Category: Film Criticism

By Melvyn Stokes

From Amazon: "Charles Vidor's vintage noir movie Gilda has interested audiences and critics when you consider that its free up in 1946. Set in Argentina on the finish of worldwide conflict II, the movie stars Rita Hayworth in her best-remembered position, because the feisty and seductive name personality, Gilda, stuck in a love triangle among difficult on line casino proprietor Ballin Mundson (George Macready) gambler Johnny Farrell (Glenn Ford). Gilda's luck had a lasting effect on Hayworth's occupation and her famous person personality: 'Put the Blame on Mame', the music she plays within the movie, used to be a best-selling tune of 1946, and the atomic bomb demonstrated on Bikini atoll on 1 July 1946 was once named 'Gilda' and had an image of Hayworth at the aspect. Such used to be her id with the function, Hayworth later complained, that 'men went to mattress with Gilda and awakened with me'. Melvyn Stokes's learn of the movie offers an in-depth account of its creation historical past, together with makes an attempt at censorship through the construction Code management. He additionally analyses the film's characterisation and narrative, cinematography, formal units similar to using a voiceover narrator, mise en scène and preoccupation with sexual perversity. Stokes locations Hayworth's functionality within the identify position within the context of her movie profession and superstar personality, targeting her complex ethnic id as she developed from being brunette 'Spanish/Latin American' dancer Margarita Carmen Cansino into the auburn-haired celebrity 'Rita Hayworth'. Stokes addresses the film's political context – its atmosphere in an Argentina that had entered the conflict at the Allied facet, with a sub-plot related to Nazi skulduggery, and the level to which the movie answered to and mirrored social issues approximately family members among women and men, lady sexuality and masculine identities that have been remodeled by means of the dislocations of wartime and the anxieties of the speedy post-war interval. Stokes's illuminating account of the movie encompasses a dialogue of its reception historical past, and its significance for film-makers, critics and students in addition to its audiences. MELVYN STOKES teaches movie background and American historical past at college collage London. He has written and edited twelve books, together with D.W. Griffith's 'The start of a Nation': A background of 'the such a lot debatable movie of All Time' (2007). he's at the moment President of SERCIA, the eu movie organization."

By Greg Taylor

Gone with the Wind an concept for the yankee avant-garde? Mickey Mouse a vital resource for the advance of state-of-the-art highbrow and aesthetic principles? As Greg Taylor indicates during this witty and provocative ebook, the assumption isn't so far-fetched. one of many first-ever reports of yank movie feedback, Artists within the Audience indicates that movie critics, starting within the Forties, grew to become to the films as uncooked fabric to be molded right into a extra radical modernism than that provided through the other modern artists or thinkers. In doing so, they provided readers a forefront replacement that reshaped postwar American tradition: nonaesthetic mass tradition reconceived and refashioned into wealthy, individually suitable paintings via the attuned, artistic spectator.

Revised and up to date edition

A groundbreaking e-book that dissects a slanderous heritage relationship from cinema's earliest days to modern Hollywood blockbusters that characteristic machine-gun wielding and bomb-blowing "evil" Arabs

Award-winning movie authority Jack G. Shaheen, noting that purely local american citizens were extra relentlessly smeared at the silver reveal, painstakingly makes his case that "Arab" has remained Hollywood's shameless shorthand for "bad guy," lengthy after the motion picture has shifted its portrayal of alternative minority teams. during this complete research of over 1000 movies, prepared alphabetically in such chapters as "Villains," "Sheikhs," "Cameos," and "Cliffhangers," Shaheen records the tendency to painting Muslim Arabs as Public Enemy #1--brutal, heartless, uncivilized Others bent on terrorizing civilized Westerners.

Shaheen examines how and why the sort of stereotype has grown and unfold within the movie and what might be performed to alter Hollywood's defamation of Arabs.

By Peter Wollen

40 Years after it first seemed, Singin' within the Rain is still the most effective enjoyed movies ever made. but regardless of marvelous good fortune with the general public, it by no means acquired its fair proportion of compliment from the critics. Gene Kelly's genius as a performer is there for all to work out. what's much less said is his innovatory contribution as director. Peter Wollen has ultimately performed justice to this landmark movie. In a super shot-by-shot research of the well-known identify quantity, illustrated by way of particularly produced body stills, he exhibits how skillfully Kelly binds the dance and musical components into the narrative, and the way he effectively combines specified traditions inside American Dance, faucet and ballet.
Scriptwriters Betty Comden and Adolph eco-friendly, and certainly Kelly himself, have been all below possibility from the McCarthyism which menaced Hollywood at the present. The ethos within which the movie was once conceived couldn't lengthy live on within the period of blacklisting. Wollen argues convincingly that Singin' within the Rain was once the excessive element within the careers of these who labored on it.

By Danny Peary

By Simon Callow

By Ryan Gilby

From Amazon: "It is changing into clearer and clearer that Groundhog Day (1993), directed through Harold Ramis, is without doubt one of the masterpieces of Nineteen Nineties Hollywood cinema. one of many first motion pictures to exploit a science-fiction premise because the foundation for romantic comedy, it tells the tale of a splenetic television weatherman, Phil Connors (Bill Murray at his disreputable best), who reveals himself indefinitely repeating one drab day in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. The movie is a deeply ambivalent fantasy: prior to he reveals redemption Phil needs to plumb the depths of suicidal despair--and even after he has survived this, there are not any promises that he'll reside fortunately ever after. Ryan Gilbey starts his account of Groundhog Day with the lengthy and unfortunate gestation of the script by means of Danny Rubin, who used to be interviewed for this publication. Gilbey celebrates the encouraged casting of Murray, Andie MacDowell, and no more famous actors comparable to Stephen Tobolowsky. In a refined research, he unpacks the film's amazing mixture of humor and depression, revealing Groundhog Day to be a unprecedented beast--a mainstream Hollywood comedy that grows richer with every one repeat viewing. Ryan Gilbey writes on movie for the self reliant, the mum or dad, and Sight and Sound and is writer of It Don't fear Me (2004)."

By Charles Barr

By Catherine Lupton