Author Archive for: ‘Ben McCann’

Lester D. Friedman, Citizen Spielberg. University of Illinois Press, 2006. ISBN: 0 25203114 8 (hb) US$75.00 ISBN: 0 25207358 4 (pb) US$24.95 376pp (Review copy supplied by University of Illinois Press) First things first. The blurb says it all. “Steven Spielberg is the director or producer of over one third of the thirty highest grossing films of all time, yet …

Jacob Leigh, The Cinema of Eric Rohmer: Irony, Imagination, and the Social World New York: Continuum, 2012 ISBN: 9 781441198 310 Au$45 (pb) 384pp (Review copy supplied by Continuum) “I saw a Rohmer film once. It was kind of like watching paint dry”. So says Gene Hackman, as private investigator Harry Moseby, in Arthur Penn’s Night Moves (1975).  It’s a …

James Chapman, Mark Glancy & Sue Harper (eds.), The New Film History: Sources, Methods, Approaches. Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. ISBN: 978 023000169 5 US$85.00 (hb) 288pp (Review copy supplied by Palgrave) The New Film History is an accessible and wide-ranging account of the methods, sources and approaches used by modern film historians. This compilation of essays, drawn together from some of British …

Ben Walters, The Office. London: BFI, 2005. ISBN: 1 84457 091 6 184pp £12 (pb) (Review copy supplied by BFI publications) The Office has already proved itself a significant sitcom, which like Whatever happened to the likely lads? (BBC 1973-4) and Fawlty Towers (BBC 1975-1979) is often excruciating to watch. Ben Walters’ timely, engaging, and highly sophisticated reading of The Office is a promising start for the …

Scott Jordan Harris Rosebud Sleds and Horses’ Heads: 50 of Film’s Most Evocative Objects Intellect, 2013 ISBN: 9 7817 8320040 5 US$18.00 (pb) 128pp (Review copy supplied by Intellect publishers) In film, objects, or design fragments, or props, or accessories (call them what you will) are thematic pointers: they conceal and reveal, simplify and stylise, function as expressive detail, focus the …

Martine Beugnet, Cinema and Sensation: French Film and the Art of Transgression. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007. ISBN: 978 0 7486 2042 5 US$65.00 (hb) 208pp (Review copy supplied by Edinburgh University Press) Anyone observing the fluctuating trends in recent French cinema will have noticed the emergence of a corpus of films that thrives on unsettling the audience on a …