History & Criticism

Positioning itself at the intersection of Italian film history, horror studies and cultural studies, this fascinating book asks why, and how, was the protean, transnational and transmedial figure of the vampire appropriated by Italian cinema...

Make sense of the world of cinema Want to pull back the curtain on film? This hands-on, friendly guide unravels the complexities of film and helps you put cinema into a cultural context. You'll get an easy-to-follow introduction to different film genres...

This provocative book is a tractate-a treatise-on beauty in Japanese art, written in the manner of a zuihitsu, a free-ranging assortment of ideas that "follow the brush" wherever it leads. Donald Richie looks at how perceptual values in Japan...

This classic in film theory, presents a systematic study of the techniques of the film medium and of their potential uses for creating formal structures in individual films such as Dovzhenko's Earth, Antonioni's La Notte, Bresson's Au Hasard Balthazar,...

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR CRITICISM 2019From the MAN BOOKER PRIZE- and WOMEN'S PRIZE-SHORTLISTED author of Changing My Mind and Swing Time - discover a second unmissable collection of essays from Zadie Smith'Generous,...

An official behind-the-scenes companion to New Line Cinema's IT and IT CHAPTER TWO, the globally popular blockbusters Collecting the best artwork produced during the making of both of these sophisticated and visually enthralling films-including...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781681370248Author Jonathan GriffinFormat PaperbackPage Count 128Imprint The New York Review of Books, IncPublisher The New York Review of Books,...

Whether it is the seaside postcard bubbly blondes of Barbara Windsor, the hysterically historical leading ladies of Joan Sims, the coquettish authoritarians of Hattie Jacques, or the statuesque confidence of Valerie Leon, the Carry On girls are stoic,...

This is the first English translation of Alain Bergala's seminal text on the potentials, possibilities, and problems of bringing film to schools and other educational contexts. Based on the author's own experiences of writing about and teaching film as...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780816637317Author Louise BrooksFormat PaperbackPage Count 168Imprint University of Minnesota PressPublisher University of Minnesota PressDimensions(mm)...

The inspiration for Edgar Wright's Last Night in Soho. Over fifty years ago, with the release of "The Curse of Frankenstein" and Christopher Lee's iconic performance in "Dracula", Hammer ushered in a whole new era of blood and barely-restrained...

This study offers a fresh approach to the remarkable German film The Lives of Others (2006), known for its compelling representation of a Stasi surveillance officer and the moral and ethical turmoil that results when he begins spying on a playwright and...

'An absolute must-read' VANITY FAIRBette Davis and Joan Crawford: two of the deadliest arch-rivals of all time. Born in the same year (though Davis swore 'Crawford is five years older than me if she's a day'), the two fought bitterly throughout their...

A definitive account of Blaxploitation cinema-the freewheeling, often shameless, and wildly influential genre-from a distinctive voice in film history and criticism In 1971, two films grabbed the movie business, shook it up, and launched a genre that...

From the noted Hollywood biographer and author of The Contender comes this celebration of the great American love story-the romance between Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart-capturing its complexity, contradictions, and challenges as never before.In...

The Art of Spirited Awaycollects colour illustrations of Spirited Awayfor the first time in an English edition. This book includes paintings and designs from the Academy Award winning animated film directed by Hayao Miyazaki. Features commentary, colour...

A new edition of Laura Mulvey's groundbreaking collection of essays, originally published in 1989. In an extensive introduction to this second edition, Mulvey looks back at the historical and personal contexts for her famous article Visual Pleasure and...

The tensions between utopian dreams and dystopian anxieties permeate science fiction as a genre, and nowhere is this tension more evident than in Star Trek. This book breaks new ground by exploring music and sound within the Star Trek franchise across...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780859653176Author Lindsay AndersonFormat PaperbackPage Count 470Imprint Plexus Publishing LtdPublisher Plexus Publishing Ltd

1971 was a great year for cinema. Woody Allen, Robert Altman, Dario Argento, Ingmar Bergman, Stanley Kubrick, Sergio Leone, George Lucas, Sam Peckinpah, Roman Polanski, Nicolas Roeg and Steven Spielberg, among many others, were behind the camera, while...

Writer, producer, and director Wes Craven has successfully tapped into the horror vein for over forty years, serving up scary, funny, cutting-edge thrillers that have become classics in the genre. His films have been both critical and commercial...

Tim Burton is one of the great modern-day visionaries of cinema, a director who has fabricated his own deliciously nightmarish universe in movies as extraordinary as Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands, Mars Attacks! and The Nightmare before Christmas - not...

Like no other book before it, this work delves into the deep, dark, and mysterious undertones hidden in Tinsel town's biggest films. Esoteric Hollywood is a game-changer in an arena of tabloid-populated titles. After years of scholarly research, Jay Dyer...

Andrey Tarkovsky, the genius of modern Russian cinema-hailed by Ingmar Bergman as "the most important director of our time"-died an exile in Paris in December 1986. In Sculpting in Time, he has left his artistic testament, a remarkable revelation of both...

The finest film critic in Britain at the absolute top of his form' Stephen Fry'Entertainingly incendiary stuff' EmpireA hatchet job isn't just a bad review, it's a total trashing. Mark Kermode is famous for them - Pirates of the Caribbean, Sex and the...

In the late 1970s, the adult film industry began the transition from celluloid to home video. Smutty Little Movies traces this change and examines the cultural and legal efforts to regulate, contain, limit, or eradicate pornography. Drawing on a wide...

All drama takes the form of one of 36 situations. That was Georges Polti's theory about theatre, which he put forward in his book 36 Dramatic Situations, published in French in the mid-19th century.A century and a half later, Mike Figgis was struggling...

From 1945 to 1950, during the formative years of his career, Stanley Kubrick worked as a photojournalist for Look magazine. Offering a comprehensive examination of the work he produced during this period - before going on to become one of America's most...

In this triumphant work David Thomson, one of film's greatest living experts and author of The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, tells the enthralling story of the movies and how they have shaped us.Sunday Times, New Statesman, The Times, Guardian,...

One of the few books to address the horror film from any kind of critical position.. Unique - The first history of the horror film to approach it from a queer perspective.. Written with detail and thoroughness - covers all eras of the horror film and...

This book provides a concise introduction to critical race theory and shows how this theory can be used to interpret Jordan Peele's Get Out. It surveys recent developments in critical race studies and introduces key concepts that have helped shape the...

Twenty years since its release, Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut remains a complex, visually arresting film about domesticity, sexual disturbance, and dreams. It was on the director's mind for some 50 years before he finally put it into production. Using...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781560256984Author Simon DoonanFormat PaperbackPage Count 256Imprint Thunder's Mouth PressPublisher Thunder's Mouth PressWeight(grams) 420gDimensions(mm)...

BRAND NEW & EXPANDED EDITION! Now with 125 additional pages of film ads from the 1970s and a new foreword by director Joe Dante! As featured in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fangoria, and more.Growing up in the 1970s...

A LOUDER THAN WAR BOOK OF THE YEARA riveting journey into the psyche of Britain through its golden age of television and film; a cross-genre feast of moving pictures, from classics to occult hidden gems, The Magic Box is the nation's visual self-portrait...

The New York Times called it "a superb new musical with great art and humor." New York magazines lauded it as a "musical gem with the kind of surprising songs only found in the best musical theater." The Washington Post called it "musical storytelling of...

Melodrama, biography, cold war thriller, drug memoir, essay in fragments, mystery – Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors is cult critic Ian Penman’s long awaited first original book, a kaleidoscopic study of the late West German filmmaker Rainer Werner...

No Crying in Baseball is a rollicking, revelatory deep dive into a one-of-a-kind film. Before A League of Their Own, few American girls could imagine themselves playing professional ball (and doing it better than the boys). But Penny Marshall's genre...

A radical look at Jane Austen as you've never seen her - as a lover of farce, comic theatre and juvenilia. The Genius of Jane Austen celebrates Britain's favourite novelist 200 years after her death and explores why her books make such...

The documentary, a genre as old as cinema itself, has traditionally aspired to objectivity. Whether making ethnographic, propagandistic, or educational films, documentarians have pointed the camera outward, drawing as little attention to themselves as...