Essay Film

A playfully critical journey through the Coen brothers' filmography From such cult hits as Raising Arizona (1987) and The Big Lebowski (1998) to major critical darlings Fargo (1996), No Country for Old Men (2007), and Inside Llewyn Davis (2013), Ethan and Joel Coen have cultivated a bleakly...

From the New York Times bestselling author of How to Read Literature Like a Professor comes an indispensable analysis of our most celebrated medium, film. No art form is as instantly and continuously gratifying as film. When the house lights go down and the lion roars, we settle in to be shocked...

Brought to you by Penguin. Crafted over twenty-five years, I Want to Talk to You invites you into a conversation about literature, art and music, identity, grief and everything in between As a young journalist, Diana Evans was catapulted overnight into the role of culture editor, going on to...

A Best Literary Novel of 2025 from ELLE A searing debut novel of envy, longing, and regret across three lives and two countries that asks how far we’ll go for a friendship, a romance, a dream. Ye Lian is thriving in Beijing. She has a well-paid job, a nice boyfriend, and plans to marry and...

A mob boss in therapy. An experimental, violent prison unit. The death of an American city, as seen through a complex police investigation. A lawless frontier town trying to talk its way into the United States. A corrupt cop who rules his precinct like a warlord. The survivors of a plane crash...

Mr. Show fans rejoice! After all these years, Bob and David are finally back together with a collection of hilarious, never-before-seen scripts, sketches, and ideas that may have just been too good for Hollywood. Bob Odenkirk and David Cross, creators of HBO's classic sketch comedy show Mr. Show...

This eBook contains two essays on film: "On Viewing Hans Richter's Rhythmus 21": the search for cinematic meaning in one of the most famous early German avant-garde films. "The Perfect Filmic Appositiveness of Jack Smith": impressions of the films of one of cinema's most eccentric auteurs.

Filmmaker Errol Morris contemplates the lengths people may go to uncover--or deny--the facts in "There Is Such a Thing as Truth," his contribution to NPR's This I Believe series. This I Believe is a National Public Radio program that features Americans, from the famous to the unknown, completing...

Firebrand NY Times columnist and bestselling author Lindy West unpacks the beloved rom-coms and cult classics we love in order to dissect the culture we've created. Lindy West was once the in-house movie critic for Seattle's alternative newsweekly The Stranger, where she covered film with brutal...

Continuing the pitch-perfect critiques begun in The Great Movies, Roger Ebert's The Great Movies II collects 100 additional essays, each one of them a gem of critical appreciation and an amalgam of love, analysis, and history that will send readers back to films with a fresh set of eyes and...

America’s most trusted and best-known film critic Roger Ebert presents two hundred brilliant essays on some of the best movies ever made in this two-book collection containing THE GREAT MOVIES and THE GREAT MOVIES II. Roger Ebert, the famed film writer and critic, wrote biweekly essays for a...

America’s most trusted and best-known film critic Roger Ebert presents one hundred brilliant essays on some of the best movies ever made. Roger Ebert, the famed film writer and critic, wrote biweekly essays for a feature called "The Great Movies," in which he offered a fresh and fervent...

When Jagat Murari, a young film student in post-war America, finds himself at the feet of one of cinema’s true giants – Orson Welles – during the making of Macbeth in 1947, the lessons he absorbs on that set will shape not only his future, but also the future of Indian cinema. Returning to...

For film buffs and literature lovers alike, Turner Classic Movies presents an essential guide to 40 cinema classics and the enduring love stories that served as their heart-tugging inspiration. What makes a good love story endure? Is it the courtship? The obstacles along the way? The happy...

#31Days features 65 essays and reviews covering everything from Don Coscarelli's Phantasm series to the anthology horror show Masters of Horror. This nonfiction collection follows the spirit of Sketching Details, Robert's long-running entertainment media criticism website. Horror deserves the same level of respect and analysis as any other genre.

How do you become a television writer? What does it take to create your own show? Did the writers of Lost really have a plan, or were they making it all up as they went? In a career spanning far longer than he cares to admit, Javier Grillo-Marxuach has not only written for some of your favorite (and not-so-favorite) shows.

Both men and women enjoy thrillers, mystery, and crime. Yet it may still feel not quite respectable, somehow a guilty (sorry!) pleasure. Do these novels so often categorized as genre offer something the literary novel does not? The market is enormous, perhaps the largest in publishing. It is a cliché which may be true that only the Bible – say - outsells Agatha Christie. And then there are films and television, either original or adapted from novels.

In this follow-up to his first collection of essays - Shoot This One - television writer and producer Javier Grillo-Marxuach continues to overshare about his misadventures in the small screen to a degree that will make you fear for his future employment. The essays in Shoot That One offer both a tantalizing glimpse into the inner circles of the entertainment industry, as well a management lesson disguised as a juicy tell-all.