Author Archive for: ‘Richard Armstrong’

Jonathan Rosenbaum, Movie Wars: How Hollywood and the media limit what films we can see. London: Wallflower Press, 2002. ISBN 1 903364 60 4 234 pp. £12. 99. (Review copy supplied by Wallflower Press) “If Vincent Canby got fired from the Times today, and he went to a bar and started talking about a movie he has just seen, nobody …

Mark Sinker, If…. London: British Film Institute, 2004. ISBN: 1 84457 040 1 88 pp £8.99 (pb) (Review copy supplied by the British Film Institute) In his review of new Godard books in Screening the Past Issue 10 (2000) Adrian Martin discusses “scanning”, an approach to writing about film which involves “‘running through’ a movie in writing, from start to end.” Departing …

Haidee Wasson, Museum Movies: The Museum of Modern Art and the Birth of Art Cinema. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. ISBN: 0 520 24131 2 (pb) US$24.95 ISBN: 0 520 22777 8 (hb) US$60.00 314 pp (Review copy supplied by University of California Press) In 1988 London’s Museum of the Moving Image was unveiled amid fanfares celebrating its interactive …

Stephen Heath, César. (BFI Film Classics) London: BFI publishing, 2004. ISBN: 0 85170 833 1 88 pp £8.99stg. (pb) (Review copy supplied by BFI Publishing) If serious cinephilia has lionized the cosmopolitan, socially significant and cinematically important French master Renoir, Marcel Pagnol’s is the atmosphere that popularly signifies the “gloire” of classic French cinema. In the 1980s the Provençal Jean de …

Peter William Evans & Celestino Deleyto, eds. Terms of Endearment: Hollywood Romantic Comedy of the 1980s and 1990s. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998. ISBN: 0 7486 0885 0 220 pp £11.00 (Review copy supplied by Marston Book Services). “But romantic comedy refuses to be exclusively sustained by reality principles – however much it is regulated by them – and for all …

Alexander Nemerov, Icons of Grief: Val Lewton’s Home Front Pictures. Berkeley: California University Press, 2005. ISBN: 0-520-24100-2 213pp US$24.95 (pb) (Review copy supplied by University of California Press) Lately there have been a number of publications devoted to cinephilia in its historical and contemporary manifestations. Christian Keathley’s Cinephilia and History (Indiana UP, 2006), in particular, dwells on the blissful detail that cinephiles …

András Bálint Kovács, Screening Modernism: European Art Cinema 1950-1980. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. ISBN: 978-0-226-45165-7 US$22.50 (pb) 428pp (Review copy supplied by University of Chicago Press) As we approach the end of the 2000s, it is worth remembering that it has been fifty years since that annus mirabilis during which history and aesthetics took a quantum leap. In …