Film history, theory or criticism

Agatha Christie’s Complete Secret Notebooks brings together for the first time Secret Notebooks and Murder in the Making, two volumes that explore the fascinating contents of her 73 notebooks. This includes illustrations, deleted extracts, unused ideas,...

A sweeping, mesmerising novel of the most enduring and evocative cultural icon of the 20th century. Joyce Carol Oates’ masterpiece is a brilliant and deeply moving portrait of a culture hypnotised by its own myths and the shattering reality of the...

A behind-the-scenes guide to the National Trust locations in some of the most iconic film and TV moments. Fully updated to include the latest dramas such as Bridgerton, The Pursuit of Love and Operation Mincemeat. Ranging from lavish costume dramas such...

Celebrate the 25th anniversary of The Sopranos with this definitive and intimate portrait of one of the most groundbreaking television shows ever made.The Sopranos is widely regarded as one of the greatest television shows of all time. Now, in honor of...

From a veteran culture writer and modern movie expert, a celebration and analysis of the movies of 1999—“a terrifically fun snapshot of American film culture on the brink of the Millennium….An absolute must for any movie-lover or pop-culture nut”...

Siegfried Kracauer has been misunderstood as a naive realist, appreciated as an astute critic of early German film, and noticed as the interesting exile who exchanged letters with Erwin Panofsky. But he is most widely thought of as the odd uncle of famed...

From the very beginning, filmmakers have struggled to free themselves from censorship and manipulation by special-interest groups, and this struggle is clearly evident in the history of drug films. Cocaine Fiends and Reefer Madness is an exhaustive...

"At a time when criticsare expected to be publicists, and anything famous is 'classic' or 'iconic,'Carlos Acevedo has managed to hold the line. The Devil Inside is asharp, hard-nosed aesthetic and cultural investigation into what everybody wasthrowing up...

A cultural history of the enduring relationship between film spectatorship and intoxicating substancesMovies under the Influence charts the entangled histories of moviegoing and mind-altering substances from early cinema through the psychedelic 1970s...

Philip K. Dick struggled to make a living during his lifetime, but his work has since served as a deep seam of ideas to be mined by filmmakers such as Ridley Scott, Paul Verhoeven, Steven Spielberg, John Woo and Richard Linklater, resulting in some of...

How the creative use of pop music in film-think Saturday Night Fever or Apocalypse Now-has shaped and shifted music history since the 1960s Quick: What movie do you think of when you hear "The Sounds of Silence"? Better yet, what song comes to mind when...

SPACE. THE FINAL FRONTIER. THESE WERE ALMOST THE VOYAGES OF THE STARSHIP ENTERPRISE.We think we know the history of Star Trek. Born at the height of 1960s popular culture, the five-year mission of Captain James T. Kirk and his crew faced early...

Straight from the cutting room floor of The Nacelle Company's hit documentary series on The History Channel comes The Center Seat companion book, full of content that almost made it in! From the complete and uncut Leonard Nimoy interview that is widely...

How a legendary woman from classical antiquity has come to embody the threat of transcendent beauty in movies and TV.Helen of Troy in Hollywood examines the figure of the mythic Helen in film and television, showing how storytellers from different...

Official retrospective hardback book telling the story of the making of Conan The Barbarian, including interviews with cast and crew and featuring behind-the-scenes photography from the shoot.In 1982, Robert E. Howard's iconic literary...

This unique collection focuses on the work of legendary Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman. Written in the wake of the centenary of Bergman's birth in 2018, the volume aims to combine new approaches to Bergman's films and writings with...

David Lynch has been accused for decades of sexism and even misogyny in his work, due largely to frequent depictions of violence against women. Yet others see in Lynch's work the deification of the female, and actresses like Laura Dern and Naomi Watts...

How did a low-budget British movie about Londoners battling zombies in a pub become a beloved global pop culture phenomenon?You've Got Red on You, the horror-comedy whose fan base continues to grow and grow. The book reveals how a group of friends...

In Stepford Daughters, Johanna Isaacson explores an emerging wave of horror films that get why class horror and gender horror must be understood together.In doing so, Isaacson makes the case that this often-maligned genre is in fact a place where...

The story of an American businessman sent to buy the Scottish village of Ferness with the aim of turning it into an oil refinery, Local Hero is one of Scotland's most beloved, and most misunderstood, films.When Bill Forsyth's incredible success with the...

Scotland's greatest export. The world's first super spy. Voted the sexiest man on the planet.Sir Sean Connery was a titanic figure on screen and off for over half a century.Behind the son of a factory worker, growing up in near-poverty on the harsh...

Writer, producer, and director Wes Craven has successfully tapped into the horror vein for over forty years, serving up scary, funny, cutting-edge thrillers that have become classics in the genre. His films have been both critical and commercial...

The 1980s. A time of fear: fear of the unknown, fear of your neighbours, fear of drugs, fear of sex, fear of strangers, fear of videos, and the very real fear that the world would end at any moment in an awful, and very sudden, nuclear attack.However, in...

The definitive account of the motion picture phenomenon, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial: The Ultimate Visual History is a must-have for fans of the beloved Steven Spielberg classic.Documenting the complete history of E.T., the book explores Spielberg's...

Werner Herzog came to fame in the 1970s as the European new wave explored new cinematic ideas. With films like Signs of Life (1968), Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974) and Fitzcarraldo (1982), Herzog became the subject...

This remarkable journey through the Hammer vault includes props, annotated script pages, unused poster artwork, production designs, rare promotional material and private correspondence.Hundreds of rare and previously unseen stills help to create a rich...

Ripped from the pages of Empire magazine, the first collection of film critic, film historian and novelist Kim Newman's reviews of the best and worst B movies.Some of the cheapest, trashiest, goriest and, occasionally, unexpectedly good films from the...

In 1990, David Lynch was on top of the world. Wild at Heart won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival and Twin Peaks was the hottest show on TV. In 1992, he released Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. It sure is amazing how fast coffee can get cold. The...

Hailed as possibly the most comprehensive oral history of Superman to be committed to print, Voices From Krypton combines over 85 years of Superman's legacy into a sweeping tale of how the champion of the oppressed became one of the world's most...

There are certain movies that should be watched on certain days or at certain times of the year, right? Obviously Christmas movies should be watched at Christmastime and perhaps a romantic film on Valentine's Day, but what about the other 350 or so days...

Super 8 is a coffee table art book showcasing the history of Super 8 filmmaking. In addition to featuring stunning photography documenting the sleek mid-century design of Super 8 cameras and projectors, the book also offers a detailed history of the...

9 to 5 wasn't just a comic film - it was a movement built by Ellen Cassedy and her friends.Ten office workers in Boston started out sitting in a circle and sharing the problems they encountered on the job. In a few short years, they had built a...

Featuring dozens of interviews with the cast and crew, fans of the franchise, film scholars, former and current cheerleaders, fellow filmmakers, and more.Gabrielle Union, Kirsten Dunst, and Eliza Dushku have all risen to fame since their performances in...

The shocking and significant story of how the White House and Pentagon scuttled an epic Hollywood productionSoon after atomic bombs exploded over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, MGM set out to make a movie studio chief Louis B. Mayer called 'the most...

An informal yet informed journey through the classic works of Japanese cinema and their directors.This is a passionate, personal journey through one of the world's greatest national cinemas, beginning with the classic directors who came to the fore in...

Named a Best Book of the Year by Financial Times"Singular, stylish and slightly intoxicating in its scope." Rolling StoneAcclaimed media critic J. Hoberman's masterful and majestic exploration of the Reagan years as seen through the unforgettable movies...

A Queer Film Classic on IshmaelBernal's 1980 film that follows a dozencharacters, all denizens of Manila's sordid yet exuberant underworld, as theypursue life, love, and pleasure. Bernal cited Robert Altman's Nashville as one of the influences onhis...

Reception studies have made film audiences increasingly visible, while surveys track trends and policymakers gather information about audience preferences and demographics. But little attention has been paid to the specific contextual relationships and...

This book examines issues of censorship, publicity and teenage fandom in 1950s Britain surrounding a series of controversial Hollywood films: The Wild One, Blackboard Jungle, Rebel Without a Cause, Rock Around the Clock and Jailhouse Rock. It also...

Despite the steady rise in adaptations of Samuel Beckett's work across the world following the author's death in 1989, Beckett's afterlives is the first book-length study dedicated to this creative phenomenon. The collection employs interrelated concepts...

Decades before the emergence of a French self-styled 'hood' film around 1995, French filmmakers looked beyond the gates of the capital for inspiration and content. In the Paris suburbs they found an inexhaustible reservoir of forms, landscapes and social...

This is a book for all those who have been absorbed and moved by Brief Encounter in the seventy or so years since its first appearance. It explores the central relationship of the film, where two people who fall unexpectedly in love come to realise that...

In a world defined by the flow of people, goods and cultures, many contemporary French films explore the multicultural nature of today's France through language. From rival lingua francas such as English to socio-politically marginalised languages such...

Chic, sophisticated, seductive and enigmatic, the Parisienne possesses a je ne sais quoi that makes her difficult to define. But who or what is the Parisienne, and how is she depicted in cinema? The first book-length study on the subject combines...

This topical and innovative study is the first book on Algerian cinema to be published in English since the 1970s. At a time when North African and Islamic cultures are of increasing political significance, Algerian National Cinema presents a dynamic,...

A tour de force chronicling the development of realism in Chinese cinemaThe history of Chinese cinema is as long and complicated as the tumultuous history of China itself. Be it the silent, the Communist, or the contemporary, each Chinese cinematic era...

Revealing cinema's place in the coevolution of media technology and the humanCinema did not die with the digital, it gave rise to it. According to Jeffrey West Kirkwood, the notion that digital technologies replaced analog obscures how the earliest...