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For nearly half a century, Roger Ebert's wide knowledge, keen judgment, prodigious energy, and sharp sense of humor made him America's most renowned and beloved film critic. From Ebert's Pulitzer Prize to his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, from his astonishing output of daily reviews to his pioneering work on television with Gene Siskel, his was a career in cinema criticism without peer.
Arriving fifty years after Ebert published his first film...
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A revolutionary classic of feminist cinema criticism, Molly Haskell's From Reverence to Rape remains as insightful, searing, and relevant as it was the day it was first published. Ranging across time and genres from the golden age of Hollywood to films of the late twentieth century, Haskell analyzes images of women in movies, the relationship between these images and the status of women in society, the stars who fit these images or defied them, and...
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Whether we are trying to impress a date after an art-house film screening or discussing Oscar nominations with friends, we all need ways to watch and talk about movies. But with so much variety between an Alfred Hitchcock thriller and a Nora Ephron romantic comedy, how can everyday viewers determine what makes a good movie? In Talking Pictures, veteran film critic Ann Hornaday walks us through the production of a typical movie-from writing the script...
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Nobody has a perfect mother. And, despite what some pushy moms would have us believe, nobody has a perfect daughter, either. It's sometimes hard to communicate with each other, but what can you do? Should you turn to Dr. Phil, psychotropic drugs, a hit man? No! Here's the solution: It's so simple, so obvious, so painless--the movies!
Drawing on more than twenty years of watching movies together, real-life mother and daughter Rosemary Rogers and Nell...
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In Movie Title Typos, artist Austin Light removes just one letter from a well-known movie title to inspire a surprising and hilarious visual scenario. There's Obocop (a robotic police officer works through his PTSD by playing smooth jazz), T. (a boy meets a jewelry-clad alien who pities fools), Harry Otter, The Princess and the Fro, Finding Emo, Pup Fiction, and many more.
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Christmas bookshop volume 2
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In this sequel to the instant New York Times bestseller The Christmas Bookshop, an American production company decides that McCredie's is the perfect location to film a very cheesy Christmas movie and Carmen, the bookshop's manager, uses this unexpected windfall to fend off a buyout offer from an obnoxious millionaire.
An American production company decides that McCredie's is the perfect location to film a very cheesy Christmas movie. Who can resist...
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"Grab the popcorn and prepare to binge the spiritual themes of cinema: the unconventional savior. The hero's journey. The balance of creation. The redemption tale. 100 Spiritual Movies to See Before You Die outlines twelve major categories of spiritual movies before diving into a wide array of films: from Chariots of Fire to Bruce Almighty ; Life of Pi to Malcolm X ; The Bishop's Wife to V for Vendetta ; and many more. From the introduction: 'In their...
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From its Broadway debut to the Oscar-winning film to countless amateur productions, West Side Story is nothing less than an American touchstonean updating of Shakespeare vividly realized in a rapidly changing postwar New York.
That vision of postwar New York is at the heart of Julia L. Foulkess A Place for Us. A lifelong fan of the show, Foulkes became interested in its history when she made an unexpected discovery: scenes for the iconic film version...
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Muscles, six-pack abs, skin, and sweat fill the screen in the tawdry and tantalizing peplum films associated with epic Italian cinema of the 1950s and 1960s. Using techniques like slow motion and stopped time, these films instill the hero's vitality with timeless admiration and immerse the hero's body in a world that is lavishly eroticized but without sexual desire. These "sword and sandal" films represent a century-long cinematic biopolitical intervention...
11) Your movie sucks
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Roger Ebert's I Hated Hated Hated This Movie, which gathered some of his most scathing reviews, was a best-seller. This new collection continues the tradition, reviewing not only movies that were at the bottom of the barrel, but also movies that he found underneath the barrel.
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"WE SEE EACH OTHER is a personal history of trans visibility since the beginning of moving images. A literary reckoning, it unearths a transcestry that's long existed in plain sight and in the shadows of history's annals, and further contextualizes our present moment of increased representation. The films and television shows that Tre'vell covers include: Midnight In The Garden Of Good And Evil, Psycho, Holiday Heart, Boy's Don't Cry, America's Next...
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Was Alfred Hitchcock a cynical trifler with his audience's emotions, as he liked to pretend? Or was he a profoundly humane artist? Most commentators leave Hitchcock's self-assessment unquestioned, but this book shows that his movies convey an affectionate, hopeful understanding of human nature and the redemptive possibilities of love. Lesley Brill discusses Hitchcock's work as a whole and examines in detail twenty-two films, from perennial favorites...
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"What if everything you know about the worst night of your life turns out not to be true? Nine years ago, with the world's eyes on her, Charlie Colbert fled. The press and the police called Charlie a "witness" to the nightmarish events at her elite graduate school on Christmas Eve--events known to the public as "Scarlet Christmas"--though Charlie knows she was much more than that. Now, Charlie has meticulously rebuilt her life: She's the editor-in-chief...
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An in-depth study of the CIA's collaboration with Hollywood since the mid-1990s, and the important and troubling questions it creates.
What's your impression of the CIA? A bumbling agency that can't protect its own spies? A rogue organization prone to covert operations and assassinations? Or a dedicated public service that advances the interests of the United States? Astute TV and movie viewers may have noticed that the CIA's image in popular media...
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More of the Pulitzer Prize—winning film critic's most scathing reviews.
A Horrible Experience of Unbearable Length collects more than 200 of his reviews from 2006 to 2012 in which he gave movies two stars or fewer. Known for his fair-minded and well-written film reviews, Roger is at his razor-sharp humorous best when skewering bad movies. Consider this opener for the one-star Your Highness:
"Your Highness is a juvenile excrescence that feels like...
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David MacDougall is Queen Elizabeth II Fellow and Convenor, Program in Visual Research, Centre for Cross-Cultural Research at the Australian National University, Canberra. Lucien Taylor is the author, with Ilisa Barbash, of Cross-Cultural Filmmaking: A Handbook for Making Documentary and Ethnographic Films and Videos (California). Formerly, he was the editor of the journal Visual Anthropology Review, published by the American Anthropological Association....