his way through Starsky & Hutch on the road to Vega$ and an Emmy for The Jericho Mile. Michael Mann: the director who made Tangerine Dream a staple in the world of film scoring with Thief, his feature debut, starring James Caan. Michael Mann: the producer who changed the face of television forever with the creation of Miami Vice and Crime Story. Michael Mann: the film-maker who first brought Hannibal Lecter to the big screen with Manhunter, his adaptation o...
In 1984 Joel and Ethan Coen burst onto the art-house film scene with their neo-noir Blood Simple and ever since then they have sharpened the cutting edge of independent film. Blending black humor and violence with unconventional narrative twists, their acclaimed movies evoke highly charged worlds of passion, absurdity, nightmare realms, and petty human failures, all the while revealing the filmmakers' penchant for visual jokes and bravura technical strokes. Their central characters may be blind...
Michael Moore is the author, film director, political activist, and lambaster of American household names and political establishments. Whether you like him or loathe him, his satirical and persistent style has opened up the world of political journalism to a new audience. His fearless assaults on formidable targets like General Motors, the National Rifle Association and George W. Bush's White House have made Michael Moore a celebrity in his own right - fawned over by movie stars such as Leonard...
The first full-length account of the life and work of Joseph H. Lewis, the noted director of films such as My Name is Julia Ross (1945) and The Halliday Brand (1957). Because most commentators and interviewers have focused on Lewis' contributions to film noir and particularly Gun Crazy and The Big Combo, Nevins tries to give equal time to Lewis' early B westerns and television series episodes, including episodes of The Rifleman and Gunsmoke that he directed at the end of his career. Nevins's...
This radical re-reading of Ford's work studies his films in the context of his complex character, demonstrating their immense intelligence and their profound critique of our culture.
Who is Ridley Scott? The director of Gladiator and Hannibal, the long-awaited sequel to the Oscar-winning The Silence of the Lambs, Ridley Scott is one of cinema's most accomplished visual stylists. His films have included the phenomenally successful Blade Runner, a film which flopped in 1982 but has since become a cinematic touchstone for visions of the future, and the fatally flawed Legend, his attempt to create a dark fairy tale, compromised by production problems and studio interference. His...
A fat guy with a deep voice who drank a lot of sherry? An unreliable film-maker who always went over time and over budget? One of the most innovative storytellers of the century? He was all of this and more. Welles shocked Broadway with his all-black voodoo version of Macbeth, challenged the US government with his production of The Cradle Will Rock, terrified America with his spoof radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds, and then at the tender age of 26, directed what many people consider the...
Of all the directors active in commercial American film-making John Carpenter remains the industry's most consistent storyteller. His films, like Halloween, The Thing, Escape From New York and Assault On Precinct 13, spark enthusiasm in those who know them and his name alone will draw people into the cinemas. Ultimately John Carpenter's reputation is built on his ability to tell a story and tell it well. He excites, thrills and scares audiences the world over. He has set trends and influenced ma...
A "Critical Cinema 5" is the fifth volume in Scott MacDonald's "Critical Cinema" series, the most extensive, in-depth exploration of independent cinema available in English. In this new set of interviews, MacDonald engages filmmakers in detailed discussions of their films and of the personal experiences and political and theoretical currents that have shaped their work. The interviews are arranged to express the remarkable diversity of modern independent cinema and the interactive community of f...
This beautifully written study looks at the haunting, melancholy horror films Val Lewton made between 1942 and 1946 and finds them to be powerful commentaries on the American home front during World War II. Alexander Nemerov focuses on the iconic, isolated figures who appear in four of Lewton's small-budget classics - "The Curse of the Cat People", "The Ghost Ship", "I Walked with a Zombie", and "Bedlam". These ghosts, outcasts, and other apparitions of sorrow crystallize the anxiety and grief e...
This book features extended conversations with Spanish filmmaker Luis Bunuel (1900-1983) and interviews with his family members, friends and colleagues--including Salvador Dali, Louis Aragon and Fernando Rey--conducted by Max Aub in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Notorious for inventing fanciful versions of his life and his creative output, Bunuel was hard put to deceive the astute Max Aub, who shared Bunuel's background in Spain, in Paris during the Spanish Civil War, and in Mexico, where t...
Tonino Valerii is one of Italy's best genre directors. He started his career as Sergio Leone's assistant on For a Few Dollars More before moving on to directing. He specialized in Spaghetti Western, and his films stand out among the most accomplished and powerful in the genre. Among his best-known works are Day of Anger (1967, starring Lee van Cleef), The Price of Power (1969), A Reason to Live, a Reason to Die! (1972, starring James Coburn and Telly Savalas), and My Name is Nobody (1973, starri...
As late as 1976, George Roy Hill was the first and only director to have two all-time, top-ten, box-office hits: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting (both starring Robert Redford and Paul Newman). A filmmaker with backgrounds in music, drama and television, he was a popular storyteller. His films reflect an ironic, bittersweet vision of life. The stories entertain, but the subtext is often disturbing. Hill felt that all of his major characters "create an environment, a fantasy, a...
American filmmaker Ted V. Mikels holds a unique position as one of the most unconventional directors of exploitation cinema. Famous for his eccentric home life (he once lived with a harem in a castle with secret passageways) and promotional gimmicks (he was known for having nurses and ambulances on hand to assist ""scared-to-death"" moviegoers), Mikels is now considered a pioneering master of low-budget movie making. This unique work examines each of Mikels' 19 major film or video productions, b...
One of the founding fathers of neorealism in the postwar period in Italy, Antonio Pietrangeli went on to focus his lens upon the female subject. Eight of his ten full-length films feature female protagonists. This study seeks to better understand both his achievements and his failings as a feminist auteur as well as analyse his films by applying new critical and theoretical approaches. Pietrangeli’s representations of women struggling with questions of identity was a revolutionary act in the 195...
Neil Hurley demonstrates Hitchcock's covert preoccupation with spiritual themes—conscience, guilt, false accusation, crises as catalysts of character development, personal romance, the salvation of nations, and the "unjustly accused." This last theme is linked in profound ways to Hitchcock's secular Christ types, who find purpose and undiscovered courage and companionship in having to disprove falsely imputed guilt in I Confess, The Wrong Man, Veritgo, North by Northwest, Psycho, The Birds, Marn...
A Critical Companion to Sofia Coppola (Critical Companions to Contemporary Directors)
by Naaman K. Wood and Christopher Booth
The films of Sofia Coppola have moved and entranced audiences with her minimalist style, moody soundscapes, and commitment to center the lives and experiences of women and girls. A Critical Companion to Sofia Coppola explores the profound implications of her stories, images, and convictions in a comprehensive study of all eight of her major works. Drawing from a wide range of disciplines, each chapter offers a fresh, interdisciplinary reading of one of Coppola’s films and her treatment of core t...
Mike Hodges, British film director of seminal works such as Get Carter and Croupier as well as blockbusters, including Flash Gordon, talks to the author about his work in film. Get Carter and Beyond takes the reader through the career of Mike Hodges, exploring decades of life in Hollywood and British film-making and the work of an auteur. This first-ever book on Mike Hodges covers the inside stories of working in mainstream and arthouse cinema in both the UK and Hollywood. The book includes: - F...
Many of Stanley Kubrick's films are often interpreted as cold and ambiguous. Whether viewing Barry Lyndon, 2001, The Shining, or Eyes Wide Shut, there is a sense in which these films resist their own audiences, creating a distance from them. Though many note the coldness of Kubrick's films, a smaller number attempt to explore exactly how his body of work elicits this particular reaction. Fewer still attempt to articulate what it might mean to "feel" Stanley Kubrick's films. In The Kubrick Facade...