Pauline Kael, Andrew Sarris, and Roger Ebert were three of America's most revered and widely read film critics, more famous than many of the movies they wrote about. But their remarkable contributions to the burgeoning American film criticism of the...

Matthew Weiner's Emmy-winning series "Mad Men" has earned wide critical acclaim in its seven seasons. What is it about these impeccably dressed men and women of midcentury Madison Avenue that fascinates us? Decades later, when Weiner's iconic charact...

On July 9, 1975, Dutch-born artist Bas Jan Ader set sail from Chatham, Massachusetts, on a thirteen-foot sailboat. He was bound for Falmouth, England, on the second leg of a three-part piece titled "In Search of the Miraculous". The damaged boat was...

The recent uproar over NSA surveillance can obscure the fact that surveillance has been an indelible part of contemporary life for decades. And cinema has long been aware of its power – and potential for abuse. In "Closed Circuits", Garrett Stewart...

One of the most important avant-garde movements in postwar Paris was Lettrism, which built an interest in the relations between writing and image in poetry, painting, and especially cinema. Highly influential, the Lettrists served as a bridge between...

Although Woody Allen's films have received extensive attention from scholars and critics, no book has focused exclusively on Jewishness in his work, particularly that of the late 1990s and beyond. In this anthology, a distinguished group of contribut...

In the middle of the eighteenth century, something new made itself felt in European culture – a tone or style that came to be called the sentimental. The sentimental mode went on to shape not just literature, art, music, and cinema, but people's very...

This superb collection of essays illuminates the film portrayal of violence, masculinity, and power in a postcolonial context, showing how the cinema challenges, normalizes, or contests these major issues. Taking an interdisciplinary and comparative...

Berlin-based artist Matt Saunders has in recent years captured the art world's eye with a striking series of hybrid images and animated films produced using techniques from both photography and painting. Using movie stars such as German actress Herth...

Bollywood movies have been long known for their colorful song-and-dance numbers and knack for combining drama, comedy, action-adventure, and music. But when India entered the global marketplace in the early 1990s, its film industry transformed radica...