Our Movies series enters the 21st century with this definitive lineup of the 100 most important films made during the 2000s, an age of evergreen franchises, historical epics, and comic-book superheroes, as well as fast-evolving CGI aesthetics, low-key...

Kenneth Turan brings to life the extraordinary partnership of Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg and their role in creating the film industry as we know it "Sharply observant."--Farran Smith Nehme, Wall Street Journal A New Yorker Best Book of the Year...

From one of cinema’s wisest and most penetrating observers, an arresting new perspective on the sweep of film history.David Thomson has been called “the greatest living writer on the movies.” Here is a career capstone of sorts—a one-volume history of...

Getting Murdoched explores the power the Murdoch Empire exercises over those who disagree; it is the first-ever global assessment of News Corp's bullying tactics. For decades, Rupert Murdoch’s global media empire has shaped political landscapes,...

Tony Conrad is exemplary of the 1960s artist who remains inassimilable to canonic histories. Creator of the “structural” film, The Flicker, collaborator on Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures and Normal Love, follower of Henry Flynt’s radical anti-art, member...

The last decade of the 20th century consolidated once again the fascinating power of the silver screen, both by looking to the future and drawing on the past. It's no exaggeration to say that never before had there been a time when the cinema focused so...

A spirited dive into the life and career of a performer, writer, and director who dominated twentieth-century American comedyMel Brooks, born Melvin Kaminsky in Brooklyn in 1926, is one of the great comic voices of the twentieth century. Having won...

From Amadeus to Aliens, Blue Velvet to Blade Runner, epic blockbusters to dark sci-fi: the great movies of the 1980s were experimental and excessive. This compendium has the 100 most influential and successful films from the decade of mullets and...

Horror films strive to make audiences scream, but they also garner plenty of laughs. In fact, there is a long tradition of horror directors who are fluent in humor, from James Whale to John Landis to Jordan Peele. So how might horror and humor overlap...

The 1970s has often been hailed as a great moment for American film, as a generation of “New Hollywood” directors like Scorsese, Coppola, and Altman offered idiosyncratic visions of what movies could be. Yet the auteurist discourse hailing these...

The long 1950s, which extend back to the early postwar period and forward into the early 1960s, were a period of “containment culture” in America, as the media worked to reinforce traditional family values and suspected communist sympathizers were...

Vivid images of the apocalypse proliferate throughout contemporary cinema, which pictures the death of civilization in wildly different ways. Some films imagine a future where humanity is wiped out entirely, while others envision humans as an endangered...

"This book explores the intersection of two topics and their impact on American culture. One is an idea: the American Dream, one of the most resonant -and controversial -themes of U.S. History. The other is a person: Martin Scorsese, a man widely...

Bollywood’s New Woman examines Bollywood’s construction and presentation of the Indian Woman since the 1990s. The groundbreaking collection illuminates the contexts and contours of this contemporary figure that has been identified in sociological and...

"History is a subject we all learn in school, some of us with more enthusiasm than others. But the way most of us know history-experience it, absorb it, apply its lessons to make sense of our everyday lives-is through popular culture. And no medium of...

Frederic Jameson and Film Theory is the first collection of its kind, it assesses and critically responds to Fredric Jameson’s remarkable contribution to film theory. The essays assembled explore key Jamesonian concepts—such as totality, national...

Ingrid Bergman. Audrey Hepburn. Elizabeth Taylor. Jane Fonda. Meryl Streep. The list of women who have won the coveted and legendary Academy Award for Best Actress is long and varied. Through this illustrious roster we can trace the history of women in...

"Exploring a crucial yet critically underappreciated trope of horror-the haunted house-Haunted Homes illuminates the ways in which it has come to signify the anxieties, traumas, and terrors of suburban American life. Surprisingly comprehensive and...

One of the silver screen’s greatest beauties, Greta Garbo was also one of its most profound enigmas. A star in both silent pictures and talkies, Garbo kept viewers riveted with understated performances that suggested deep melancholy and strong desires...

"With the release of each new musical film, critics ask, "Has the musical returned?" The very frequency of the question would seem to belie its implication. Indeed, while musicals have changed over time, they have never truly gone away. This point...