Category: Film Criticism

Bonnie and Clyde (BFI Film Classics)

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Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967) replaced American cinema, reinvigorating the gangster style with ecu, New Wave concepts and a notably candid view of intercourse and violence. Starring Warren Beatty, who additionally produced, and Faye Dunaway, the movie whipped up a frenzy of controversy and cleared the path for the "New Hollywood" of the 70s.
For Lester D. Friedman, Bonnie and Clyde is a pivotal movie that mirrored and contributed to the profound swap in American values within the 60s and 70s. After detailing how Penn, who was once particularly interviewed for the e-book, Beatty, and writers David Newman and Robert Benton introduced the movie to the display (in the face of studio hostility), Friedman explores its progressive therapy of teenybopper, model, crime and authority.

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Dr. Strangelove or: How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (BFI Film Classics)

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Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, or, How I realized to prevent being concerned and Love the Bomb (1964) has lengthy been recognized as one of many key inventive expressions of the nuclear age. Made at a time whilst nuclear battle among the U.S. and the Soviet Union was once a true hazard, the movie is menacing, exhilarating, exciting, insightful and extremely humorous. Combining a scene-by-scene research of Dr. Strangelove with new examine within the Stanley Kubrick Archive, Peter Kramer's research foregrounds the connections the movie establishes among the chilly struggle and international warfare II, and among sixties the USA and Nazi Germany.

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Film As Film: Understanding And Judging Movies

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By V. F. Perkins

Here eventually is an advent to movie thought and its background with out the jargon. famous movie student V. F. Perkins provides standards for increasing our figuring out and pleasure of flicks. He employs good judgment phrases like stability, coherence, importance, and delight to enhance his insightful aid of the delicate strategy and of the unobtrusive director. Readers will research why a scene from the humbler motion picture Carmen Jones is a deeper awareness of filmmaking than the bravura lion series within the vintage Battleship Potemkin. alongside the best way Perkins invitations readers to re-experience with readability, directness, and ease different recognized scenes via administrators like Hitchcock, Eisenstein, and Chaplin. Perkins examines the origins of flicks and embraces their use of either realism and magic, their skill to list in addition to to create. within the technique he seeks to find the synthesis among those opposing parts. With the satisfaction of the fan and the notion of the critic, Perkins advances a movie concept, in accordance with the paintings of Bazin and different early movie theorists, that's wealthy with recommendation for debate and extra pursuit. sit down beside Perkins as he reacquaints you with cinema, heightens your knowledge, deepens your excitement, and raises your go back each time you put money into a film ticket.

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Grey Gardens (BFI Film Classics)

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By Matthew Tinkcom

Grey Gardens (1975) is one among most crucial documentary movies of the previous thirty years, gaining the prestige of a cult vintage. Matthew Tinkcom argues that the movie reshaped documentary cinema by way of relocating the non-fiction digital camera to the guts of the family, a personal area into which film-makers had seldom formerly ventured.

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Heathers (Deep Focus)

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By John Ross Bowie

What’s your damage?

In 1989, Michael Lehmann’s black comedy Heathers drew a line within the sand, rebuffing the beauty and optimism of John Hughes’ extra renowned fare with darkness and dying. Launching the careers of Winona Ryder and Christian Slater, Heathers grew to become a cult vintage, score #5 on Entertainment Weekly’s record of the 50 top highschool videos and encouraging hoards of juvenile movies that tremendously overshadow its repute yet lack its acid wit, ethical complexity, and indisputable emotional punch.

For the newest installment of Deep concentration, John Ross Bowie blends desirable memoir with astute research, tracing the rebel-teen mythology that hyperlinks Columbine, heavy steel, and The Catcher within the Rye. With aid from Lehmann, screenwriter Daniel Waters, and individuals of the solid, Bowie completely unpacks the film’s bizarre resonance. impressive riffs at the etymology of its teenager slang, the consequences of its identify, and its visible debt to Stanley Kubrick convey how Heathers—for all its audacious absurdity—speaks volumes in regards to the realities of highschool and of existence itself.

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Meshes of the Afternoon (BFI Film Classics)

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By John David Rhodes

John David Rhodes' illuminating research of Maya Deren's mesmerising short 'Meshes of the Afternoon' (1943) areas the movie within the context of ecu modernism and as a pivotal textual content for the pre- and post-War heritage of the cinematic avant garde. Rhodes additionally explores the film's use of perspective, repetition and visible symobolism.

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Roman Polanski: The Cinema of a Cultural Traveller

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By Ewa Mazierska

Polanski is celebrated; the identify of the director of Knife within the Water,  Rosemary's Baby, Chinatown and The Pianist  is recognized and revered internationally.  but even movie critics locate it tricky to assert what a 'Polanski movie' is.  This welcome e-book unravels the meanings of Polanski's motion pictures, devoting each one of its chapters to an enormous point: the autobiographical issue, characters and narratives, literary diversifications like Tess and the new Oliver Twist, Polanski's use of many genres, his track, represented ideology and so on.  In so doing, it uncovers either the typical components in his motion pictures and the ambiguities and paradoxes of his cinema. Ewa Mazierska unearths the necessities of Polanski the 'cinema kid', stimulated via many of us and activities, yet like a magpie attracted to every little thing that he encounters, relocating simply among Europe and the United States, among low price range and large finances endeavours.  This e-book is definitely the right advent to Polanski's motion pictures and even as delves deep into their complexities - sharing a true pleasure of their riches.

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Sansho Dayu (Sansho the Bailiff) (BFI Film Classics)

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By Carole Cavanaugh

This textual content seems to be at Kenji Mizoguchi's movie Sansho Dayu, a model of a recognized jap folk-tale approximately an eleventth century feudal legit pressured into exile by means of his political enemies. In his absence, his youngsters fall lower than the corrupting effect of the malevolent Sansho.

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Bombay (BFI Film Classics)

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By Lalitha Gopalan

In January 1993 sectarian rioting left thousand Hindus and Muslims useless in Bombay. merely years later Mani Ratnam's audacious Tamil filmBombay (1995) used those occasions as a backdrop to a love tale among a Hindu boy and a Muslim girl. Bombay was condemned via Muslim critics for misrepresentation and used to be embroiled in censorship controversies. those served purely to intensify curiosity and the movie ran to packed homes in India and abroad.

Lalitha Gopolan exhibits how Bombay struggles to discover a story which could reconcile communal adjustments. She appears to be like intimately on the manner professional censors attempted to alter the movie less than the impression of robust figures in either the Muslim and the Hindu groups. In happening to research the aesthetics ofBombay, she exhibits how issues of social and gender distinction are rendered via functionality, choreography, music and cinematography. this can be a interesting account of a landmark in fresh Indian cinema. 

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