Everything Is Cinema
The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard
Richard Brody
Metropolitan Books: 702 pp., $40
DEEPLY researched, conscientiously written, careful to contextualize its subject both in his field and in the larger culture that shaped his work, “Everything Is Cinema” is in almost every respect an admirable biography, exactly the sort of scrupulous and passionate work significant movie figures deserve and almost never receive.
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10 Bad Dates With De Niro
A Book of Alternative Movie Lists
Edited by Richard
T. Kelly
Overlook/Rookery: 460 pp., $29.95
MOVIE geeks are list-making animals.
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Cecil
B. DeMille
A Life in Art
Simon Louvish
Thomas Dunne Books/St.
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It probably began with Mack Sennett.
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A few years ago, I vowed never again to read, let alone review,
another movie history that begins with accounts of the Praxinoscope,
the Kinetoscope, the Mutoscope and all those other toys for grown-ups
that constitute the prehistory of the motion picture.
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Dali
& Film Edited by Matthew Gale Tate Publishing: 238 pp., $60 paper
IN the winter of 1929, two young Spaniards, Luis Bunel and
Salvador Dali, spent several weeks together hammering out the
screenplay for the short film eventually titled “Un chien andalou,”
which Bunel then shot and which had a riotous premiere in Paris in
June of that year.
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An exhibition at a New York museum celebrating the Abraham Lincoln Brigade – a band of left-wing, largely communist American volunteers who fought against Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War about 70 years ago – is criticized by anti-Stalinist historians for its hagiographic bias.
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The deaths on the same day of two masters of world cinema, Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni, naturally prompt gloomy end-of-an-era reflections – particularly in the case of the former, who, though he had largely ceased to direct movies, continued to write screenplays (“Faithless,” “Sunday’s Children,” “The Best Intentions”) that I think are among his best work.
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The Secret Servant A Novel Daniel Silva Putnam: 386 pp., $25.95
DANIEL SILVA is a craftsmanlike writer of international thrillers.
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I
DON’T
KNOW if “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix” is a good
movie or not – I haven’t seen it.
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