Engaging Film Criticism examines recent American cinema in relationship to its «imaginative intertexts», films from earlier decades that engage similar political and cultural themes. This historical encounter provides an unexpected and exciting way of reading popular contemporary films. Eclectic pairings include the Schwarzenegger action film True Lies with the Hitchcock classic North by Northwest, as well as the lampooned Will Smith comedy Wild, Wild West with Buster Keaton's silent feature The General. Using a theoretically and historically informed brand of criticism, Engaging Film Criticism suggests that today's Hollywood cinema is every bit as worthy of study as the classics.

Engaging Film is a creative, interdisciplinary volume that explores the engagements among film, space, and identity and features a section on the use of films in the classroom as a critical pedagogical tool. Focusing on anti-essentialist themes in films and film production, this book examines how social and spatial identities are produced (or dissolved) in films and how mobility is used to create different experiences of time and space. From popular movies such as 'Pulp Fiction,' 'Bulworth,' 'Terminator 2,' and 'The Crying Game' to home movies and avant-garde films, the analyses and teaching methods in this collection will engage students and researchers in film and media studies, cultural geography, social theory, and cultural studies.

In what ways do films influence and interact with society? What social forces determine the kinds of movies that get made? How do movies reinforce—and sometimes overturn—social norms? As societies evolve, do the films that were once considered ‘great’ slip into obscurity? Which ones? Why? These questions, and many others like them, represent the mainstream of scholarly film studies today. In Engaging Cinema, Bill Nichols offers the first book for introductory film students that tackles these topics head-on. Published in a handy 'trade paperback' format, Engaging Cinema is inexpensive and utterly unique in the field—a perfect complement to or replacement for standard film texts.

Noël Carroll, a brilliant and provocative philosopher of film, has gathered in this book eighteen of his most recent essays on cinema and television—what Carroll calls “moving images.” The essays discuss topics in philosophy, film theory, and film criticism. Drawing on concepts from cognitive psychology and analytic philosophy, Carroll examines a wide range of fascinating topics. These include film attention, the emotional address of the moving image, film and racism, the nature and epistemology of documentary film, the moral status of television, the concept of film style, the foundations of film evaluation, the film theory of Siegfried Kracauer, the ideology of the professional western, and films by Sergei Eisenstein and Yvonne Rainer. Carroll also assesses the state of contemporary film theory and speculates on its prospects. The book continues many of the themes of Carroll’s earlier work Theorizing the Moving Image and develops them in new directions. A general introduction by George Wilson situates Carroll’s essays in relation to his view of moving-image studies.

Cinephilic practice today - viewing, thinking, reading and writing about films - is marked by an unprecedented amount of social interaction, made possible by dramatically lower economic barriers to pub­lication through the Internet, giving rise to new hybrid forms and outlets of cinephilic writing that draw freely from scholarly, journalistic and literary models.

In this engaging collection, Stanley Kauffmann comments on a broad range of films, including Ridley Scott's "Thelma and Louise," Oliver Stone's "JFK," Stephen Frears' "My Beautiful Laundrette," Kenneth Branagh's "Henry V," and Federico Fellini's "Intervista."

An engaging look at four pioneering film critics—“besides being a pleasure to read, [it] makes a sophisticated contribution to the study of film criticism” (Cineaste). In the 1960s, Pauline Kael, Andrew Sarris, and Roger Ebert were three of America’s most popular and influential film critics. But their remarkable contributions to the cinema landscape were deeply influenced by the work of four earlier critics who are too often overlooked: Otis Ferguson, James Agee, Manny Farber, and Parker Tyler. Throughout the ’30s and ’40s, these pioneering critics scrutinized movies with an intensity not previously seen in popular reviewing. With The Rhapsodes, renowned film scholar and critic David Bordwell restores their work to a wider audience. Bordwell calls these four critics the “Rhapsodes”, in honor of their passionate and deliberately offbeat prose. Each broke with prevailing currents in criticism, finding new ways to discuss popular films that their contemporaries regarded as trivial. With his customary clarity and brio, Bordwell considers each critics’ writing style, their conceptions of films, and their many quarrels. He then concludes by examining their profound impact on later generations of film writers.

A collection of greatest film reviews from a critic who “understands how to pop the hood of a movie and tell us how it runs” (Steven Spielberg). Pulitzer Prize–winning film critic Roger Ebert wrote movie reviews for the Chicago Sun-Times for over forty years. His wide knowledge, keen judgment, and sharp sense of humor made him America’s most celebrated film critic—the only one to have a star dedicated to him on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. His hit TV show, At the Movies, made ‘‘two thumbs up’’ a coveted hallmark in the industry. From The Godfather to GoodFellas, from Cries and Whispers to Crash, the reviews in Awake in the Dark span some of the most exceptional periods in film history, from the dramatic rise of rebel Hollywood and the heyday of the auteur, to the triumph of blockbuster films such as Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark, to the indie revolution. The extraordinary interviews included capture Ebert engaging with such influential directors as Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Woody Allen, Robert Altman, Werner Herzog, and Ingmar Bergman, as well respected actors as diverse as Robert Mitchum, James Stewart, Warren Beatty, and Meryl Streep. Also gathered here are some of his most admired esssays, among them a moving appreciation of John Cassavetes and a loving tribute to the virtues of black-and-white films. A treasure trove for film buffs, Awake in the Dark is a compulsively readable chronicle of film since the late 1960s. “[Ebert] has a keen understanding of the way [movies] work.” —Martin Scorsese “[Ebert’s] criticism shows a nearly unequalled grasp of film history and technique.” —A.O. Scott, New York Times

Characters - those fictional agents populating the fictional worlds we spend so much time absorbed in - are ubiquitous in our lives. We track their fortunes, judge their actions, and respond to them with anger, amusement, and affection - indeed the whole palette of human emotions. Powerfully drawn characters transcend their stories, entering into our imaginations and deliberations about the actual world, acting as analogies and points of reference. And yet there has been remarkably little sustained and systematic reflection on these creatures that absorb so much of our attention and emotional lives. In Engaging Characters, Murray Smith sets out a comprehensive analysis of character, exploring the role of characters in our experience of narrative and fiction. Smith's analysis focuses on film, and also illuminates character in literature, opera, song, cartoons, new and social media. At the heart of this account is an explanation of the capacity of characters to move us. Teasing out the various dimensions of character, Smith explores the means by which films draw us close to characters, or hold us at a distance from them, and how our beliefs and attitudes are formed and sometimes reformed by these encounters. Integrating these arguments with research on emotion in philosophy, psychology, evolutionary theory, and anthropology, Engaging Characters advances an account of the nature of fictional characters and their functions in fiction, imagination, and human experience. In this revised, twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Engaging Characters, Smith refines and extends the arguments of the first edition, with a substantial new introduction reviewing the debates on emotion, empathy, and film spectatorship that the book has inspired.

The New York Times film critic shows why we need criticism now more than ever Few could explain, let alone seek out, a career in criticism. Yet what A.O. Scott shows in Better Living Through Criticism is that we are, in fact, all critics: because critical thinking informs almost every aspect of artistic creation, of civil action, of interpersonal life. With penetrating insight and warm humor, Scott shows that while individual critics--himself included--can make mistakes and find flaws where they shouldn't, criticism as a discipline is one of the noblest, most creative, and urgent activities of modern existence. Using his own film criticism as a starting point--everything from his infamous dismissal of the international blockbuster The Avengers to his intense affection for Pixar's animated Ratatouille--Scott expands outward, easily guiding readers through the complexities of Rilke and Shelley, the origins of Chuck Berry and the Rolling Stones, the power of Marina Abramovich and 'Ode on a Grecian Urn.' Drawing on the long tradition of criticism from Aristotle to Susan Sontag, Scott shows that real criticism was and always will be the breath of fresh air that allows true creativity to thrive. "The time for criticism is always now," Scott explains, "because the imperative to think clearly, to insist on the necessary balance of reason and passion, never goes away."