Film lovers seeking critical guidance more discerning than daily newspaper reviews but less daunting than scholarly journal articles depend on a handful of critics who write about rarefied films for a general audience. 1001 Movies You Must See before You Die puts a user-friendly mask on the serious thought animating its effort to create a roster of indispensable films and rather belies the erudition of its well-qualified contributors. The chosen 1,001 are chronologi… Buy 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die: 5th Anniversary Edition at Amazon
These three Jean Renoir films were not conceived as a trilogy, but they fit beautifully together in this Criterion package: all luscious with theatrical color, wry in tone, and awestruck by beautiful women. When Renoir returned to Europe after his wartime exile in Hollywood, he first turned to The Golden Coach (1953), an international co-production shot in Rome. It contains all of Renoir’s love of the theatrical life, as a traveling troupe of actors arrives in a colonial town i… Buy Stage and Spectacle – Three Films by Jean Renoir at Amazon
This is a thorough and definitive survey/history of documentary films. Concentrating mainly on the output of the US, the UK, and Canada, the authors outline the origins of the form and then show its development over the next several decades. The book is completely up-to-date in discussing films like Fahrenheit 9/11 and Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer, and in its coverage of IMAX movies and the development of cable and satellite television outlets. Written in a simpl… Buy A New History of Documentary Film at Amazon
In 1994, director Richard Linklater (Dazed and Confused, Waking Life) made Before Sunrise, a gorgeous poem of a movie about two strangers (played by Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy) wandering around Vienna, talking, and falling in love. Ten years later, Linklater, Hawke, and Delpy have returned with Before Sunset, which reunites the same characters after Hawke has written a book about that night. Delpy appears at the final book reading of his European tour; they have less than two h… Buy Before Sunset at Amazon
Parker Posey was the It Girl of independent film in early 1997, the year this film (along with three or four others in which she starred) all played at the Sundance Film Festival. This film was the toughest of the bunch to embrace, based as it was on a self-consciously quirky off-Broadway play about Thanksgiving at the home of a particularly strange family. Oldest son Josh Hamilton comes home from college for the holidays, with fiancée Tori Spelling in tow. What he hasn’t told … Buy The House of Yes at Amazon
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