Nicolas Cage Biography ‘How Coppola Became Cage’ Focuses on Methods and Cooperation
Zach Schonfeld’s compulsively readable, well-researched book on Nicolas Cage, How Coppola Became Cage, gets to the heart of the unique, multitalented actor.
film studies
David Lazar’s ‘Celeste Holm Syndrome’ Appreciates Hollywood’s Unsung Character Actors
David Lazar's Celeste Holm Syndrome documents how character actor work is about scene-defining, not scene-stealing.
Stanley Kubrick Biography Goes Beyond Rumors and Mystique
David Mikics casts Stanley Kubrick as a kind of modernist tragedian, showing how meticulous planning often gives way to vanity, error, or random chaos.
‘Art Rebels’ Squeezes Miles Davis and Martin Scorsese into the Same Box
Paul Lopes's Art Rebels is a study that tries (and only partly succeeds) to fit two great artists -- Miles Davis and Martin Scorsese -- into clearly defined categories.
‘Sleeping with Strangers’ May Be More Prurient Than Its Hollywood Subjects
In an apparent attempt to generate understanding and contextuality in film history, David Thomson only ends up perpetuating myths and stigmas against homosexuals in his latest, Sleeping with Strangers.
‘We’ll Always Have Casablanca’
Isenberg doesn’t reveal much about the lives or careers of Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, but he provides some interesting and less well-known information.
‘Pink Slipped’, a Study of Women Working in Silent Film, Questions the Source
Film history is re-written both deliberately and inadvertently, and so the consideration of it as "fact" becomes tricky, as Jane Gaines' work reveals.
Was ’60s Sexploitation Cinema More Than Just Pornography?
Film history work Lewd Looks argues that sexploitation films provided an underground and important bridge between the end of old Hollywood and the start of something else.
‘Reinventing Hollywood’ Educates, Illuminates and Connects Films Past and Present
David Bordwell effectively argues that the change in the era of bold, different, sometimes difficult films from the '40s made a permanent mark of cinematic storytelling that resonates to this day.
Glistening Male Bodies in Film: ‘Descended From Hercules’
This is an extensive and thoughtful survey of the peplum that's limited only by its ambition.
Trailing the Artisans of Oneiric Worlds in Anand Pandian’s ‘Reel World’
Reel World reconciles the recondite with the banal, the sublime with the quotidian, and the real with the mythological.
How Representative of India Is Bollywood?
Axiomatically, Rachel Dwyer’s Bollywood’s India is a survey of the collective dreamscape created by a billion desires and dreads.