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The best film books, by 51 critics

Which are the most inspirational five books about film ever written? This was the question we asked 51 leading critics and writers, and their answers are printed here in full.

☞ Read Nick James’ introduction ☞ See the top five

• Sight & Sound reviews the latest film books every month.

Peter Biskind , Michael Chanan , Ian Christie , Michel Ciment , Paul Cronin , Richard Dyer , Olaf Möller , Christoph Huber , Lizzie Francke , Philip French , Chris Fujiwara , Charlotte Garson , Tom Gunning , Philip Horne , Kevin Jackson , Kent Jones , Richard T. Kelly , Mark Le Fanu , Toby Litt , Brian McFarlane , Luke McKernan , Geoffrey Macnab , Peter Matthews , Geoffrey Nowell-Smith , Michael O’Pray , John Orr , Jonathan Rosenbaum , Sukhdev Sandhu , Jasper Sharp , Iain Sinclair , David Thompson , Kenneth Turan , Armond White Updated: 8 May 2020

This is an unabridged version of the Film Book poll published in the June 2010 issue of Sight & Sound

Jean-Pierre Melville

Index of contributors

Geoff Andrew Michael Atkinson Peter Biskind Edward Buscombe Michael Chanan Tom Charity Michel Ciment Kieron Corless Mark Cousins Paul Cronin Chris Darke Maria Delgado Geoff Dyer The Ferroni Brigade Lizzie Francke Philip French Chris Fujiwara Graham Fuller Charlotte Garson Tom Gunning Philip Horne Kevin Jackson Nick James Kent Jones Richard T. Kelly Mark Le Fanu Toby Litt Brian McFarlane Luke McKernan Geoffrey Macnab Adrian Martin Peter Matthews Sophie Mayer Henry K. Miller Kim Newman Geoffrey Nowell-Smith Michael O’Pray John Orr Tim Robey Nick Roddick Jonathan Romney Jonathan Rosenbaum Sukhdev Sandhu Jasper Sharp Iain Sinclair David Thompson David Thomson Kenneth Turan Catherine Wheatley Armond White

Geoff Andrew

Head of film programme, BFI Southbank, UK

Note : Publication dates are for first edition only, except where specified. However, votes for a particular title are collected together no matter what the edition (with the exception of Geoff Dyer’s voting for all five editions of David Thomson’s A Biographical Dictionary of Film).

Signs and Meaning in the Cinema Peter Wollen, Secker & Warburg, 1969

A Biographical Dictionary of Film David Thomson, Secker & Warburg, 1975

Hitchcock’s Films Robin Wood, A.S. Barnes & Co, 1965

The Making of Citizen Kane Robert L. Carringer, University of California Press, 1985

Mamoulian Tom Milne, Thames & Hudson, 1969

Michael Atkinson

Critic, USA

The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968 Andrew Sarris, Doubleday, 1968

A Biographical Dictionary of Film David Thomson

Vulgar Modernism J. Hoberman, Temple University Press, 1991

Agee on Film: Reviews and Comments James Agee, McDowell, Obolensky, 1958

Magic and Myth of the Movies Parker Tyler, Simon & Schuster, 1970

PLUS: Cahiers du cinéma: The 1950s Edited By Jim Hillier Confessions of a Cultist   Andrew Sarris The Phantom Empire   Geoffrey O’Brien Durgnat on Film   Raymond Durgnat Science Fiction Movies   Philip Strick The Hollywood Hallucination   Parker Tyler Negative Space: Manny Farber on the Movies   Manny Farber The Shadow of an Airplane Climbs the Empire State Building   Parker Tyler Film as a Subversive Art   Amos Vogel Dictionary of Films   Georges Sadoul Cinema: A Critical Dictionary Edited By Richard Roud On the History of Film Style   David Bordwell City of Nets   Otto Friedrich Visionary Film   P. Adams Sitney Hitchcock   François Truffaut Who the Devil Made It   Peter Bogdanovich Signs and Meaning in the Cinema   Peter Wollen

Peter Biskind

Author/critic, USA

The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era Thomas Schatz, Pantheon Books, 1988

I Lost It At the Movies Pauline Kael, Little, Brown, 1965

Final Cut Steven Bach, William Morrow, 1985

Indecent Exposure David McClintick, William Morrow, 1982

A Life Elia Kazan, Alfred A. Knopf, 1988

↑  Back to contributors’ list

Edward Buscombe

Signs and Meaning in the Cinema Peter Wollen

The founding work of so-called Screen theory – which is where I came in, although it has now left me behind, or me it – is still a pretty enjoyable read today. Back in 1969 when it was first published, it was, like Martin Peters, ten years ahead of its time.

Hitchcock’s Films Robin Wood

Its opening sentence – “Why should we take Hitchcock seriously?” – strikes just the right note of courteous provocation in its determination to reorient our view of popular cinema. Although I disagree with much of it, Wood always demands to be taken seriously.

The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968 Andrew Sarris

The Bible of the dedicated cinephile when it was first published in 1968, and still an invaluable route map of what needs to be seen.

Horizons West: Studies in Authorship in the Western Jim Kitses, Thames & Hudson, 1969

Here I have to declare an interest, in both senses: an enduring love of the Western, and a role in editing the much-expanded second edition of 2004. The best book of criticism bar none on the most important film genre.

The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era Thomas Schatz

First published in 1988, and thus the only one of my choices not first published in the 1960s (showing my age). A marvellously subtle and informative account of the way the Hollywood film industry worked in its heyday and a book I wish I’d been able to write myself.

Michael Chanan

Academic, UK

The Technique of Film Editing Karel Reisz and Gavin Millar, Focal Press, 1953

This is the book that taught me about film language – not just the nuts and bolts of how it works, but the aesthetics. But I forgot that I’d read it (as an undergraduate, when I was first thinking of making films) until many years later, when I first started teaching film and rediscovered it. Now I recommend it to all my students, whether they’re interested in practice or theory.

The World Viewed Stanley Cavell, Viking, 1971

A book I found so captivating I devoured it in a single night. As a postgrad studying aesthetics, I was enthralled to find an English-language philosopher who understood cinema! At the end I felt it had said practically everything it needed to say. An exaggeration, of course, but for a while I was convinced.

The Camera and I Joris Ivens, International Publishers, 1969

Like all autobiographies, Ivens’ leaves certain things out, but it’s a great testimony to political commitment and full of wisdom about the nature of documentary, which Ivens calls “a creative no-man’s land”. Very inspiring.

Hitchcock François Truffaut, Simon & Schuster, 1967

I enjoyed this immensely, though largely because it seemed to me to explain why I didn’t really care much for Hitchcock.

Histoire économique du cinéma Pierre Bachlin, La Nouvelle Edition, 1947

I found this browsing for second-hand film books in Paris at the very moment I was first trying to figure out how the film industry worked. Bachlin was a Marxist, and this was the first rigorous analysis of the industry I’d discovered that made real sense to me. It seems symptomatic that the book has never been translated into English – neither has the film writing of the Italian Marxist Umberto Barbaro (which I read in the translation published in Cuba by the ICAIC).

Tom Charity

Lovefilm and CNN.com, Canada

Hitchcock François Truffaut

These were the most inspirational books to me as a film student (as was Truffaut’s The Films in My Life). If the first edition of Robin Wood’s study hadn’t been so seminal for me, I would now choose Hitchcock’s Films Revisited, because it shows how critical engagement is a lifetime’s process, always evolving as we mature. The Hitchcock interview book has probably inspired more film books than any other, including, I assume, the entire Faber ‘Directors on Directors’ series.

This is Orson Welles Orson Welles and Peter Bogdanovich, edited by Jonathan Rosenbaum, HarperPerennial, 1992

This is probably my favourite of the many books on Welles.

John Ford: The Man and His Films Tag Gallagher, University of California Press, 1986

Substantially revised in 2007 and made available for free download, this is exemplary film criticism, a book Ford would have delighted in deriding yet kept close by his bed, I’m sure.

But let’s have the original 1975 edition, when it was really something.

Ian Christie

Professor of Film History, Birkbeck, UK

Frank Kermode defined the ‘classic’ in literature as a work that can be endlessly re-interpreted, according to the needs and interests of successive generations. These are the books that I find myself returning to again and again, usually finding new information and insights that I hadn’t previously noticed.

Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Cinema Jay Leyda, Allen & Unwin, 1960

Surely one of the greatest books about a national cinema ever written? Leyda spent several years in the USSR in the mid-30s, studying at the world’s first film school, and assisting Eisenstein on his eventually banned film, Bezhin Meadow. And those ‘witnessed years’, as he calls them, are the fulcrum of the book. But the whole sweep of Russian cinema up to the years just after Stalin’s death are vividly chronicled by Leyda. We may know much more today about what really happened, but Leyda’s judgements were shrewd and his sheer enthusiasm is still infectious.

The book that every young film snob carried around or even memorised in the early 70s – just in case you might catch a rare Edgar Ulmer B movie in a rep cinema (yes, that’s how we saw films maudits in those days). Sarris’ classification of directors on different levels – from the ‘Pantheon’ to ‘Lightly Likeable’, via ‘Expressive Esoterica’ and ‘Less than Meets the Eye’ is imprinted on my attitude to American cinema, and I still have to argue in my head with Sarris’ unforgettably snappy put-downs. Sarris was far more influential than Chabrol, Truffaut and co., I’m sure, in shaping the British politique des auteurs.

What is Cinema? André Bazin, translated by Hugh Gray, University of California Press, 1967 (Volume 1) and 1971 (Volume 2)

This may be a poor translation of Bazin, inadequately edited, but it was my generation’s first contact with cinema’s greatest post-war critic-philosopher and the godfather of the French New Wave. After first swallowing Bazin whole, I turned against his Catholic humanism, but I find myself returning to him almost every week to check something, to argue with him, and often to agree.

Circles of Confusion Hollis Frampton, Visual Studies Workshop, 1983

Frampton wasn’t just the high priest of ‘structural cinema’, with his cerebral but playful masterpieces, Zorns Lemma and (nostalgia), but a superb essayist on classic photography and on the ontology of film as “the last machine”. This long-unfindable book (now revived in a new edition) brings together essays that can stand alongside those of Borges, Barthes and just about anyone who helped shape it.

A Life in Movies Michael Powell, Heinemann, 1986

After years of professional disappointment, Michael Powell decided to write a passionate no-holds-barred autobiography that would tell the story of cinema as the 20th century’s folk art from the standpoint of one who had helped shape it. There’s still no film autobiography to match it for style, audacity and insight – and it deserves to be recognised as one of the 20th century’s great memoirs. Apart from conveying what it felt like to be at the top of the game (and sliding to the bottom in the second, equally fascinating volume, Million Dollar Movie), it also provides dozens of shrewd judgements on film-makers who are only now being discovered.

Five is not enough! It leaves no room to mention Ray Durgnat’s crucial book, A Mirror for England, that staked a claim for British cinema when few film enthusiasts in Britain cared; or Rachael Low’s pioneering seven-volume history of British cinema from the very beginning to, alas, only 1939, although Low is a treasure trove of discoveries still being made. Or Dan Talbot’s eclectic Film: An Anthology (1966), a stirring alternative to Ernest Lindgren and Paul Rotha, which first introduced me to writings by Manny Farber, Parker Tyler, Gilbert Seldes and Erwin Panofsky. Peter Wollen’s Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, as elegantly written as it was groundbreaking, made semiotics exciting and revealed the political and wider aesthetic context of film. And what about the writing that was never in book form when it was most influential? How many Xeroxes of Laura Mulvey’s ‘Visual Pleasure’ Screen article have I passed on, along with essays by P. Adams Sitney, Annette Michelson and many others, before film books became common?

Michel Ciment

Editor, Positif, France

What is Cinema? André Bazin

An anthology of the best French film critic of the 1940s and ’50s.

A groundbreaking interview book and a model of its kind.

A Life Elia Kazan

The best autobiography (with Bergman’s) of a theatre and film director.

Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood Todd McCarthy, Grove Press, 1997

A perfect example of the critical biography: informed, never complacent, analytical and with a superb knowledge of the industry background.

Viv(r)e le cinéma Roger Tailleur, Institut Lumière, 1997

Personal Views: Explorations in Film Robin Wood, Gordon Fraser, 1976

Two volumes of selected film criticism by two inspirational critics, from France and England respectively.

Kieron Corless

Deputy Editor, Sight & Sound

Abel Ferrara Nicole Brenez, University of Illinois Press, 2006

Poétique du cinématographe Eugène Green, Actes Sud, 2009

Notes on the Cinematographer Robert Bresson, Editions Gallimard, 1975

Fassbinder’s Germany Thomas Elsaesser, Amsterdam University Press, 1996

Negative Space: Manny Farber on the Movies Manny Farber, Da Capo Press, 1998 (expanded edition)

Mark Cousins

Critic and filmmaker, UK

Who the Devil Made It?: Conversations with Legendary Film Directors Peter Bogdanovich, Alfred A. Knopf, 1997

The Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema Edited By Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Paul Willemen, BFI, 1994

Notes on the Cinematographer Robert Bresson

Currents in Japanese Cinema Tadao Sato, Kodansha Int, 1982

Film Style and Technology: History and Analysis Barry Salt, Starword, 1983

Paul Cronin

Writer / filmmaker, UK

On Directing Film David Mamet, Viking, 1991

A beautiful, idiosyncratic articulation of the job of the film director. Eisenstein for the new millennium.

The Technique of Film Editing Karel Reisz and Gavin Millar

There is no better explanation of what it’s all about. Theory and practice intersect at craft.

My Life and My Films Jean Renoir, Collins, 1974

Autobiography and common sense.

Film: A Montage of Theories Edited Richard Dyer, MacCann, E.P. Dutton, 1966

A definition of film theory: anything written about the cinema.

Film as a Subversive Art Amos Vogel, Random House, 1974

Because he has spent the past 60 years opening up new worlds to us.

Chris Darke

The Republic Plato

Cinema was invented in the fourth century BC with the Myth of the Cave, a thought experiment illustrating the hard-won virtues of education via a parable of perception and knowledge. Socrates’ mise en scène depicts underground captives facing a wall on which the light of a fire casts lifelike shadows, which they mistake for reality. The question of whether we should believe our eyes (or any of our senses) is dramatised in a setting that uncannily predicts cinema. The Cave is the first work of film theory, and considerably more readable than most examples of the genre written since.

Illuminations Walter Benjamin, Suhrkamp Verlag, 1955

For ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1936), a jazz standard of an essay that writers have riffed on (and ripped off) ever since. Benjamin was one of the first people to grapple with the question of how art is transformed by technology, supposedly sacrificing ‘aura’ for accessibility. A modernist rapture over the possibilities of the film image – deathlessly described as “an orchid in the land of technology” – is palpable throughout.

In his clarity of expression and the way he develops theoretical ideas from specific examples, Bazin was a truly great writer on cinema. Two essays from the 1940s are irreplaceable, ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’ and ‘The Myth of Total Cinema’, both setting film in art’s longue durée. Should one want to get a handle on the thorny philosophical question of ‘faith’ in the image in the digital era, Bazin is the first go-to guy…

The Society of the Spectacle Guy Debord, Buchet-Chastel, 1967

…and Debord is the second. Platonic mistrust of mere appearances goes into late-1960s overdrive here, but Debord’s analysis remains astonishingly prescient given that the spectacle – described as “the other side of money” – is now the element we live in. And while cinema is inevitably compromised by its fundamental role in this state, it should be remembered that Debord was also a master of the found-footage film.

The Invention of Morel Adolfo Bioy Casares, Editorial Losada, 1940

There’s no shortage of novels deserving of a place on the shelf, including Shoot! Or the Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio by Luigi Pirandello (1916), pretty much everything by Don DeLillo, and Me, Cheeta by James Lever (2008). Three rules for great novels about film: 1) they needn’t be ‘great novels’; 2) they should concern themselves less with the intrigues of filmmaking than with cinema as a metaphor for the modern condition; 3) they must remain resolutely unfilmable. Which ought to rule out The Invention of Morel, the inspiration for Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad. Bioy Casares was a friend and collaborator of Borges, and his 1940 fantasy shares his quizzically metaphysical character and was inspired by the author’s Louise Brooks fixation. A fugitive finds his way to an unnamed island, discovers he has unexpected company, sees two suns rise, and observes how, with the aid of Dr Morel’s magical machine, space and time can be irretrievably altered. Borges called the plot “perfect” – if it was good enough for him, it’s good enough for me.

Maria Delgado

Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema Andrei Tarkovsky, The Bodley Head, 1986

Poetry as cinema, cinema as poetry. One of the best books on artistic endeavour and the craft of film-making. Just beautiful.

Out of the Past: Spanish Cinema After Franco John Hopewell, BFI, 1986

The first book to really explore what had happened to Spanish cinema post-Franco, rooting the argument in a discussion of how film-making had functioned under El Caudillo’s dictatorship. Still indispensable.

Letters François Truffaut, translated by Gilbert Adair, Faber & Faber, 1989

A funny, droll, incisive, idealistic and perceptive collection of letters to friends and collaborators, colleagues and film-makers he admired (and fell out with).

The Brechtian Aspect of Radical Cinema Martin Walsh, edited by Keith Griffiths, BFI, 1981

I picked it up as an undergrad and never looked back.

Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society Richard Dyer, BFI, 1986

The first edition was published in 1986 and changed the way I thought about film acting and stardom.

I would restrict my choice to the various editions (the fifth, I believe, is forthcoming) of David Thomson’s A Biographical Dictionary of Film. I’m sure some future scholar will produce an admirable thesis comparing the changes in – and evolution of – what has come to be, along with everything else, a vicarious and incremental autobiography. In that context, even Thomson’s diminishing interest in cinema – or current cinema at any rate – becomes a source of fascination. The Dictionary is not only an indispensable book about cinema, but one of the most absurdly ambitious literary achievements of our time. It deserves a shelf to itself.

The Ferroni Brigade aka Christoph Huber & Olaf Moller

Critics, Austria/Germany

Dictionnaire du cinéma Edited by Jacques Lourcelles, Laffont, 1993

The only general dictionary we trust: absolutely partisan while commendably catholic in its scope and taste – just check out the list of auteurs worth discussing more deeply at the very end of the second edition from 2003.

Lignes d’ombre: une autre histoire du cinéma soviétique (1926-1968) Edited by Bernard Eisenschitz, Edizioni Gabriele Mazzotta, 2000

Histoire du cinéma Naz i Francis Courtade and Pierre Cadars, Eric Losfeld/Éditions Le Terrain Vague, 1972

Two tomes that (should have, at least) changed the way we think about film history; two attempts to understand the (extra)ordinary in film cultures deemed totalitarian and therefore artistically irrelevant by our unquestioning middlebrow culture and its collaborators high and low.

Enciclopédia do Cinema Brasileiro Edited by Fernão Ramos and Luiz Felipe Miranda, Senac São Paulo, 2000

Anschluß an Morgen and Das tägliche Brennen Elisabeth Büttner and Christian Dewald, Residenz Verlag, 1997 and 2002

Two exemplary ways of making sense of a national film culture: the first is an encyclopedia that invites the seeker to find his or her own way through a labyrinth of myriad relationships; the second offers creative criss-cross readings of topoi and obsessions through various decades, genres and political systems. We consider these approaches preferable to the common and-then-and-then histories, as these are usually too industry-development-keyed – i.e. disinterested in spheres like documentary cinema, the avant garde, sponsored films, amateur praxis, etc, which we consider all equal in importance and interest.

Mauritz Stiller och hans filmer 1912-1916 Gösta Werner, Norstedt, 1969

Leo McCarey: sonrisas y lágrimas Miguel Marías, Nikel Odeon, 1999

The value of the late Gösta Werner’s work lies in its author’s age: he was old enough to have seen many a Stiller work now (considered) lost, meaning his memories are probably as close as we’ll ever get to these films. Marías’ McCarey monument is of interest and dear to us as an instance where the best analysis of an essential oeuvre was written and published in a language other than that of the auteur in question.

Soshun: Früher Frühling von Ozu Yasujiro Helmut Färber, Eigenverlag des Autors, 2006

Red Cars y David Cronenberg, Volumina, 2006

Put them in your apartment and feel the atmosphere change for the better. Soshun is the most outstanding piece of film analysis in decades – based on only the first few minutes of the subject’s work.

Zur Kritik des Politischen Films: 6 analysierende Beschreibungen und ein Vorwort “Über Filmkritik” Peter Nau, DuMont Buchverlag, 1978

Der lachende Mann: Bekenntnisse eines Mörders Walter Heynowski and Gerhard Scheumann, Verlag der Nation, 1966

Criticism and agitation, reflection and documentation, theory and praxis.

Lizzie Francke

Development Producer, UK Film Council, UK

On Film-making Alexander Mackendrick, Faber & Faber, 2004

The Cinema Book Edited by Pam Cook, BFI, 1985

Suspects David Thomson, Secker and Warburg, 1985

Philip French

Critic, Observer, UK

Film Roger Manvell, Pelican, 1944

There was only a handful of books on the cinema when I and my contemporaries (now aged 70+) became cinephiles after World War II: Paul Rotha’s seminal The Film Till Now (1930 and never updated by its author); Alistair Cooke’s lively anthology of criticism, Garbo and the Night Watchmen; several theoretical works (Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Spottiswoode, Balázs, Arnheim); some dull sociological studies; and Manvell’s Pelican paperback Film. First published in 1944 and constantly revised over the next decade, Manvell’s marvellous book covered all aspects of cinema and was the one book that all of us owned. Affordable, deeply serious, clearly written, it gave us our first filmographies, 15 frame blow-ups from Battleship Potemkin and a cinematic canon that we eagerly accepted and then rebelled against.

When this original paperback appeared in 1965, the first full-length study of Hitchcock in English, I wrote in my Observer review: “It is an important publication that sets an altogether new standard for critical books on the cinema in this country.” Revised and augmented several times (most recently in 1989), it remains unsurpassed and is the high-water mark of auteurist criticism, with Andrew Sarris’ taxonomic masterpiece The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968 a close runner-up.

The Parade’s Gone By Kevin Brownlow, Secker & Warburg, 1968

Few people have done so much to revive interest in silent cinema and none has written so well about it as Brownlow. This beautifully produced book, the first and most essential volume in a trilogy on American cinema before the coming of sound, is based entirely on evidence gathered at first hand and mostly illustrated by photographs from the author’s own collection. It’s an informative delight to read and look at and the kind of thing that gives passionate enthusiasm a good name.

The Film Encylopedia Edited by Ephraim Katz, Crowell, 1979

First published in 1979, this is by some way the best, most wide-ranging single-volume reference book on the cinema ever written. Entirely the work of one man, an Israeli documentarist resident in New York, it has been updated, though sadly not improved, since Katz’s untimely death at the age of 60 in 1992. It should be kept within easy reach by anyone interested in the cinema, whether writer or film fan.

The Last Tycoon F. Scott Fitzgerald, Scribner, 1941

The cinema as a subject for fiction has attracted serious writers ever since Luigi Pirandello’s Shoot! was published in 1915, and there are 50 or 60 examples on my shelves, gathered over the years for a book I’ll now never write. The best novel of recent years is Theodore Roszak’s astonishing Flicker (1991), while the finest on British cinema is Christopher Isherwood’s Prater Violet (1945), but greatest of all is Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon, left unfinished at his death in 1940 and superbly edited by his friend Edmund Wilson.

Chris Fujiwara

Rivette: Texts and Interviews Edited by Jonathan Rosenbaum, BFI, 1977

A manifesto for a revolutionary cinema, this compact selection of talks with and essays by Jacques Rivette includes his seminal text on Fritz Lang’s Beyond a Reasonable Doubt.

Godard on Godard Jean-Luc Godard, edited and translated by Tom Milne, Secker & Warburg, 1972

It may not always be obvious from reading Godard’s early reviews that the writer would become a film-making giant, but it’s clear he could inspire five or six others to do so.

Every page of this slim volume – the Pascal’s Pensées of film – is filled with riches. Opened at random: “To your models: ‘You must play neither someone else, nor yourself. You have to play no one’”; “Neither director, nor film-maker. Forget that you’re making a film”; “Slow films in which everyone gallops and gesticulates; quick films in which people hardly move”; “Your film must be like the one you see while shutting your eyes.”

It launched and defined an era of cinephilia in the United States.

Negative Space: Manny Farber on the Movies Manny Farber

The only reason I list this edition instead of 2009’s Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings is that the smaller collection is the one I spent years marveling at, puzzling over and taking comfort from as from a favourite food.

Graham Fuller

The Parade’s Gone By Kevin Brownlow

The History of World Cinema David Robinson, Stein and Day, 1973

The Haunted Screen Lotte Eisner, Le Terrain Vague, 1952

Suspects David Thomson

Working on The Movie, a multi-volume history of the cinema published in weekly parts at the start of the 1980s, I found the first four books on this list not only remarkable for their scholarship and practical use, but as sources of magic – Eisner’s not least because of the dread-heavy stills and the electrifying chapter on G.W. Pabst and Louise Brooks, since exceeded only by ‘Lulu and the Meter Man’ in Thomas Elsaesser’s Weimar Cinema and After. Though in need of updating, Robinson’s History is unequalled as a single-volume narrative primer on cinema’s evolution. The Parade’s Gone By is the most accessible of Brownlow’s great books about silent film, though I could as easily have picked The War, the West and the Wilderness and Behind the Mask of Innocence.

Thomson’s Dictionary was a revelation when it first appeared 35 years ago because it doubled as a work of reference and (brilliant) criticism – it remains indispensable. Thomson was a historian writing like a novelist and so it was logical that he would eventually weave fiction with history in the serpentine Suspects, from which one can learn more about the iconography of film noir than from many worthy textbooks.

That’s five – and still I’m missing The BFI Companion to the Western and Hollywood Babylon.

Charlotte Garson

Critic, Cahiers du cinéma, France

Encompasses all film book categories: interview, yes, but also memoir, monograph, theory, picture book…

It’s always fruitful to go back to Bazin’s writings, less as a theoretician than as a critic (with theoretical intuitions that are sometimes hazardous).

The first film book I ever read.

Eric Rohmer Pascal Bonitzer, Cahiers du cinéma, 1991

Along with Bazin’s unfinished Jean Renoir this is one of the best monographs I know on any director.

Film: A Sound Art Michel Chion, Columbia University Press, 2003

Godard au travail: Les années 60 by Alain Bergala A wealth of documents, but also Alain Bergala’s ever-clear, precise prose on one of the film-makers he knows best. (Also, in French: Nul mieux que Godard, an anthology published by Cahiers du cinéma on Godard and edited by Bergala.)

La Maison et le monde by Serge Daney The anthology (in two volumes) of the Cahiers and Liberation French critic offers a panoramic view of the changes French criticism went through from the 1960s to the ’90s.

My Life and My Films by Jean Renoir

Beauty and the Beast: Diary of a Film by Jean Cocteau

The ‘I’ of the Camera: Essays in Film Criticism, History, and Aesthetics By William Rotman

John Ford hors-série , Cahiers du cinéma

Mikio Naruse by Jean Narboni

Sul cinema By Roland Barthes , edited by Sergio Toffetti Only in Italy are Barthes’ writings on film collected!

Tom Gunning

Professor of Cinema and Media Studies, University of Chicago, USA

Film Form Sergei Eisenstein, edited and translated by Jay Leyda, Harcourt Brace, 1949

Visionary Film P. Adams Sitney, OUP, 1974

The World Viewed Stanley Cavell

From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film Siegfried Kracauer, Princeton University Press, 1947

Philip Horne

Prater Violet Christopher Isherwood, Methuen, 1945

The best novel I know on the film-making process, set in the 1930s and dealing (as if from the experience of ‘Christopher’ himself) with the career of Austrian director Friedrich Bergmann, whose genius is thrillingly evoked.

One of the great landmarks, a meeting of two film cultures, two languages, two personalities – full of omissions and evasions, but richly suggestive, and a demonstration that criticism and creation can enter into a significant dialogue.

A Life in Movies Michael Powell

Powell was a major film-maker who could write and who cared immensely and generously for literature and art – this magnificently vivid, self-dramatising yet wonderfully responsive first volume of his memoirs brings to life one eccentric but steely Englishman’s journey to greatness.

Adventures of a Suburban Boy John Boorman, Faber & Faber, 2003

Like Powell, Boorman can write like a dream as well as direct films like Point Blank and Deliverance “in a state of grace”, and this wise, intensely sympathetic, informative, amusing, moving account of his globe-spanning trajectory from Carshalton via L.A. to Galway is a classic.

After three decades of use, it’s an old companion, rather taken for granted and occasionally irritatingly prejudiced (eg on Ford), as well as funny and endlessly suggestive about avenues to explore; but whatever reservations it inspires (and expresses) it’s a grand example of appreciative, impassioned, intelligent, encyclopaedic criticism that shaped a generation or two of film watchers.

Kevin Jackson

Godard on Godard Jean-Luc Godard

A thrilling confection of passionate advocacy, youthful extremism, ardent love and lofty disdain. The one film book I crammed into my suitcase to keep me company when I went to live abroad for a couple of years; every dip into its pages offered something to think about, wonder at or silently dispute. So what if it borders on eccentricity, and then crosses the borders? It turns up the old mental rheostat every time. Well worth it even if you don’t much care for his films, and all the more so if you do.

Doesn’t everyone enjoy these interviews? Highly informative when read innocently, highly entertaining when read for the implied drama: the hero-worshipping young man (who is no dummy, mind), paying court to the urbane old master who seems to give so much away, and yet, cunning trickster/shaman that he is, really yields nothing that could be used in court against him. The dialogue as artform.

Reeling Pauline Kael, Little, Brown, 1977

Or almost any of her collections, really, but wasn’t she at her best when she had plenty of movies to love? And wasn’t the 1970s the period of cinema she loved best? This was the volume that made a god awful 26-hour greyhound bus trip to New York seem bearable – in fact, time well spent. It doesn’t matter if you don’t admire all her raving and comminations; she is almost always a gas, and brought to film criticism an addictive combination of driven, garrulous intensity and loose-limbed, slangy intimacy. Has anyone ever managed that balance as well?

A miracle. How could anyone – especially someone with a boring day job, and before the video/DVD age – have seen so much, noticed so much, understood so much, remembered so much at such a young age… and then written about it in a prose style of such idiosyncratic verve, lyricism and aphoristic pith? Not just one of the best film books, one of the best later 20th-century books of criticism of any medium. A monument.

Madame Depardieu and the Beautiful Strangers Antonia Quirke, Fourth Estate, 2007

Plus one: this lightly fictionalised memoir of film criticism, love affairs and the quest for beauty and perfection is so funny that it often makes you bark with laughter. Plus two: it is also an achingly serious discussion about why movies can be so potent, about the way they shape our fantasy lives and so our real lives, about how it really does matter whether or not you can love Withnail & I. Plus three: Quirke has an effortless knack for the mot juste; eat your liver, Flaubert. A potent and delicious cocktail.

Editor, Sight & Sound

Like most people in the unique position of foreknowledge of what others have said, I have avoided the choices that now seem obvious in this survey. My list is therefore devised partly to champion books neglected by everyone else.

A Mirror for England: British Movies from Austerity to Affluence Raymond Durgnat, Faber & Faber, 1970

I first encountered Durgnat’s seminal book by proxy in the stirring poetic quotes from it that turned up regularly in the reviews of old British films in London listings magazines. It was out of print by the time I wanted to buy it, but I found a copy on my first trip to New York in 1982 (along with Kings of the Bs), devoured it, then lent it to a friend and never saw it (or him) again. So it’s as mysterious a treasure for me as, say, any film seen and loved years ago and not re-encountered since – though of course there’s a copy in the BFI library just three floors down from my office. Call it deferred gratification.

Melville on Melville Edited by Rui Noguera, translated by Tom Milne, Secker & Warburg, 1971

This most inspiring of interview texts is at least as fine a demonstration as Truffaut’s Hitchcock of why the Q&A format is so often more revealing than the mediated profile article or book. As befits his flinty films, Melville is a pugnacious, affectionate and slightly melancholy observer: sanguine and unequivocal about the daring with which his films were made. He gives a cool insight too into the rich inheritance of pre-war French cinema that declined post-war into the cinéma du papa so decidedly trashed by Truffaut. Towards the book’s end, Melville says, “I estimate the final disappearance of cinemas to take place around the year 2020.” Let’s hope he’s not right.

The New Wave: Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, Rohmer, Rivette James Monaco, OUP, 1976

Again, for me this book was about self-education. Not at all professionally involved in film when I bought it, I wanted something to help a London art student get more out of the films of Godard, Truffaut, Rohmer, Chabrol and Rivette. And if it was as puzzling in its way as some of the films seemed at the time, then that only intrigued me more, as any introduction to so important a subject should.

The Avant-Garde Finds Andy Hardy Robert B. Ray, Harvard University Press, 1995

Judging from this survey few, if any, colleagues seem to share my enthusiasm for Ray’s attempts to break out of the cul-de-sacs of postmodern film theory, but I find his use of surrealist randomising and brainstorming games to generate new perspectives on classic Hollywood and other material stimulating, imaginative, informative and very entertaining, both here and in his more recent The ABCs of Classic Hollywood.

The Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium Gilberto Perez, The John Hopkins University Press, 1998

In recent decades there has been no more cogent a rethinking of the physical and psychological experience of film as it evolved, both as a technology and as an artform. I want to read it again, soon.

Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber Manny Farber, Library of America, 2009

King Vidor, American Raymond Durgnat and Scott Simmon, University of California Press, 1988

The American Cinema Andrew Sarris

Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage Stanley Cavell, Harvard University Press, 1981

These are the books that I’ve lived with the longest (excepting Farber On Film), so I suppose they’re the ones that have had the most profound effect on me.

Richard T. Kelly

Fun in a Chinese Laundry Josef von Sternberg, Secker & Warburg, 1965

My Last Breath Luis Buñuel, Jonathan Cape, 1983

Beauty and the Beast: Diary of a Film Jean Cocteau, J.B. Janin, 1946

Mark Le Fanu

Academic / critic, Denmark

The books that most influence you tend to come early in one’s life – whether one likes it or not, everyone is a product of their generation. I started reading about cinema in the late 1960s, the heyday of auteurism: the books that I read then formed my taste and have marked me as a certain kind of cinephile and, 40 years on, after the great adventure (or misadventure) of theory, that is still how I would define myself.

The opening revelation in my case was the discovery of the late Robin Wood’s writings, specifically the five or six beautiful monographs he wrote around that time on contemporary film-makers, so let me single out Bergman (Praeger, 1969). Wood’s patient, unpedantic, exegetical prose remains for me the permanent model of how to do these things.

Next, an interview book: Jon Halliday’s extended conversation Sirk on Sirk: Interviews with Jon Halliday (Secker & Warburg, 1971) hints at profound connections between European and American cinema and the sophisticated passage between the two cultures – connections deepened and cemented by my more or less simultaneous discovery of Andrew Sarris’ extraordinary handbook (compact and encyclopaedic at the same time) The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968 . Over the years this little volume must surely have been the Bible for many of us.

Another bible (can there be two?) that has never left my desk is David Thomson’s A Biographical Dictionary of Film . Readers of Sight & Sound will need no introduction to Thomson’s stunningly erudite film scholarship – for over 30 years he has been a leading contributor to this journal.

Alas, only one more book! There are so many wonderful writers out there. Should I opt for something from my collection written by Geoffrey O’Brien? Or Pauline Kael? Or Robert Warshow? Or André Bazin? Or either of the two wise Gilberts (Perez and Adair)? No, it is going to be François Truffaut’s collection of essays The Films in My Life (translated by Leonard Mayhew, Simon & Schuster, 1978). The peerless lucidity of his writing about cinema is underscored by a profound moral passion. Indeed, this is true about all the writers on film that I admire most – even the aesthetes and dandies.

Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema Andrei Tarkovsky

Tarkovsky is my all-time favourite director. But while this is fascinating, I sometimes find his statements frustratingly evasive. Or to the point but about very vague subjects: “Time”. Everything’s a lot clearer in the films. Yet this is what he had to say about them, and that makes it uniquely valuable.

Notes: On the Making of Apocalypse Now! Eleanor Coppola, Simon & Schuster, 1979

For a while I became obsessed with what must have been the best-documented disaster shoot in film history. I had the photo of Francis Ford Coppola pointing a revolver at his head up on my office wall the whole time I was writing Corpsing.

Louise Brooks Barry Paris, Hamish Hamilton, 1989

This depressed the hell out of me, but it’s a great read. Louise Brooks was one of the few actresses with absolute integrity. This may have something to do with why she also had the most vivid screen presence.

Lulu in Hollywood Louise Brooks, Hamish Hamilton, 1982

And she could write, too.

Quay Brothers Dictionary Michael Brooke

In the absence of a full book on my favourite contemporary film-makers, this pamphlet that came with the DVD Quay Brothers: The Short Films 1979-2003 will do very well. I’m still following up all the references to writers, artists and poster designers.

Brian McFarlane

Academic, Australia

Agee on Film: Reviews and Comments James Agee

I loved his willingness to find excitement in unexpected places, to do justice to merit when he found it and to write in such a strongly personal voice.

Ealing Studios Charles Barr, Cameron & Tayleur/David & Charles, 1977

This still seems to me the definitive account of the ethos of a studio. Lucid, rigorous and utterly readable.

David Lean: A Biography Kevin Brownlow, Richard Cohen Books, 1996

The best biography of a film-maker I’ve ever read. An enthralling account of a man enraptured by cinema, written by another man enraptured by cinema.

Typical Men: The Representation of Masculinity in British Cinema Andrew Spicer, I.B. Tauris, 2001

Gives a whole new perspective on the phenomenon of male stardom in British film, wears its theory lightly and is written with wit and perception.

Infuriating and stimulating by turns, this is an idiosyncratic inclusion. It leaves out Phyllis Calvert and includes Audie Murphy, which enrages me, but I read it from cover to cover.

Luke McKernan

Curator, Moving Image, British Library, UK

Spellbound in Darkness Edited by George C. Pratt, University of Rochester, 1966

A loving anthology, with commentary, on the silent cinema. An invitation to discovery on every page, and perhaps the best title for any film book yet published.

The British Film Catalogue, 1895-1970 Denis Gifford, David & Charles, 1973

The nearest we have to a British national filmography was created not by any institute or university but by one man.

Ealing Studios Charles Barr, 1977

A classic analysis of a film studio’s output in terms of nation, society and politics. There is no better stimulus to look at films seriously.

The Pleasure Dome Graham Greene, Secker & Warburg, 1972

Greene’s film reviews from the 1930s are filled with sharp observations and haunting turns of phrase no other critical anthology can match.

The Cinematograph in Science, Education and Matters of State Charles Urban, The Charles Urban Trading Company, 1907

Written at the dawn of cinema, an inspirational manifesto for film as an educative medium.

Geoffrey Macnab

The richness of Powell’s autobiography lies in its scope and its colour. On the one hand, it’s a fantastically useful resource for anyone interested in British film history. Powell offers vivid portraits of his colleagues and collaborators, many of them émigrés. This is a gossipy and very colourful memoir, full of anecdotes and asides about Powell’s romantic life and his sometimes vexed relationships with studio bosses. On the other hand, it is also a self-portrait by a brilliant and uncompromising English film-maker.

A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies Martin Scorsese and Michael Henry Wilson, Faber & Faber, 1997

Published to accompany a BFI documentary, this is a beautifully illustrated and very sharp-eyed tour through a century of American cinema by a true obsessive. Scorsese is as interested in Allan Dwan, Phil Karlson, Jacques Tourneur and Sam Fuller as he is in the bigger-name directors.

Preston Sturges by Preston Sturges: His Life in His Words Preston Sturges, Simon & Schuster, 1990

Sturges’ autobiography is as well written, droll and well observed as his best films.

The Magic Lantern Ingmar Bergman, translated by Joan Tate, Hamish Hamilton, 1987

There’s a wild streak of perversity to Bergman’s autobiography. He is honest and self-lacerating about his own foibles and equally caustic about those of others. Morbidity and lyricism run side by side as he lays bare his demons.

An Autobiography of British Cinema Brian McFarlane, Methuen, 1997

This book is easy to undervalue. At first glance it looks like a series of nostalgic, fireside chats with actors and film-makers from the good old days of British cinema. However, no one else was doing these interviews. Thirteen years on, many of the 180 interviewees have died. McFarlane did future British historians an extraordinary service by capturing their reminiscences.

Adrian Martin

Critic, Australia

Theory of Film Practice Noël Burch, Secker & Warburg, 1973

A book that opens minds to formalism in the fullest and most supple way. Burch has changed his position many times since 1967 (when the chapters first appeared in Cahiers du cinéma), but there is still much to excite in these pages.

The Memory of Tiresias: Intertextuality and Film Mikhail Iampolski, University of California Press, 1998

So you think you know what intertextuality is? Iampolski, a pre-eminent contemporary Russian theorist, gives a dazzling demonstration of how, when, where and why films quote other films (and other media) and why we should care. A book so far ahead of its time we haven’t caught up with it.

The Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium Gilberto Perez

The long tradition of sensitive film aesthetics (it would once have been called film appreciation), from Béla Balázs to V.F. Perkins, finds its apotheosis in Perez’s superb book, as fully literary as it is analytical. Has anyone ever written this beautifully about Dovzhenko, Renoir or Straub-Huillet?

Deadline at Dawn: Film Criticism 1980-1990 By Judith Williamson, Marion Boyars, 1992

Journalist-critic heroes play out, on a weekly or even daily basis, the tension between the pressure to publish an instant response and the background resource of a lifetime’s reflection. Bazin, Daney, Rosenbaum and a dozen others fill this role admirably, but my vote is for Britain’s own Judith Williamson, whose books of collected reviews from the 1980s and ’90s are an unending inspiration.

Poetics of Cinema Raúl Ruiz, Dis Voir, 1995 (volume 1) and 2007 (volume 2)

Writings on film by film-makers form a generally undervalued genre. Among the many candidates – from Eisenstein, Tarkvosky and Pasolini to Alexander Kluge, Marcel Hanoun and Alexander Mackendrick – Ruiz’s ongoing Poetics of Cinema project stands out for its intellectual generosity, its luminous storytelling, its sly wit and its surrealist vision of what cinema could still become.

PLUS FIVE UNTRANSLATED GEMS:

Method Sergei Eisenstein, Museum of Cinema, Eisenstein-Centre, 2002

A casual observer might think we have much or most of Eisenstein’s writings in English, but the complete assemblage of his lifelong two-volume project Method has only appeared in Russian (and German) over the past decade. It will forever change the way we regard his life, work and thought. Fortunately, thanks to the gifted Russian-Australian scholar Julia Vassilieva, this project is on the way.

De la figure en général et du corps en particulier: L’invention figurative au cinéma Nicole Brenez, De Boeck, 1998

English-language film cultures have kept pace with French aesthetic philosophers like Jacques Rancière and Alain Badiou, but forgot to check where film analysis itself went in France after the heyday of semiotics. Here’s the answer: the most radical, innovative and inventive tome of cinema study in the past quarter-century, boldly proposing a ‘figural’ approach that combines meaning with emotion, history with imagination. Brenez is our greatest living critic.

Im/Off: Filmartikel Frieda Grafe and Enno Patalas, Hanser, 1974

Emerging from Filmkritik magazine in the late 1950s, this lively pair shaped much future German-language film culture to come with their analyses, programming, teaching and restoration work. Grafe (1934-2002), in particular, combined a crisp, evocative, Barthesian style with a rigorous eye and brilliant mind. This book is among the key chronicles of the 1960s and ’70s revolutions in cinema and film criticism.

Viv(r)e le cinéma Roger Tailleur

Francophiles, in general, know a lot about Cahiers du cinéma (and the whole artistic-intellectual culture that goes with it) and almost nothing about Positif (ditto). The saddest lacuna of all is Roger Tailleur (1927-85), an extraordinary prose stylist and encyclopaedic brain who, on a good day, makes Manny Farber seem like Harry Knowles. This selection, lovingly assembled by Positif comrades Michel Ciment and Louis Seguin, and containing classic essays on Bogart, Antonioni, Hawks and Marker, really just scratches the surface of Tailleur’s remarkable oeuvre – a true thinking-person’s cinephilia.

Kantuko Ozu Yasujiro Shigehiko Hasumi, Chikuma Shobo, 1983

Hasumi’s analytical method is deceptively simple: he takes us through the facts, limpidly described, of the everyday world of Ozu’s films – the walking, sitting, dressing, banal chit-chat – in order to arrive at often devastating revelations of this master director’s sensibility at work. Few critics give us such a concrete sense of what Godard once called “the evidence”. Cahiers du cinéma published a French version in 1998; we English readers are still waiting.

Peter Matthews

Agee on Film: Reviews and Comment James Agee

The greatest American film reviewer of the 1940s is a neglected figure these days, no doubt as his lofty humanist standards are out of tune with our own cynical resignation to ‘entertainment’. Ever the disappointed idealist, Agee offered grudging praise to such compromised efforts as Meet Me in St. Louis and Double Indemnity in long, delicately cadenced sentences that would never survive the copy editor now. Yet he was equally a master of the short demolition job (Princess O’Rourke: “An unobtrusive raising of the window, and the less said the better”), while his clairvoyant appreciation of Zéro de conduite almost single-handedly put Jean Vigo on the map in the English-speaking world. Though he could get it wrong (as in his cranky dismissal of Citizen Kane), Agee’s intense moral engagement with cinema sets him far above critics who merely get it right.

Katharine Hepburn: Star as Feminist Andrew Britton, Studio Vista, 1995

The competition isn’t fierce, but this book remains easily the best serious full-length study of a star. Shunning the high road of 1970s ‘apparatus theory’, with its curiously self-defeating notion that pleasure is an ideological error, Britton champions Hollywood icons as authentic sources of emotional and political inspiration. Hepburn’s fey, tomboyish persona may not have been radical exactly, but its very oddity created a worrying disturbance in her films that even the ritual clinch at the end didn’t entirely pacify. Stars back then embodied vital social contradictions – one doubts whether the featureless pretty people of contemporary celebrity would repay so subtle and scrupulous a treatment.

The Material Ghost: Films and their Medium Gilberto Perez

This volume has already become a milestone in film criticism, and it isn’t hard to see why. For one thing, Perez magnificently vindicates the beauty of illusionism – a salutary attitude after decades of academic militancy that judged it a ruling-class plot. But even more crucially, he understands how every general theory of cinema must start from its concrete particulars as an artform. The book is really about nothing beyond the author’s own infinite sensitivity to the implications of style. Has anyone else been quite so astute regarding the poetics of the shot/reverse shot (in Straub-Huillet’s History Lessons) or the uses of stasis (in Dovzhenko’s Earth)? A work of transcendent intelligence.

These aphoristic memos from the legendary director are often as inscrutable as Zen Buddhist koans, yet reflecting on them can produce a similar enlightenment. Bresson’s notorious contempt for acting is explained here in the distinction he draws between cinematography (pure writing with images) and mere cinema (still beholden to the mimetic fakery of theatre). The professional player counterfeits truth vaingloriously, whereas the amateur or ‘model’ simply reveals a soul. Essential reading for anyone curious about the physics and metaphysics of film, this slender volume can be profitably revisited over a lifetime.

Sirk on Sirk: Interviews with Jon Halliday Edited by Jon Halliday

A book that revolutionised film studies. Douglas Sirk’s erudite exchanges with Halliday in 1971 turned his previous reputation as a merchant of lachrymose piffle upside down by revealing he had been a cool ironist all along. Universal loved the Panglossian optimism of the title All That Heaven Allows, but Sirk knew what it really meant (‘heaven is stingy’) and proved the point with a mise en scène that systematically undercuts its own chocolate-box display of luxury. Through his sophisticated apologia for melodrama, a despised genre was propelled into the academic spotlight where it has remained ever since.

I could as easily have picked William Rothman’s Documentary Film Classics, Robin Wood’s Hitchcock’s Films Revisited, Stanley Cavell’s Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage or Paul Schrader’s Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer. I haven’t included André Bazin’s What is Cinema? because it sits in a class by itself.

Sophie Mayer

Decreation Anne Carson, Alfred A. Knopf, 2005

Beauty and the Beast: Diary of a Film Jean Cocteau

Essential Deren: Collected Writings on Film Maya Deren, edited by Bruce McPherson, Documentext, 2005

Queer Edward II (annotated screenplay) Derek Jarman, BFI, 1991

When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender and Cultural Politics Trinh T. Minh-ha, Routledge, 1991

Henry K. Miller

Let’s Go to the Pictures Iris Barry, Chatto & Windus, 1926

A product and record of the years when cinema first came to be ‘taken seriously’ in Britain, to use the conventional phrase. Barry was a cinephile pioneer among the literati, and one of film culture’s seminal figures. Very little was outside her scope. Sample observation: “Every habitual cinemagoer must have been struck at some time or another by the comparative slowness of perception and understanding of a person not accustomed to the pictures: the newcomer nearly always misses half of what occurs. To be a habitué makes one easily suggestible through the eye, quick at observing manners, gestures and tricks of expression.”

The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema Jean Mitry, Indiana University Press, 1997

Overflowing with riches, it’s something of a scandal that Mitry’s summa went untranslated until the 1990s while the canon was packed by scores of philosophers manqués.

Films and Feelings Raymond Durgnat, Faber & Faber, 1967

Hard to pick just one Durgnat. Films and Feelings makes it because its extended chapter on the history of Franco-Anglo-American film criticism, ‘Auteurs and Dream Factories’, has yet to be bettered.

The Studio John Gregory Dunne, Farrer, Straus & Giroux, 1969

This account of a year at Twentieth Century Fox during the dying days of the dream factory is the best of the ‘inside Hollywood’ books by dint of Dunne’s peerlessly dry prose.

Cinema: A Critical Dictionary Edited by Richard Roud, Secker & Warburg, 1980

The single best reference work on the cinema I’ve dipped into, this ought to have become standard household issue. Having assembled an all-star team of contributors – from Jean-Andre Fiéschi to Robin Wood to P. Adams Sitney – editor Roud (an S&S mainstay) himself jumps in at the end of each entry to register the extent of his disagreement.

An Illustrated History of the Horror Film Carlos Clarens, Putnam, 1967

The first film book I ever bought – or nagged my parents to buy me – and still a model of genre history/criticism, teasing out bigger narratives from the mosaic achievements of individual films.

Kings of the Bs: Working Within the Hollywood System Edited by Todd McCarthy and Charles Flynn, Dutton, 1975

Full of important things, like Manny Farber on Val Lewton and Roger Ebert on Russ Meyer, and evaluations of previously obscure films (Thunder Road) and film-makers (Sam Katzman).

Looking Away: Hollywood and Vietnam Julian Smith, Scribner, 1975

A study that manages to say a lot of fascinating, illuminating things about its subject even though it labours under the handicap that when it was published (1975) Hollywood had made almost no films about the Vietnam War.

Nightmare USA: The Untold Story of the Exploitation Independents Stephen Thrower, FAB Press, 2007

A huge study of independent American horror films of the 1970s and ’80s, this is a rare book that tells me things I didn’t already know. A monumental achievement, and it’s only the first part.

Science Fiction Movies Philip Strick, Octopus, 1976

Strick, a long-time S&S commentator, was one of the sharpest writers on science fiction in film and literature. This was one of a series of disposable illustrated books, but proved that the wordage between the stills needn’t just be rehashed press releases. Like all books I go back to, it has solid information, wide-ranging insight and an elegant, precise, wry prose style.

Geoffrey Nowell-Smith

Academic and writer, UK

Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? (What is Cinema?) André Bazin, Editions du Cerf, 1958-62

Four little volumes of essays and reviews written in the 1940s and 1950s, published posthumously, that were absolutely formative for the film-makers of the nouvelle vague and for critics ever after. The selective and not very good English translation as What is Cinema? may have done more harm than good in reach-me-down film studies courses. A much better translation of most of the key essays has recently been published (What is Cinema?, edited and translated by Timothy Barnard, Montreal: Caboose, 2010), but for copyright reasons is available only in Canada.

A Bazin antidote. Harbinger of the theory boom of the 1970s, but much more readable than most of what followed.

Thoughts and opinions of the most important and revolutionary film-maker of the past 50 years. Beautifully edited and translated, but it unfortunately stops just before 1968. For Godard’s later thinking, avoid books and watch his extraordinary Histoire(s) du cinéma (1998).

For a reference book, am I allowed to put forward The Oxford History of World Cinema, despite being its editor (OUP, 1996)? If debarred, then the 2000 edition of the Time Out Film Guide, being less bulky than it has since become.

Michael O’Pray

Visionary Film P. Adams Sitney

Magisterial. It was written over 30 years ago, yet remains the most lucid and critically coherent account of American avant-garde film.

A World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film Stanley Cavell, Harvard University Press, 1971

The most sophisticated marriage of philosophy and film written. Brimming with ideas and beautifully written.

Stargazer: The Life, World and Films of Andy Warhol Stephen Koch, Marion Boyars, 1991

Still the best book on Warhol’s cinema. A cool gaze at a cool world.

My Last Breath Luis Buñuel

Surrealism, not as a set of dogmas, but as a life lived.

Durgnat on Film Raymond Durgnat, Faber & Faber, 1976

So sharp and so readable.

This is as sharp, witty and lacerating as all his best pictures; Buñuel’s observing eye turned into an act of reflective writing on his own life.

L’Imaginaire Jean-Paul Sartre (mistranslated as The Psychology of the Imagination), Gallimard, 1940

This is the book of books that helped me develop a cinematic eye.

Memoirs of the Beijing Film Academy Ni Zhen, National Publishers of Japan, 1995

Charts the rise of the Fifth Generation out of nowhere to astonish the world.

Ingmar Bergman Jacques Aumont, Cahiers du cinéma, 2003

In which the French critic says it all and shows us that further Bergman books must lie in new detail or a broader window on the film world.

Film Journal Eve Arnold, Bloomsbury, 2001

A masterpiece of stills photography that captures the world behind the movie camera, culminating in her extraordinary on-set pics of Marilyn and The Misfits.

Critic, Daily Telegraph, UK

The Aurum Film Encyclopedia Edited by Phil Hardy, Aurum, 1983-98

This guide to the horror (1983 edition), science fiction (1984) and Western (1984) genres is addictive, exhaustive and unsurpassed.

Reeling Pauline Kael

My favourite Kael collection because the period it covers (1973-75) coincides with so many of her true passions.

Placing Movies: The Practice of Film Criticism Jonathan Rosenbaum, University of California Press, 1995

No one else seems to get the point of film criticism as well as Rosenbaum, or to pursue it with such prickly independence.

Dirk Bogarde: The Authorised Biography John Coldstream, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004

This grasping of a unique career and life is an absolute model of diligence and wisdom.

The Devil’s Candy: The Bonfire of the Vanities Goes to Hollywood Julie Salamon, Delta, 1992

Outstrips even Steven Bach’s Final Cut as an appalled account of big-budget catastrophe.

Nick Roddick

André Bazin’s What is Cinema? introduced me to a different way of thinking about film and Christian Metz’s [two-volume] Essais sur la signification au cinéma (Klincksieck, 1968 and 1972) took things to a whole new level – even if the air up there was sometimes a little too thin to breathe.

In an entirely different context, a trio of Hollywood autobiographies – Sterling Hayden’s Wanderer (Alfred A. Knopf, 1963), Raoul Walsh’s Each Man in His Time: The Life Story of a Director (Farrer, Straus & Giroux, 1974) and Sam Fuller’s A Third Face: My Tale of Writing, Fighting and Filmmaking (Alfred A. Knopf, 2002) – confirmed that, even within the studio system, there were different lives being lived and different stories being told.

So, in a quite different but unforgettable way, did Kenneth Anger’s scurrilous Hollywood Babylon (J.J. Pauvert, 1959), which should be prescribed reading on every po-faced film course.

One that got away: Hugh Fordin’s MGM’s Greatest Musicals: The Arthur Freed Unit (Da Capo, 1996), which I lent to someone in 1976 and never saw again.

But if there is one book to rule them all, it is Peter Wollen’s Signs and Meaning in the Cinema . The revised and enlarged edition of 1972 is the most concise, lucid and inspiring introduction to thinking about film ever written.

Jonathan Romney

Critic, Independent on Sunday, UK

Deadline at Dawn Judith Williamson

This is an exemplary collection, with a superb opening essay on the importance of resisting complicity with the culture supermarket. Its key statement, provocative but true: asking a critic what films to go to is as inappropriate as asking a geographer where to go on holiday.

Devant la recrudescence des vols de sac à main, cinéma, télévision, information Serge Daney, Aléas, 1997

This was my first exposure to the complexity, provocation and sometimes perversity of this French critic, a champion of cinephilic promiscuity and a brilliant expander of small, seemingly inconspicuous details into troubling symptoms. The title is what they used to warn audiences about in French cinemas: “Given the increase in handbag thefts…”

Flicker Theodore Roszak, Summit, 1991

Dan Brown avant la lettre for film buffs and those who tolerate their obsessions, Roszak’s novel is the best airport thriller ever, a passionate mythomanic celebration of cinema and its possible secret histories and, incidentally, a prescient forecast of the satanic-brat film-making generation of Gaspar Noé, Harmony Korine, Eli Roth et al. If ever I were to use the term ‘unputdownable’…

Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles David Thomson, Alfred A. Knopf, 1996

Biography as something close to picaresque fiction. At once imaginative myth-making and insightful, demystifying critical essay.

The Phantom Empire Geoffrey O’Brien, W.W. Norton & Company, 1993

A sui generis reimagining of film history – a poetic treatise, cultural delirium and phenomenological evocation of the mysterious, multiform rapture of watching. O’Brien’s prose textures alone bear testimony to the power of film to galvanise the creative impulse.

Jonathan Rosenbaum

Films and Feelings Raymond Durgnat

This first collection by the most thoughtful, penetrating, and far-reaching of UK film critics ever remains scandalously overlooked and undervalued. Conceivably more ideas per page can be found here than in the work of any other English-language critic, and Durgnat’s grounding in surrealism and the school of Positif is merely one of the starting points for an exploratory critical intelligence that is nonetheless quintessentially English.

I also prize the expanded original, Jean-Luc Godard par Jean-Luc Godard of 1985 – it’s only the first of two volumes, but still a doorstop at 638 pages. The shorter English version of this seminal collection of criticism and interviews may be only 292 pages, but Tom Milne’s translation and commentary are exemplary, and there’s no other volume of criticism from Cahiers du cinéma that has influenced me as deeply. (The main reason, incidentally, why I haven’t selected any collections in French by André Bazin or Serge Daney is the absence of any fully satisfying volume in the first case and too many possible candidates in the second.)

More Than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts James Naremore, University of California Press, 2008 (revised and expanded edition)

Although it’s hard to arrive at a single title by my favourite academic film critic (my second choice would probably be the updated edition of The Magic World of Orson Welles), this is probably the most enjoyable, edifying, and rereadable of Naremore’s books – and certainly the best study of noir ever published.

After much internal debate, I’ve opted for this essential collection over the far heftier Farber on Film because this includes the lengthy and indispensable interview Farber and Patricia Patterson gave to Richard Thompson in 1977, whereas the other volume, even though it sports the almost accurate subtitle The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber, contains only excerpts from it.

Romantic Comedy in Hollywood: From Lubitsch to Sturges James Harvey, Alfred A. Knopf, 1987

Before arriving at this 720-page definitive compendium, I came very close to selecting the 1977 640-page The Compound Cinema: The Film Writings of Harry Alan Potamkin by a leftist intellectual of the 1920s and ’30s with a truly international grasp of cinema – and the first critic ever to write about film cults. But I keep returning to Harvey’s judicious book even more often.

Sukhdev Sandhu

Channel 4 Guide to François Truffaut Channel 4, 1984

As all who recall the glory days of the fanzine will know, great, life-changing literature often comes through the front door in a self-addressed envelope. This small booklet, issued as a pedagogic aid of sorts, is a reminder of a time when terrestrial television scheduled whole series dedicated to individual arthouse directors (at prime time!) – series that would initiate ignorant schoolboys like me into the joys of world cinema.

Geoff Dyer once wrote: “Spare me the drudgery of systematic examinations and give me the lightning flashes of those wild books in which there is no attempt to cover the ground thoroughly or reasonably.” Bresson’s slender collection of jottings and aphorisms (“The ejaculatory force of the eye”; “The terrible habit of theatre”; “Don’t run after poetry: it penetrates unaided through the joins”) is a witty example of the virtues of brevity.

100 Modern Soundtracks Philip Brophy, BFI, 2004

It doesn’t have the most compelling title, and this kind of synoptic volume is usually far less than the sum of its parts, but Brophy is a terrifically incisive and generative thinker about the possibilities of Ear Cinema, audio-delving into films as diverse as India Song and I Spit on Your Grave to create what he calls a “Braille for the deaf”.

As a film writer, my knee-jerk position is to use the word ‘studio’ as shorthand for greed, enervated groupthink, imaginative inertia, capitalism, western imperialism, evil itself. Sometimes, especially after you’ve just stumbled out of the remake of Clash of the Titans, that seems an intellectually responsible position. Mostly though, as this fastidiously researched and elegantly argued rebuff to auteurism shows, it’s not: the complex mesh of marketing, production and management enabled as much as it retarded the creation of the best US cinema of the mid-century.

An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: Shanghai Cinema, 1896-1937 Zhang Zhen, University of Chicago Press, 2006

As the years trundle by, I’m more and more embarrassed by the parochialism of my filmic knowledge. Of Bollywood and Nollywood and Latin American cinema I know a bit, but not as much as I ought. As for Chinese film, well, this superb history, in which Zhang spotlights the teeming interplay between movies, photography and architecture in early 20th-century Shanghai, performs the function of all the best literature: it leaves you ravenous for more.

Jaspar Sharp

Midnight Eye, UK

The Japanese Film: Art and Industry Joseph L. Anderson and Donald Richie, Princeton University Press, 1959 (expanded edition 1982)

Although only covering developments prior to the 1960s, this is still the most essential publication out there on Japanese film.

The Imperial Screen: Japanese Film Culture in the Fifteen Years’ War, 1931-45 Peter B. High, University of Wisconsin Press, 2003

An exhaustive and fascinating account of how the Japanese film industry was mobilised during the war years.

From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film Siegfried Kracauer

Its arguments as to how Germany’s national cinema portended the rise of Nazism might seem a bit oversimplified, but this book still provides a fascinating insight into the rise and fall of one of the world’s greatest film industries.

A Pictorial History of Horror Movies Denis Gifford, Hamlyn, 1973

I owe my obsession with cinema to being given a copy of this at the age of ten.

Mondo Macabro: Weird & Wonderful Cinema around the World Pete Tombs, St. Martin’s Griffin, 1998

The book that really opened my eyes to some of the more obscure corners of global film culture.

Iain Sinclair

Proving you don’t need to rehash the plot (it’s only there to secure financing). And for that essay ‘White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art’. And for the undeceived appreciation of Sam Fuller. Rescues, with painterly intelligence, a defunct form.

Joseph Losey: A Revenge on Life David Caute, Faber & Faber, 1994

Begins with the balance sheet: accountancy, documentation, polemic. The cultural connections of that period, from Brecht to Pinter, nicely fixed.

Knotty meat. A good place from which to steal.

Film at Wit’s End: Essays on American Independent Film-makers Stan Brakhage, Polygon, 1989

Generous evaluations of his peers by the inspirational film poet.

Nouvelle Vague, The First Decade Raymond Durgnat, Motion, 1963

Provocative, opinionated and a little crazy. I read this one until it fell apart, pre-viewing in my imagination films I had not yet seen and might never see. A fine example of literature as catalogue.

David Thompson

Critic/documentarian, UK

A Discovery of Cinema Thorold Dickinson, OUP, 1971

Reeling By Pauline Kael Film as a Subversive Art By Amos Vogel

I would also add a complete set of Sight & Sound – no kidding!

David Thomson

Critic/author, USA

I don’t think this has been equalled as a record of a life in show business desperate to get into art.

Final Cut Steven Bach

The most candid and complete account of a film, and a famous disaster – which looks better every time you see it.

David O. Selznick’s Hollywood Ronald Haver, Bonanza, 1980

The most beautiful film book.

This is Orson Welles Orson Welles and Peter Bogdanovich, edited by Jonathan Rosenbaum

Endlessly fascinating, a book of record that is bursting to be a novel.

The Deer Park Norman Mailer, Putnam, 1955

Mailer had so many great insights about film and they start in this 1955 novel.

Kenneth Turan

Critic, LA Times, USA

Picture Lillian Ross, Rinehart, 1952

A terrific piece of journalism and a landmark in the history of American non-fiction writing, this look at how John Huston made The Red Badge of Courage remains the ultimate Hollywood behind-the-scenes story.

The Pat Hobby Storie s F. Scott Fitzgerald, Scribner, 1962

The great American novelist turned his attention to a Hollywood he knew well for this collection of short stories about a washed-up screenwriter, which retain their relevance and punch to this day.

For US critics of a certain age this is the most obvious choice, but there is no overestimating the impact its English-language exploration of auteur theory had on serious filmgoers and critics.

The book that almost single-handedly revived serious interest in the long-reviled world of silent film.

King Cohn: The Life and Times of Harry Cohn Bob Thomas, Putnam, 1967

A deliciously gossipy biography of Harry Cohn, the feared and reviled head of Columbia Pictures. As comedian Red Skelton said of the man’s well-attended funeral, “It proves what Harry always said: ‘Give the public what they want and they’ll come out for it.’”

Catherine Wheatley

Critic/Academic, UK

Hollywood Babylon Kenneth Anger

Postcards from the Cinema Serge Daney, P.O.L Editions, 1994

Subtitles: On the Foreignness of Film Atom Egoyan and Ian Balfour, MIT Press, 2004

Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture and Film Giuliana Bruno, Verso, 2002

The Cinema Book Pam Cook

Armond White

Critic, New York Post, USA

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang Pauline Kael, Litte, Brown, 1968

A treasure chest of critical art anchored to her ‘Notes on Movies’ – a personal, inspiring history of cinema without a single received idea.

A one-man tour de force that cements the case for the auteur theory.

Heavenly Bodies: Stars and Society Richard Dyer

The one true advance from pop criticism into academic thought, yet that still relates to pop, pleasure and real life.

The only example of a great film era (the 1970s) meeting a worthy, attentive journalist. Includes her essential ‘On the Future of Movies’ essay, a timeless cri de coeur.

The Resistance: Ten Years of Pop Culture That Shook the World Armond White, Overlook Press, 1995

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Nonfiction Books » Music & Drama » Film, Cinema & TV

The best books on film criticism, recommended by andrew sarris.

The legendary American critic, Andrew Sarris , sounds off on auteurism, his own career and the value of the traditional film-writing canon over internet innovations such as IMDB. He picks the best books on film criticism.

Interview by Eve Gerber

Agee on Film by James Agee

The Immediate Experience by Robert Warshow, Stanley Cavell and Lionel Trilling

What is Cinema? Volume 1 by André Bazin

Negative Space by Manny Farber

The New Biographical Dictionary of Film by David Thomson

1 Agee on Film by James Agee

2 the immediate experience by robert warshow, stanley cavell and lionel trilling, 3 what is cinema volume 1 by andré bazin, 4 negative space by manny farber, 5 the new biographical dictionary of film by david thomson.

B efore we talk about film criticism’s golden era, let me ask a question about its future: Do you think the paring of print payrolls, the proliferation of viewer reviews, and the emergence of Internet aggregators, like Metacritic, will spell an end to serious criticism? And if serious criticism no longer pays, what will fuel the arguments among cinephiles that used to occur under theatre marquees (at least in Woody Allen movies)?

Let’s move on to that writing, starting with James Agee. He is best remembered for his sober social reporting and his posthumously-published Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, A Death in the Family . Agee on Film assembles essays he wrote about film during the 1940s.

I read Agee in high school. He was deeply humanistic. He was an inspiring force for me as well as for many other critics. He was a message critic, very much concerned with what film said, and very sociologically oriented.

“Before the auteurists, Hitchcock was considered trivial. Now the notion that Hitchcock’s body of work was important is not so controversial.”

Let’s move on to The Immediate Experience, a collection of criticism by Robert Warshow, who died in 1955. His analyses of the archetypes of mid-century cinema, including cowboys and gangsters, were so canonical that this collection was published in 1962 and then republished in 2002.

He died at a very young age – he was 37 – but he had a tremendous influence on many contemporary critics. You read him to get a different slant on film and criticism. He took movies as they were, and didn’t ask them to bear the weight of social messages.

Warshow focused on the ‘immediate experience’ of the viewer – how a movie moved a man. He, in fact, preferred the term ‘movie’ to the more highfalutin ‘film’. He suggested that we should judge films based on the emotional effect they have on us.

The next collection you chose, if we go in chronological order, has a very different point of view. This is What is Cinema by André Bazin, France’s most esteemed film critic .

Bazin was the antithesis of Russian film theorist and director Sergei Eisenstein, who posited that film didn’t become film until it was sliced up and served montage-style.  Eisenstein advocated for the collision of images and conflict of classes in films. Bazin believed that films should be smooth, and needn’t be so socially weighty; he felt that films should have a realism to them. He focused on mise-en-scène, as opposed to montage.

Bazin was one of the founders of the Cahiers du Cinema, which popularised the auteur theory of film.

You are credited – and were at times blamed – for importing Bazin’s theory of auteurism to the States. Can you explain the theory and how it influenced the course of film criticism?

Auterism acknowledged that the director was the dominant personality in films and that films reflected a director’s vision. That was how it changed the trajectory of criticism. It was accused of ignoring every other contributor and technician involved in film – unfairly so.

Auteurism helped us understand that a director’s work should be judged on its artistry rather than its subject matter. Before I became familiar with the work of Bazin, I felt that film had to be ambitious and socially conscious to be valuable. Bazin and Cahiers helped me realise that cinema was sui generis , that film didn’t have to prove its social relevance, and that film should be judged on its own terms.

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Let’s move on to the work of a very different critic. Manny Farber (the author of Negative Space) wrote about film for Time, The Nation, and Artforum from the late 40s through the early 70s. 

Manny Farber was the ultimate iconoclast. He pointed out the ways in which some of the most revered directors of the era, such as John Huston, were pretentious and insensitive to the medium. At times he would underrate people who were overrated. On the other hand, he brought to broader attention some directors who had previously been dismissed as insignificant, such as Samuel Fuller. Like Warshow, Farber uplifted action movies.

Some credit Faber with creating a prose style that matched the fluidity of film. 

He was a great writer. I think his reviews read better now than they did at the moment he wrote them.

Farber is remembered for favouring what he called ‘termite art’, art which burrowed into its subject matter in a down-to-earth way, over ‘white elephant art’, which pretentiously trumpeted its own importance. Did his focus on the value of ‘termite art’ alter perceptions of popular cinema? 

Your final choice is The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, by David Thomson. It was first published in 1975, and a fifth edition just came out in October. Tell me why you selected this over other reference works. 

This volume is a compendium of biographical profiles of just about every major figure in film. But it is really much more than a movie reference book; Thomson writes better than almost any other encyclopaedic critic. And he writes with a great deal of humour. He packs a lot into each entry in his Dictionary. 

Thomson is a great analyst of acting. He did the same thing with actors that Bazin did with directors: he ennobled their work and made us all see how cinema depends on them.

Why is Thomson’s work still worth reading in the age of IMDB? Why is any of this criticism still worth reading?

The work of these critics is just much more nuanced than what you can find on Internet movie databases. Agee, Bazin, Faber, Warshow, and Thomson still make great reading today. They don’t just broaden our knowledge of film; they deepen it.

Are today’s critics serving more as consumer guides?

All critics were in some sense consumer guides. There is nothing wrong with being a consumer guide. I know that the term is used in derogation. But the best writers were also the best consumer guides.

March 9, 2011

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Andrew Sarris

Andrew Sarris was a film critic and professor of film studies (1969–2010) at Columbia University. In 1960 Sarris began writing for the Village Voice. Sarris outlined his radical approach to film criticism in the essay “Notes on the Auteur Theory” (1962). He also applied the approach in his influential book The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929–1968 (1968). Sarris left the Village Voice in 1989 to write for the New York Observer, where he remained for 20 years.

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The 30 Best Books about Film

The best books about film celebrate cinema as a thriving art form, capable of holding dozens of genres and sub-genres with something for everyone. The books on this list explore all the different categories of film, from niche genre guides to screenplay writing instruction and more than a few film criticism books. Film is my greatest passion outside books, writing, and cats, so I’m eager to share this list of the best books about film with you and nerd out.

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And now for the 30 best books about film!

The age of movies by pauline kael.

There is no list of the best books about film without a contribution from legendary New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael. If you’re new to Kael’s criticism or are already a fan, The Age of Movies is a great place to start. This volume collects various writing of Kael, the best of the best, including her reviews of famous films like Raging Bull , Taxi Driver , Network , and Blue Velvet . Like mini time capsules, Kael’s reviews take you inside how these now-classic films landed when they first came out. Read it and see why it’s one of the best books on film cricisim.

How to read it: Purchase The Age of Movies on Amazon

America on film by harry m. benshoff.

As one of the most diverse countries in the world, America should be just as diverse on film. And indeed we are. In America on Film , professor Harry M. Benshoff takes a critical look at the way America looks on film. One of the best books about film, America on Film offers a fascinating analysis of the way minority and majority identities appear on film, with chapters on how film represents African American, Native American, Asian Americans, Latinos, and White ethnicities. Benshoff also includes information about the uniquely American system of Hollywood and the history of American cinema.

How to read it: Purchase America on Film on Amazon

The american cinema by andrew sarris.

The late American film critic Andrew Sarris was enormously influential in cinema studies, in particular his theory of auteur theory in film criticism. Sample his best writing in his classic film theory book, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929 – 1968 , which focuses on a discussion of two hundred American directors who Sarris believes have auteur status. All the big ones are here: Stanley Kubrick, Charlie Chaplin, Fritz Lang, and François Truffaut, and many more. This book was first published in 1968, and it remains just as fresh, just as fascinating, and just as fantastic as it was when it debuted, making it easily on to any roundup of the best books on film criticism.

How to read it: Purchase The American Cinema on Amazon

The beginning or the end: how hollywood—and america—learned to stop worrying and love the bomb by greg mitchell.

This amazingly insightful book details the way that Hollywood navigated the realities of the atomic bomb. In the Atomic Age, Hollywood processed the frightening new normal of life in the shadow of nuclear war. Mitchell’s vivid writing makes you feel like you’re there, in a time of paranoia and promise in this engaging story, definitely one of the best books about film history.

How to read it: Purchase The Beginning or the End on Amazon

Best. movie. year. ever. how 1999 blew up the big screen by brian raferty.

Was 1999 the best movie year ever? With classic films like Election, The Blair Witch Project, Office Space, and The Matrix as just a few of the hot movies released then, it’s hard to disagree. In Best. Movie. Year. Ever. , Brian Raferty argues that 1999 was, indeed, the best movie year in the history of film. Raferty organizes his book around the four seasons, highlighting various films that were a commercial or critical hit (or both!), situating them within the context of greater trends in American history and American cinema. The result is a highly readable account of a most formative year in film history that will have you eagerly going back for a rewatch of these beloved movies. This is definitely one of the best books about filmmaking.

How to read it: Purchase Best. Movie. Year. Ever. on Amazon

The big goodbye: chinatown and the last years of hollywood by sam wasson.

In The Big Goodbye , film critic Sam Wasson uses the classic film Chinatown (1974) as an entryway to discuss pivotal years in America’s Hollywood. Wasson brings you inside this remarkably formative film, from its rising star actor Jack Nicholson to its controversial director Roman Polanski, complicated producer “The Kid” Robert Evans, and brilliant screenwriter Robert Towne. The Big Goodbye definitely ranks up there among the best books about film history.

How to read it: Purchase The Big Goodbye on Amazon

The devil’s candy: the anatomy of a hollywood fiasco by julie salamon.

In an unprecedented move, director Brian de Palma granted writer Julie Salamon unlimited access to the filming of the movie adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities . And what a film it was… a complete critical and commercial disaster, dragged down by weighty egos, shoddy production, cast tantrums, and epic meltdowns. Get the inside play-by-play in Salamon’s The Devil’s Candy: The Anatomy of a Hollywood Fiasco , now considered one of the best books about film. Read the Wikipedia page on the movie to get a taste of what made this film flop.

How to read it: Purchase The Devil’s Candy on Amazon

Easy riders, raging bulls by peter biskind.

Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls is one of the most well-known best books about film, and it stays relevant even today almost 25 years after its first publication. This book analyzes how the 1969 biker film Easy Rider helped pave the way to a new Hollywood, one that took more risks, gambled on more impossible movies, and helped young directors like Spielberg, Scorsese, and Coppola rise in prestige and actors like De Niro, Nicholson, and Pacino find the right iconic roles.. Biskind takes you inside the “sex-drigs-and-rock-‘n’-roll generation of Hollywood in the 1970s when everything changed.

How to read it: Purchase Easy Riders, Raging Bulls on Amazon

The essentials: 52 must-see movies and why they matter by jeremy arnold.

Turner Classic Movies regularly screens classic films through its “Essentials” series, and in The Essentials , the book companion, you get introduced to what the “essential” films are in cinema history. If you’re looking to get started with watching the best of the best movies, pick up this book for your hand-curated list of what to watch next. Fill in the gaps in your film knowledge with The Essentials and the 52 movies it recommends that all cinephiles see. Among the top best books for film lovers, The Essentials will get you started on filling in your knowledge of film history.

How to read it: Purchase The Essentials on Amazon

Film art: an introduction by kristin thompson, david bordwell, and jeff smith.

This is your go-to Introduction to Film course textbook, but it’s a great read even if you don’t need it for a college class. Film Art helps movie viewers grasp the skills they need to analyze film. This is a book that will help you learn how to watch—and talk about, and analyze—movies. You’ll learn key concepts like filmmaking, film style like cinematography, and entry level film criticism. An all-in-one introduction to cinema, Film Art is one of the best books about film.

How to read it: Purchase Film Art on Amazon

The filmmaker’s eye: learning (and breaking) the rules of cinematic composition by gustavo mercado.

In The Filmmaker’s Eye , Gustavo Mercado provides a comprehensive introduction to cinematic composition, a.k.a. making movies. One of the best books about filmmaking, The Filmmaker’s Eye includes an incredible bevy of examples to help educate young filmmakers (or curious movie lovers) on different shots and cinematic techniques. You don’t have to be in a filmmaking course to appreciate this book’s all-inclusive guide to the technical side of making movies.

How to read it: Purchase The Filmmaker’s Eye on Amazon

Film theory and criticism by leo braudy and marshall cohen.

I’m willing to bet that each film major has a copy of Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen’s Film Theory and Criticism on their bookshelf. I certainly have my heavily highlighted, underlined, and glossed copy on my bookshelves (full disclosure: I majored in English but took several film studies courses). One of the best books on film criticism, this is an excellent introduction to film theory and contains landmark works of film criticism, including all the most influential writing that has made a big impact on the field all in one place.

How to read it: Purchase Film Theory and Criticism on Amazon

Final cut: art, money, and ego in the making of heaven’s gate, the film that sank united artists by steven bach.

Final Cut is Steven Bach’s I-was-there-for-it account of the making of Heaven’s Gate , one of the most famous hot messes in all of film history. A critical and commercial flop, Heaven’s Gate marked failure on a whole new level, taking United Artists down with it. Do yourself a favor and take a tour down the rabbit hole on the film’s Wikipedia page . Steven Bach had a front seat to the debacle as the senior vice president and head of worldwide production for United Artists while Heaven’s Gate was in production, giving him unprecedented access to the entire steaming shit pile that was Heaven’s Gate . We’re left with one of the best books about filmmaking every aspiring director should read.

How to read it: Purchase Heaven’s Gate on Amazon

The geek’s guide to sf cinema: 30 key films that revolutionized the genre by ryan lambie.

This book is exactly as it title says: a geek’s guide to science fiction cinema. In this book, Ryan Lambie gives you the intro you need to 30 of the most influential sci-fi films that revolutionized this beloved subgenre. From 2001: A Space Oddity to Independence Day to Inception , this guide has all the greatest hits in the history of science fiction movies, making it on this list of the best books about film.

How to read it: Purchase The Geek’s Guide to SF Cinema on Amazon

The great movies by roger ebert.

Roger Ebert was a singular film critic, both reviewer of big blockbusters and analyst of the best films in the history of cinema, from art house, to European, independent, and obscure movies alike. Above all, Ebert just loved cinema, and you get that right away when you start reading his guide to the “great movies” in this book, the first in a four-book series. In The Great Movies , which ranks among the best books about film history, Ebert gives you a curated, eclectic list of the best movies ever, ones all serious cinephiles will want to see. Watching the diverse films listed in Ebert’s book will definitely give you a base education in the finest films of all time.

How to read it: Purchase The Great Movies on Amazon

Hitchcock/truffaut by françois truffaut.

A must-have for any film lover, François Truffaut’s Hitchcock/Truffaut is the iconic French New Wave director’s guide to the iconic director Alfred Hitchcock and among the great books by film directors. In transcripts of more than 50 interviews between the two directors, this book is one auteur talking to another auteur. It’s a fascinating discussion and meeting of two great minds that film nerds will not want to miss. This is surely one of the best books about filmmaking.

How to read it: Purchase Hitchcock/Truffaut on Amazon

Hollywood: the oral history by jeanine bassinger and sam wasson.

In Hollywood: The Oral History , Jeanine Bassinger and Sam Wasson have compiled the ultimate history of Hollywood through interviews with major players like Steven Spielberg, Meryl Streep, and close to four hundred other filmmakers who helped shape the industry and “Tinsel Town.” If you’re looking for a solid introduction to the history of Hollywood, this is it. Neither dry nor stuffy nor choking with dust, Hollywood: The Oral History is a vivid, engaging, and readable tour through the annals of cinematic history and one of the best books about film history.

How to read it: Purchase Hollywood: The Oral History on Amazon

Horror: the definitive companion to the most terrifying movies ever made by kim newman and james marriott.

Horror cinema definitely has its fans, but if you’re new to the genre, you might not know where to start. Fortunately, with Kim Newman and James Marriott’s Horror! The Definitive Companion to the Most Terrifying Movies Ever Made , you can dive in and get up to speed with horror in no time. This work of film criticism is also readable and covers over 300 horror films with some horror TV series highlighted, too. Plus, the book includes iconic image after iconic image of some of the most frightening scenes to ever find their way to film. Horror fans, this book is for you. This is for sure one of the best books about horror movies.

How to read it: Purchase Horror! on Amazon

How films tell stories: the narratology of cinema by larry a. brown.

Have you ever wondered about how films tell stories? If so, Larry A. Brown’s How Films Tell Stories is required reading. This engrossing book nerds out on cinema’s storytelling theory. How Films Tell Stories is divided into two sections: First, “Aspects of Story,” which details the secrets of screenwriting like plot and characterization, and second, “Aspects of Discourse,” which analyzes the filmmaking techniques for telling a story, like perspective, cinematography, editing, and sound. Taken together, these components help movie lovers begin to think about the overall storytelling experience that only cinema can offer, making this on any list of the best books about making movies.

How to read it: Purchase How Films Tell Stories on Amazon

Making movies by sidney lumet.

Critically acclaimed and commercially successful director Sidney Lumet ( Dog Day Afternoon, Network, 12 Angry Men , and Serpico , to name a few) takes you inside the decisions that director make that result in the best film. Lumet’s Making Movies is one of the best books about filmmaking, giving readers an inside seat to the choices you have to make when you’re a top director, covering topics like screenplays, film style, managing actors, and soundtracks, to name a few subjects in this intimate, revealing, and educational book. Making Movies is certainly among the top books for aspiring filmmakers.

How to read it: Purchase Making Movies on Amazon

Monster cinema by barry keith grant.

Another one of the best books about horror movies, in Monster Cinema , Barry Keith Grant offers an appreciation of monsters throughout the annals of cinema. Discover the best creature features in the history of film, including famous monsters like King Kong, serial killers like Norman Bates, and the pod people from Invasion of the Body Snatchers . Grant explores three kinds of creatures: Human Monsters, Natural Monsters, and Supernatural Monsters. Funny an insightful, Monster Cinema tops any list of the best books about film.

How to read it: Purchase Monster Cinema on Amazon

The new biographical dictionary of film by david thomson.

This essential encyclopedia of film that sprawls over 1,100 pages has a multitude of entries about everything possibly related to cinema, from key actors to directors to screenwriters and everything and everyone in between. With this guide, definitely one of the best books about film, you’ll never be lost on key players in Hollywood, then and now. See why The New Republic named this “The best book on movies ever written in English.”

How to read it: Purchase The New Biographical Dictionary of Film on Amazon

The other hollywood by legs mcneil and jennifer osborne.

In this book, Legs McNeil and Jennifer Osborne shine a light on the “other Hollywood,” meaning the pornography film industry. This oral history includes conversations with key producers, directors, and stars of the porn industry. The Other Hollywood also incorporates primary documents, like court testimony, police reports, and newspaper articles. The result is an exhaustive account of pornography’s rise, the Golden Age, and the twilight of the industry as it meets a changing horizon.

How to read it: Purchase The Other Hollywood on Amazon

Pictures at a revolution: five movies and the birth of the new hollywood by mark harris.

In Pictures at a Revolution , one of the best books about film history, Mark Harris argues that five movies released in the mid-1960s ushered in a new era of Hollywood history: Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, In the Heat of the Night , and  Doctor Doolittle . Harris makes a convincing case that these films broke Hollywood and, our of that destruction, a New Hollywood was able to be born. Looking for another reason to pick it up? According to Quentin Tarantino: “ Pictures at a Revolution  is probably one of the best books I’ve ever read in my life.” You can’t argue with that.

How to read it: Purchase Pictures at a Revolution on Amazon

Screenplay: the foundations of screenwriting by syd field.

Syd Field’s Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting still delivers as a top-tier intro to screenwriting book there is and one of the best books about making movies. It seems that some things don’t change, such as Field’s enthusiastic how-to for writing screenplays. Field wants to teach aspiring screenwriters the way to writing movies that people will not just want to see, but engage with emotionally. Field is especially adept at teaching story structure and blending it with characterization to craft a knock-out screenplay. If you own one screenwriting book, it should be this one. (PS: You might want to check out another article on this site about the best books on creative writing.)

How to read it: Purchase Screenplay on Amazon

Spike, mike, slackers & dykes : a guided tour across a decade of american independent cinema by john pierson.

In Spike, Mike, Slackers & Dykes , John Pierson traces notable American indies from the mid-80s to mid-90s, bookending it with Stranger from Paradise on the one hand and Pulp Fiction on the other. Readers are treated to inside knowledge from Pierson, an independent film director who also helped produce and therefore launch the careers of Spike Lee, Michael Moore, Kevin Smith, and Richard Linklater. Published in 1996, this book has already attained legendary status among film nerds and ranks high in any list of the best books about filmmaking.

How to read it: Purchase Spike, Mike, Slackers & Dykes on Amazon

Rebels on the backlot by sharon waxman.

Sharon Waxman’s Rebels on the Backlot focuses on six daring directors who conquered Hollywood’s studio system, a not insignificant accomplishment. One of the best books about film history, this book focuses on one iconic film each by directors Paul Thomas Anderson ( Boogie Nights ), David O. Russell ( Three Kings ), David Fincher ( Fight Club ), Quentin Tarantino ( Pulp Fiction ), Spike Jonze ( Being John Malkovich ), and Steven Soderbergh ( Traffic ). Highly readable and engrossingly told, Rebels on the Backlot belongs on any list of the best books about film.

How to read it: Purchase Rebels on the Backlot on Amazon

Rebel without a crew by robert rodriguez.

Subtitled “Or How a 23-Year-Old Filmmaker with $7,000 Became a Hollywood Player,” Robert Rodriguez’s Rebel Without a Crew tells the wild story of how he rose from improbable circumstances to create his first movie, the wildly successful debut El Mariachi . This book is an astonishingly candid look at just how little you have to have in order to make your film, operating as both a how-to guide and production diary all in one, making it one of the best books abut filmmaking.

How to read it: Purchase Rebel Without a Crew on Amazon

Seduction: sex, lies, and stardom in howard hughes’s hollywood by karina longworth.

As the creator and host of the popular podcast You Must Remember This , which is a deep dive into the history of Hollywood, Karina Longworth is the perfect person to pen Seduction: Sex, Lies, and Stardom in Howard Hughes’s Hollywood . This revealing book told with breathless pacing that will keep you turning pages as it details the many women whom Howard Hughes sought to circle into his life as both a filmmaker and a toxic man. Hughes was prone to sexual exploitation and forceful coercion into numerous sexually transactional relationships. Sound familiar? Longworth’s book makes the compelling case that Howard Hughes was the original Harvey Weinstein in a book that couldn’t be more timely. This is for sure one of the best books about film.

How to read it: Purchase Seduction on Amazon

These fists break bricks: how kung fu movies swept america and changed the world by grady hendrix and chris poggiali.

We close this list of the best books about film with a nod to kung fu. In this lively book, authors Grady Hendrix and Chris Poggiali capture the rise of kung fu cinema and how it swept through the world. An affectionate and absorbing book all at once, These Fists Break Bricks is a highly readable history of the origins, popularity, and legacy of kung fu film.

How to read it: Purchase These Fists Break Bricks on Amazon

And there you have it an epic list of the 30 best books about film. which one will you read first, share this:.

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Sarah S. Davis is the founder of Broke by Books, a blog about her journey as a schizoaffective disorder bipolar type writer and reader. Sarah's writing about books has appeared on Book Riot, Electric Literature, Kirkus Reviews, BookRags, PsychCentral, and more. She has a BA in English from the University of Pennsylvania, a Master of Library and Information Science from Clarion University, and an MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults from Vermont College of Fine Arts.

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Den of Geek

63 Film Books That Are Well Worth Your Time

Looking for good books about the movies to read? We've got a bumper selection of recommendations right here...

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This article originally appeared on  Den of Geek UK.

A confession. I actually started writing this article in 2013, and the reason you’ve only reading it now is that I’ve made sure I’ve read every book on this list, save for one or two where I’ve marked otherwise. As such, what you’re getting is a very personal list of recommendations. Each of these books has at least something to it that I think is of interest to someone wanting to learn more about film – or just enjoy stories of movie making.

I’ve tended to avoid picture books, with one exception, as these ones I’ve chosen are all intended to be chock-full of words, to relax with at the end of a long day. Which is what I did. There are one or two notable omissions, as I’m still working through a pile of books (sorry, Sidney Lumet). I’ll keep adding recommendations to the list though as I find more books I think are worth checking out. Please add your own recommendations in the comments!

Also, I should note, I’ve also avoided books that tend to be more academic. None of these are for a film studies course. All are designed for mortals like me to read.

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Some of these are out of print, and some are quite tricky to track down. Others are widely available, none of them should break the bank. They’re listed in alphabetical order, by author’s surname.

Without further ado…

Vic Armstrong – The True Adventures Of The World’s Greatest Stuntman

About half way through movie stunt legend Vic Armstrong’s memoir, I found myself wondering if it’d been a better book were it a biography rather than an autobiography. Yet I still enjoyed it, and Armstrong offers an angle on the movies that’s not often discussed.

He talks about the rise of his career in movie stunt work, sharing his views on the proliferation of CG in more recent times (the Bond movie Die Another Day gets particular criticism). Also, his stories of doubling for Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom in particular are very good value. You’ll learn lots from the book, even if it’s not always the easiest to read.

Buy  The True Adventures Of The World’s Greatest Stuntman on Amazon

Steven bach – final cut.

Here, I defer to my colleagues.  Final Cut   charts to the story of the infamous production of Heaven’s Gate . Ryan charted 10 stories of excess from the filming of the movie, gleaned from Bach’s excellent book, right here . And Aliya penned a piece about this book specifically here .

Buy Final Cut on  Amazon

John badham – i’ll be in my trailer.

Director John Badham has written a pair of books on directing movies, of which this one is the best for my money. It’s written in a dip in and out style, and that’s the best way to enjoy it too, I think. Badham is a man who’s candid that he’s learned from his mistakes on movie sets, and he’s got lots of advice for potential directors, generously illustrated with compelling examples from his own career.

Buy  I’ll Be In My Trailer  on Amazon

Peter biskind – down and dirty pictures.

In theory, this was supposed to do for the independent cinema boom of the 1990s what Easy Riders Raging Bulls (below) did for the films and filmmakers of the 1970s. As equally as contentious as its forerunner, Down And Dirty Pictures didn’t quite gel as well for me personally, yet there’s an awful lot to feast on here. And as you come to expect from Biskind’s film writing, you get a hell of a list of films to check out once you’re done.

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Buy  Down And Dirty Pictures  on Amazon

Peter biskind – easy riders raging bulls.

There have been many conversations about just how close to the mark the many stories that Peter Biskind explores in Easy Rides Raging Bulls are. But one thing is fairly certain: that by the time you get to the end of his gossip-y book, you’ll have a list of films to watch that’s comfortably in double figures (assuming you’ve not seen them before, of course).

Biskind’s book is a hugely, hugely entertainment journey though the rise of directors such as Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, George Lucas, Hal Ashby and Brian De Palma. Funny, wildly entertaining, and one of the most wonderful journeys through 1970s cinema in print form.

Buy  Easy Riders Raging Bulls  on Amazon

Brian blessed – absolute pandemonium.

First piece of advice: get the audiobook. Blessed reads it himself. Second piece of advice: head to the chapters on Flash Gordon , and the making of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace . Utter gold.

Blessed’s new memoir also covers his landing the role of Fancy Brown in Z Cars , and takes in his theatre work as well. The film stuff is strong enough to earn it a place on this list, though. Best not to read Absolute Pandemonium while sipping a drink would be my strong advice. The number of laugh-out-loud moments in here is high.

Buy  Absolute Pandemonium  on Amazon

Bernie brillstein – where did i go right you’re no one in hollywood unless someone wants you dead.

The fact that the late Bernie Brillstein wasn’t a household name, particularly in the UK, just adds to the surprise of his 1999 autobiography. For Brillstein was instrumental in the careers of people such as Jim Henson, John Belushi and Gilda Radner. As a manager and producer, he had access to lots of behind the scenes stories, and he shares many of them, from a slightly different perspective than many others can offer. He has interesting stories to tell, and tells them very, very well.

Buy  Where Did I Go Right?  on Amazon

Billy crystal – still foolin’ em.

A warm, witty collection of essays from actor, writer, director, comedian and Oscar-host Billy Crystal. Plenty to enjoy here, too, with my favourite being the story of how Charles Bronson slammed the phone down on Crystal, insulted, after being offered Jack Palance’s role in City Slickers . The film for which Palance would finally win his Oscar…

Buy  Still Foolin’ Em  on Amazon

Michael deeley – blade runners, deer hunters & blowing the bloody doors off.

An insightful read this, and (relatively) rare in that it gives a producer’s-eye view of some very big and important movies. Michael Deeley’s stories are happy to poke at a few old wounds, and he’s a man who doesn’t pull his metaphorical punches.

Inevitably, that means you get a very one-sided version of events behind the scenes of films such as Blade Runner , The Italian Job , and The Deer Hunter . But once you settle into the fact that it’s a very subjective tale – as more autobiographies should arguably be – then it’s an entertaining book to read. Just one you’re aware that you might not be getting the full picture from.

Buy  Blader Runners, Deer Hunters & Blowing The Bloody Doors Off on Amazon

Helen de winter – what i really want to do is produce.

What differentiates some film books is the enviable access they’d had to the right people. That’s certainly the case with Helen de Winter’s comprehensive What I Really Want To Do Is Produce . In it, she tries to get to the bottom of what film producing is about, and how to break into it. And in doing so, she talks to the likes of Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson, Lawrence Bender, and Lord Of The Rings producer Bob Shaye.

Each has different approaches to their job, and de Winter takes time to find out about them, then present the information in a digestible way. No shortage of good anecdotes, too…

Buy  What I Really Want To Do Is Produce  on Amazon

Kirk douglas – i am spartacus.

Kirk Douglas has penned many books , but I thought I Am Spartacus was really quite something. It’s an economical piece of work, that in turn tells the story of Douglas producing and starring in Spartacus , whilst also helping break the Hollywood blacklist.

The blacklist side of the story comes from the hiring of Dalton Trumbo (now the subject of a biopic starring Bryan Cranston), and that’s arguably the best bit of the book. His stories of visiting Trumbo, living in Hollywood exile, are expertly told.

But then so is the story of changing directors on Spartacus , and coming to work with Stanley Kubrick. It won’t take too long to read I Am Spartacus , but it’s very much worth the effort.

Buy  I Am Spartacus  on Amazon

Susan dworkin – making tootsie: a film stud y.

A little bit dry this one, perhaps, but still an interesting book, and one given a new audience by it being made available on Kindle. It digs into the making, as you can probably guess, of Sydney Pollack’s comedy classic, and in particular the intensity with which star Dustin Hoffman approached the lead role. It’s a brief read, coming in well shy of 200 pages, but delivers very much on the promise of its title.

Buy  Making Tootsie: A Film Study  on Amazon

Joe eszterhas – hollywood animal.

A very long, sometimes rambling, but very often utterly gripping autobiography of screenwriter Joe Eszterhas. The meat for movie fans will be in his candid description of the rise and fall of his screenwriting career ( and we touched on just a fraction of that here ). We get the expensive script sales, the arguments, taking on the most powerful man in Hollywood at the time (agent Mike Ovitz) and the making of some of the movies themselves.

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What we also get is Eszterhas’ complex upbringing, his marriages, his battle with the bottle, and often a picture painted of a not very nice man. Comfortably one of the longest books on this list, it’s worth sticking with it through its slower parts, not least because it’s an insightful glimpse of Hollywood in the ’80s and ’90s.

Buy  Hollywood Animal  on Amazon

Robert evans – the kid stays in the picture.

From the heady heights of heading up Paramount in the 1970s, to a fast fall from the top fuelled by excess, Robert Evans has quite a tale to tell. Across two books, he both tells it very well, and in a very tired way. So stick with the first, the engrossing The Kid Stays In The Picture . It leaves him on the verge of what would prove to be an unsuccessful comeback – The Saint and Sliver were on his slate at the time – but his stories from behind the scenes of Love Story and The Godfather , for instance, are engrossing.

Robert Evans is clearly a man in love with himself, by the tone of his prose. Plus you won’t be left in much doubt that he’s led something of a sleazy life. Yet for some reason, books about ’70s Hollywood rarely fail to deliver. This is no exception.

Buy  The Kid Stays In The Picture  on Amazon

Corey feldman – coreyography: a memoir.

Corey Feldman has lived more lives in his time on Earth already than many of us will ever manage, and his open, revealing memoir is pretty frank about them. It’s heavily movie-centric, going behind the scenes on the likes of The Goonies and The Lost Boys , before detailing his current run of DTV productions. But it’s most haunting for the stories of what it’s like being a child star, with a very pushy parent. Difficult to read at times, as it should be, Feldman puts his heart and soul onto the page in a very strong book.

Buy  Coreyography: A Memoir  on Amazon

Angus finney – the egos have landed.

Palace Pictures was, at one stage, the biggest force in UK cinema. At a point where the British film industry was in the doldrums, Palace – in the ’80s and ’90s – managed to get films such as The Company Of Wolves and The Crying Game through the system.

But the methods Palace used – with films heading into production before full financing was in place – led to a house of proverbial cards the eventually came tumbling down. Angus Finney’s book captures some of that. And whilst its still leaves the door open for perhaps a more definitive tome on the Palace era, it’s a fascinating snapshot of a very British riches to rags story.

Buy  The Egos Have Landed  on Amazon

Charles fleming – high concept: don simpson and the hollywood culture of excess.

This doesn’t feel like the definitive telling of uber-producer Don Simpson’s life. Perhaps if his one-time business partner Jerry Bruckheimer ever writes an autobiography, then there’ll be a little less varnish.

Still, Fleming does a solid job charting the rise and premature death of Top Gun and Days Of Thunder producer Don Simpson. There’s a lot more excess charted than there is movie insight delivered, and it might have worked best as a series of articles rather than a book. But it’s hard not to get something out of High Concept .

Buy  High Concept  on Amazon

Michael j fox – lucky man.

As you might expect, Michael J Fox’s first memoir focuses on his diagnosis with Parkinson’s disease, and the way he has fought from that point. Lucky Man is also intertwined with some candid conversation about his movie career, and the choices that he made. For instance, Fox details signing a three picture deal with Universal Pictures in the early 1990s, and how that proved to be a good idea only in the short term.

Fox’s voice is engrained through Lucky Man , and it’s a rounded, moving and very human piece of work.

Buy  Lucky Man  on Amazon

Hadley freeman – life moves pretty fast.

You don’t have to spend long with Google to find articles from people on why movies of a particular era mattered to them so much. What makes Hadley Freeman’s terrific Life Moves Pretty Fast stand out is that not only does she come up with interesting reasons as to why her films of choice worked so well, but that she’s woven that in alongside chats with some of the people behind them.

Her choices are fiercely mainstream too. And given how the bookshelves of Waterstones have a habit of creaking under the weight of academic dissections of less well known features, Life Moves Pretty Fast is all the more accessible for celebrating such ultimately successful films.

Buy  Life Moves Pretty Fast  on Amazon

Caseen gaines – we don’t need roads: the making of the back to the future trilogy.

An unofficial guide to the putting together of the Back To The Future films, albeit with enough access to key personnel to give it a bit of extra lift. If there’s a flaw with Gaines’ well-researched and likeable book, it’s that it gives the sequels – which arguably have enough stories of their own to fill a book – quite short shrift. A pity, as many of the tales of the first film are already well known. Still, Gaines is a passionate host, and it’s hard not to be swept along by his love and enthusiasm for his subject matter.

Buy  We Don’t Need Roads  on Amazon

William goldman – adventures in the screen trade.

Not for nothing is William Goldman’s Adventures In The Screen Trade known as one of the very best books about film ever written. It’s the book in which Goldman came up with the phrase “nobody knows anything” to describe how people keep trying to predict the ingredients for a successful movie. Yet the pages are dripping with stories that are gold dust for self-respecting movie nerds. Superbly written, as you’d expect, decades on, Goldman’s book is still hard to beat.

Buy  Adventures In The Screen Trade  on Amazon

William goldman – which lie did i tell.

A sequel of sorts to Adventures In The Screen Trade , Which Lie Did I Tell? brings thing a little more up to date. Published in 2001, it covers Goldman’s work on films such as The Chamber , Maverick , and Misery . Plus it’s got plenty of tips for wannabe-screenwriters, and some superb analysis of what does and doesn’t work on film.

Buy  Which Lie Did I Tell?  on Amazon

Richard e grant – with nails.

The film writing of Richard E Grant is something to be cherished, not least because he published his outstanding movie diaries – With Nails – whilst very much at his most in-demand.

Grant turns his witty, critical eye to the likes of Hudson Hawk (his account of this one being a particular delight), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (a movie you can feel him aching to like slightly more than he ultimately did) and L.A. Story . As a snapshot of ’90s movie-making, it’s pretty much unparalleled, all the better for us not having to wait 20 years until these stories spilled out.

Grant’s subsequent film book, The Wah Wah Diaries , is also worth a look – an incisive and intelligent look at making his debut movie as director, Wah Wah .

Buy  Richard E Grant  on Amazon

Nancy griffin and kim masters – hit & run.

A spiky, terrifically-written look at when Peter Guber and Jon Peters ran Columbia Pictures in the early 1990s. In particular, the superb insight into just what went wrong with the infamous Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle Last Action Hero is reason enough to pick the book up.

As with many Hollywood true stories, it’s so bizarre and far-fetched there are moments of pinch-yourself madness in here. And yet, it seems, it was all true. One of the best books out there about 1990s Hollywood.

Buy  Hit & Run  on Amazon

Peter guber and peter bart – shoot out.

The astonishing era at Paramount Pictures in the 1970s has been richly covered in film books, but there’s room in producer and eventual Sony studio head Peter Guber for a few more tales.

Shoot Out – which was turned into a television series – was published in 2003, and thus it doesn’t cover his more recent career heading up Mandalay Entertainment. But between him and former Variety editor Peter Bart, there’s enough behind the scenes meat here to warrant seeking out a copy.

Buy  Shoot Out  on Amazon

Don hahn – brain storm.

Not ostenisbly a movie book, Don Hahn’s Brain Storm is nonetheless bursting with movie anecdotes, of particular interest to animation fans. Hahn, the producer of films such as The Lion King and Beauty And The Beast , has put together a book that gets across ways to make your work more creative, and how to capture that spirit in others. But the bonus here is in the proverbial margins, as Hahn offers tips and examples from across his movie making career.

Buy  Brain Storm  on Amazon

Jane hamsher – killer instinct.

Whether you came to love or loathe Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers , the story behind bringing it to the screen is worth a read. There’s the fact that original screenwriter Quentin Tarantino became, er, ‘not a fan’ of the way his story was being treated. There’s the moment where Stone caught one particular shot, with the added incentive of free goodies if he did. And there’s ultimately the story of young producers biting off, at first, seemingly more than they can chew, and eventually steering one of the 90s’ most controversial movies to the screen.

Buy  Killer Instinct  on Amazon

Mark harris – scenes from a revolution.

A really, really satisfying read this one, that takes the five films nominated for the Best Picture Oscar in 1967, and charts how each had their part to play in shaping the future of Hollywood. Harris is an excellent guide, from the tittle-tattle behind the scenes of the bloated Dr. Dolittle , to the struggles just to get Warner Bros to fully back Bonnie & Clyde .

Wonderfully researched and a joy to read, Harris’ Five Came Back also comes strongly recommended.

Buy  Scenes From A Revolution  on Amazon

Peter hanson and paul robert herman – tales from the script.

It’s the level of access that Peter Hanson and Paul Robert Herman has enjoyed that makes Tales From The Script such a vital book for wannabe screenwriters. It’s packed with anecdotes about the film industry, and in particular, how the development process dilutes and in many cases weakens the ideas that have got a film interesting a movie studio in the first place. Contributions come from the likes of Frank Darabont, the late Nora Ephron, William Goldman and Shane Black, amongst many others.

Buy  Tales From The Script  on Amazon

Dade hayes and jonathan bing – open wide: how hollywood box office became a national obsession.

Box office analyis used to be purely for film trade magazines, now it’s a meal feasted on by thousands of websites and publications. The 2006 book Open Wide dug into this, and it’s at its best when it zeroes in on a trio of movies as they approach their release in summer 2003. The films? Terminator 3 , DreamWorks’ Sinbad , and Legally Blonde 2 .

It’s interesting to read just how far in advance the film companies concerned knew they had problems, or otherwise (especially DreamWorks, in this instance). And whilst Open Wide can be tough to get through at times, when Hayes and Bing devote their attention to those three movies, the results are excellent.

Buy  Open Wide  on Amazon

Robert hofler – party animals.

Or to give it its full title: Party Animals – A Hollywood Tale Of Sex, Drugs And Rock ‘n’ Roll Starring The Fabulous Allan Carr .

Penned by Robert Hofler, this biography charts the rise of producer Allan Carr, whose name adorns most infamously both Grease and the Village People movie musical, Can’t Stop The Music . Oh, and Grease 2 .

It’s a story of parties, excess and famous names, although it does feel like – a harsh criticism for a biography, granted – this is a very familiar tale. However, the stories of some of Carr’s parties alone make for good reading, and we also get an insightful glimpse at the insecurities beneath a one-time big name producer.

Buy  Party Animals  on Amazon

David hughes – tales from development hell.

An update to his earlier book, The Greatest Sci-Fi Movies Never Made , the trick to David Hughes’ excellent Tales From Development Hell is that he’s dug deep to find the real stories behind fabulous-sounding movies that never happened. His book charts the battles behind Darreon Aronofsky’s Batman , Ridley Scott’s Crisis In The Hot Zone , and productions that have since been realized, including Indiana Jones 4 and the now-in-development Sandman .

In the last addition, he also adds a chapter where he discusses his own screenwriting, and this too proves to be insightful and well worth reading. The structure of the book makes it one to easily dip and out of, too.

Buy  Tales From Development Hell  on Amazon

Anjelica huston – watch me: a memoir.

As with many memoirs on this list, Huston’s latest book, Watch Me , talks around the movies as much as about them. Yet there are real gems in here, not least her working with her father, John Huston, on his last film.

Huston manages to be open and engaging without being snarky and nasty, and her writing is perceptive and captivating. I found myself breezing through this one, and enjoying it, in next to no time.

Buy  Watch Me: A Memoir  on Amazon

Brian jay jones – jim henson: the biography.

Inevitably covering Henson’s early work, experimental shorts and television breakthrough with the likes of The Muppets and Sesame Street , there’s also no shortage of material here for movie nerds to feast on.

In particular, it’s hard not to applaud as Henson delves into The Dark Crystal , without any semblance of a completed script in place. Then there’s the sheer ambition in The Muppet Movie and Labyrinth . It’s an exhaustive biography, but crucially not a rose-tinted one. It’s a richly rewarding read, too.

Buy  Jim Henson: The Biography  on Amazon

Dave itzkoff – mad as hell.

I’ve a real soft spot for books that go into forensic detail about the making of just one film. But even without that, David Itzkoff’s superb dissection about the making of Sidney Lumet’s classic Network would be a must-read.

New interviews and archive material are skilfully woven together, and the end result is a wonderful piece of work, about a really wonderful movie. Credit, too, for focusing so heavily on screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky.

Buy  Mad As Hell  on Amazon

Rebecca keegan – the futurist: the life and films of james cameron.

Aided by having access to her subject, Rebecca Keegan has here put together a bit of a whistle-stop tour of the movie career of James Cameron, right up to the release of Avatar . It’s got a lot to cover in its near-300 pages, and if there’s a frustration, it’s that the production of each of Cameron’s movies feels like it deserves a book of this ilk in its own right.

Still, Keegan absolutely doesn’t short-change you when it comes to anecdotes about the man himself. Our favourite? On the set of True Lies , Cameron barking at Arnold Schwarzenneger “would you rather have Paul Verhoeven directing this?”. Priceless.

Buy  The Futurist  on Amazon

Mark kermode – it’s only a movie.

Mark Kermode has done a trilogy of books thus far that are his broader takes on cinema (as opposed to, for his instance, his excellent BFI tome on Silent Running ). I’ve enjoyed the other two – Hatchet Job and The Good, The Bad & The Multiplex – a lot. But It’s Only A Movie just about edges them for me.

Ostensibly an autobiography, it’s actually Kermode talking about his upbringing through films. As such, he paints a picture of growing up with double bills, the excitement of discovering new filmmakers, his love of horror and – as you’d expect – The Exorcist . It’s a witty, immensely readable piece of work.

Buy  It’s Only A Movie  on Amazon

Michael kuhn – one hundred films and a funeral.

A little bit clinical this one, but if you like your film books nerdy, and with a managerial focus, then it’s worth at least checking a local library for. After all, it’s the only book on this list that attempts to break down the mechanics of budgeting a motion picture. Furthermore, the story of how Kuhn helped build up Polygram Films in the UK – and in particular his hand in turning Four Weddings And A Funeral into a success, is rewarding. Not always the easiest to get through, but there’s the kind of nuggets in here you don’t find elsewhere.

Buy  One Hundred Films And A Funeral  on Amazon

Nicole laporte and stephen hoye – the men who would be king.

The ambitious plan by Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen to set up the first major Hollywood movie studio since United Artists enjoyed some success. Still, over 20 years on, DreamWorks is a different beast to the one it once was. Nicole LaPorte and Stephen Hoye’s chatty history goes through the creation of the studio, and how it stumbled through its early days before hitting success with the likes of Gladiator and American Beauty .

Russell Crowe infamously called at least one of its facts to account around the time of the book’s publication, but it’s still a decent read, that pulls together much of the early DreamWorks story.

Buy  The Men Who Would Be King  on Amazon

John leguizamo – pimps, hos, playa hatas and all the rest of my hollywood friends.

Dear John Leguizamo: please write more books.

Rare amongst his peers for writing an honest, candid and hilarious book about the people around him whilst still working with some of them, his 2006 book is quite brilliant. The Steven Seagal anecdote from the set of Executive Decision alone justifies the book’s existence. As you might expect, that’s the proverbial tip of a quite wonderful proverbial iceberg.

Buy  Pimps, Hos, Playa Hatas And All The Rest Of My Hollywood Friends on Amazon

Art linson – what just happened bitter hollywood tales from the front line.

Also subsequently made into a film, What Just Happened? sees producer Art Linson taking us through his world of movie-making, and the difficulties that lie wherein. It’s not an easy book to read in one sitting, giving that Linson jumps around an awful lot. But he does have things to say about the making of movies such as Fight Club , the underrated The Edge , and Great Expectations , that make this an intriguing tome for those interested in ’90s Hollywood.

Buy  What Just Happened?  on Amazon

David mamet – bambi vs godzilla.

Perhaps not quite the great film book you’d expect and hope for from David Mamet, Bambi Vs Godzilla is nonetheless a useful look at the Hollywood system. This time, it’s primarily from Mamet’s screenwriting and occasionally directing perspective, and he shares his bemusement at many parts of the filmmaking process. You might not quite get as much out of the book as you’d hope, but I still quite enjoyed it.

Buy  Bambi Vs Godzilla  on Amazon

Garry marshall – wake me when it’s funny.

Marshall, the director of films such as Pretty Woman and Beaches , has written two memoirs, but I confess I’ve only read this one. It was worth it, though. The book explores his rise to prominence through his work writing, producing and directing on the liks of Happy Days and Mork & Mindy . It then takes in his movie career (albeit, given when the book was written, stopping in the 1990s).

Marshall’s an entertaining storytelling, but I also liked very much his detailed stories, of how he went about getting certain scenes to work. Good stuff.

Buy  Wake Me When It’s Funny  on Amazon

Jack matthews – the battle of brazil.

A wonderfully-researched tale of Hollywood horror, that, of course, is also true. The Battle Of Brazil is the story of how Terry Gilliam and Universal Pictures came to butt heads over the director’s richly acclaimed 1985 movie, Brazil .

The book covers the story of the studio’s fight with the filmmaker, and the infamous putting together of the ‘Love Conquers All’ cut of the movie. Furthermore, there’s Gilliam’s campaign to persuade Universal to release a movie that was picking up awards, even if nobody could see it.

The book also features the director’s cut of the screenplay. An astonishing story, excellently told by Matthews.

Buy  The Battles of Brazil  on Amazon

Simon mayo and mark kermode –  the movie doctors.

Don’t be fooled! What looks like it may just be a tie-in book to their excellent Wittertainment Radio Five Live film review programme, Simon Mayo and Mark Kermode have put together a thumping good film book instead. Capturing the tone of their excellent radio show whilst finding (lots of) space for detailed film essays, quick recommendations and lots of film chatter, it’s a beautifully presented, absorbing piece of work.

Buy The Movie Doctors  on Amazon

Mike medavoy – you’re only as good as your next one.

The co-founder of Orion Pictures, and one-time head of TriStar, Mike Medavoy has had his fingers in an awful lot of film pies. Films greenlighted on his watch include The Terminator , The Silence Of The Lambs , Cliffhanger , and Sleepless In Seattle .

His book, subtitled 100 Great Films, 100 Good Films And 100 For Which I Should Be Shot , is a little scattergun. But, not for the first time on this list, he offers a snapshot of what it was like to be making movies, and getting them through the system, across the 1970s through to the 1990s. He’s a strong guide, too, with enough insight and access to put across an account with real substance to it.

Buy  You’re Only As Good As Your Next One  on Amazon

Ryan north – b^f: the novelization of the feature film.

A book that no Back To The Future fan should be without. Originally posted as a Tumblr blog, what Ryan North has done here is taken the utterly bizarre original novelization of Back To The Future by the late George Gipe, and done a forensic scene by scene comparison with the film.

The star of the show is North, though, thanks to his breathlessly funny writing style. Rarely has such a factual dissection induced such mirth. Given the structure of the book – an assembling of the aforementioned Tumblr posts – it’s best to read this one in pieces, rather than in one go.

Buy  B^F: The Novelization Of The Feature Film on Amazon

Lynda obst – hello, he lied: and other truths from the hollywood trenches.

Producer Lynda Obst has written a couple of books about working in Hollywood, but this one is probably the best of them. It’s more aimed at those wanting to work in the business, or get advice on surviving it. But for outsides, Obst still has interesting tales to tell. Her insight into how, for instance, the movie Crisis In The Hot Zone failed to materialize is eye-opening.

Buy  Hello, He Lied  on Amazon

David a price – the pixar touch.

One part the making of a technology company, another part the story of John Lasseter’s thirst to make animated films, David A Price’s The Pixar Touch is a terrific read. In particular, Lasseter’s drive to make massive, film-changing breakthroughs in digital animation.

Yet Price doesn’t neglect the Pixar culture, the Steve Jobs influence (and doubts), and the ultimate battles with Disney. It’s an enthralling read, and well worth pairing with Ed Catmull’s Creativity Inc for a fuller look at the life and times of Pixar, and how it came to be.

Buy  The Pixar Touch  on Amazon

Robert rodriguez – rebel without a crew.

How far would you go to get your first feature funded? In the case of Robert Rodriguez – now best known, of course, for the likes of Spy Kids and the Sin City films – he’d sell his body to medical science.

Rebel With A Crew charts Rodriguez trying to get his first full feature – the micro-budget El Mariachi – funded and made. In his extremely candid book, he’s as open about the technical challenges he faced in the edit as he is the lengths he’d go to in order to secure finance. It’s a captivating, outstanding read.

Buy Rebel With A Crew  on Amazon

Jake rossen – superman vs hollywood.

It stops before we get to the current era, as Zack Snyder takes cinematic ownership of the Superman screen franchise, but Jake Rossen’s history of Hollywood’s flirtation with the Man of Steel is still perhaps the best account out there.

The book tries to do an awful lot, but finally comes into its own when it moves onto the Salkinds, and how they brought the first four Superman films to the screen. In particular, the challenges of making the first two back to back, and the subsequent fallout with director Richard Donner. We then get the Superman III and Superman IV problems dissected.

The Death Of Superman Lives movie picks up the later story slightly better, but this is still an empassioned account of how Hollywood has dealt with a comic book icon.

Buy  Superman Vs Hollywood  on Amazon

Danny rubins – how to write groundhog day.

Less a great book perhaps, more a really, really interesting one. For what sets Rubins’ story of taking his idea to the movies apart is he charts the before, middle and after of its development. All from the writers’ perspective. On top of that, you get the original script for Groundhog Day that Rubins wrote, which is notably different, before it went through the system.

Rubins is open about the process he went through, and about what director Harold Ramis brought to it (eventually sharing screenwriting credit). It’s not a textbook, though, rather that Rubins puts a very human perspective on what happened. His book, especially considering the classic movie that came out at the end of it, rewards the time you give it.

Buy  How To Write Groundhog Day  on Amazon

Julie salamon – the devil’s candy.

The real gift of Julie Salamon’s superb telling of the making of the movie The Bonfire Of The Vanities is that she has you absolutely rooting for it. Accepting that the movie was a notorious early 90s Hollywood bomb (eclipsed in Bruce Willis’ career soon after when the knives came out for Hudson Hawk ), Salamon is a patient, diligent observer. She charts how one of the most compelling books of its time was chewed up by the Hollywood system, with director Brian De Palma desperately trying to shape a worthwhile picture at the end of it all.

The Devil’s Candy has been described as the greatest book on the making of a film ever written. I couldn’t personally call that. But I can tell you it’s surely a candidate…

Buy The Devil’s Candy  on Amazon

Michael sellers – john carter and the gods of hollywood.

Andrew Stanton’s John Carter movie seems resigned to living – in the minds of some – in the annals of Hollywood failures. The hugely expensive blockbuster had a muddled released, and the film certainly had problems. Yet few people have got to the heart of quite what happened as effectively as Michael Sellers.

Sellers takes the project from its early stages, through to the botched marketing campaign and its eventual release. He has a perspective on it, given that he ran a John Carter fan site that was clearly doing a better job of selling the film than Disney was. Once or twice, perhaps, his focus shifts a little more towards his site than the key task in hand. But that’s a minor grumble, in what turns out to be a riveting account of how a film that Hollywood had been trying to bring to the screen for 100 years fell at the release hurdle.

Buy  John Carter and the Gods of Hollywood  on Amazon

Robert sellers – very naughty boys , hellraisers.

Robert Sellers is the author of a bunch of fascinating, quite gossipy film books, each of which are written in an accessible, non-academic way. That’s not to sell them short. Sellers is clearly fascinated with his subjects, and that can’t help but come across on the page.

His best? Well, I’m going for two.

Firstly, the rise of Handmade Films is charted in Very Naughty Boys . Founded by George Harrison, Handmade had an at-times guerilla approach to getting movies made, and amongst the productions it’d be responsible for were Monty Python’s Life Of Brian and Time Bandits . There’s an inevitable fall to the rise part of the story, yet Sellers has a style that takes you through 1980s British moviemaking, as if you and he have drinks on the table, and he’s telling a very, very good story.

The same style permeates Hellraisers , his charting of the movie and drinking careers of Richard Burton, Richard Harris, Peter O’Toole and Oliver Reed. Some of the stories he manages to uncover beggar belief, and Sellers writers about them in a warm and entertaining way.

Buy  Very Naughty Boys   and   Hellraisers  on Amazon

Dawn steel – they can kill you but they can’t eat you.

The late Dawn Steel was one of the first women to ever run a Hollywood movie studio, heading up Columbia Pictures in the late 1980s, before setting up Steel Pictures and making films such as Cool Runnings .

Steel’s memoir is a candid one, most notably for her recollection of discovering Paramount Pictures had fired her, just as she’d given birth to her daughter. Steel died tragically young, at just 51 years old. Her excellent book is a fitting tribute to her work.

Buy They Can Kill You But They Can’t Eat You  on Amazon

James b stewart – disneywar: the battle for the magic kingdom.

The boardroom battles behind the scenes at Disney in the 1990s and early 2000s left the company in a position ripe for saving – which the merger with Pixar arguably properly kickstarted. The tragic death of Frank Wells in the early 1990s led to a power struggle of sorts between Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg, with the latter eventually leaving to co-found DreamWorks.

DisneyWar is a book that tries to chart all of this – and there’s both a biography and an autobiography of Michael Eisner that has a go, less successfully – and as a consequence, it does get bogged down in boardroom politics. But it’s surprisingly entertaining, and would also set the scene for a film in its own right. It also goes a long way to explaining why Disney rose and fall so dramatically across 20 or so years.

Buy  DisneyWar  on Amazon

Drew struzan and david j schow – the art of drew struzan.

I’ve tried to focus this list more on text-driven books than visual ones, but I’ll make an exception for the brilliant The Art Of Drew Struzan . The reason? Because alongside the draft poster designs for many iconic movies, the text – from Struzan and David J Schow – bothers to take us through why some ideas were rejected, why some made it through, and what Struzan’s thought process was. A real gem.

Buy The Art of Drew Struzan  on Amazon

Sharon waxman – rebels on the backlot.

A really fascinating book this one, that looks at how six films and six filmmakers at the end of the 1990s came to alter the Hollywood studio system. The filmmakers cover David O Russell, Steven Soderbergh, David Fincher and Spike Jonze, amongst others. Waxman has access to most of her subjects too, and in particular, the story of how Being John Malkovich made it through the Hollywood system by simply barely being noticed is a fascinating one. An excellent book.

Buy  Rebel On The Backlot  on Amazon

Jerry weintraub – when i stop talking, you’ll know i’m dead.

The late Jerry Weintraub’s resume is testament to the fact that, at one time, he was one of Hollywood’s biggest producers. That said, his book isn’t one of a man with scores to settle. Rather, it’s a guided tour through Weintraub’s life and the entertainment industry, with few passages likely to make headlines, but the coherent whole adding up to a gently intriguing tale.

Buy When I Stop Talking, You’ll Know I’m Dead  on Amazon

Mara Wilson – Where Am I Now?: True Stories Of Girlhood and Accidental Fame

Not a pure film book, but Mara Wilson’s excellent memoir recounts her early experiences as a child actor, and how that conflicted with the personal tragedy she was going through at the same time. Furthermore, it’s an intelligent, wonderfully-written piece of work, that follows Wilson’s decision to move away from acting, and why…

Buy  Where Am I Now?  on Amazon

Andrew yule – hollywood a go-go: an account of the cannon phenomenon.

A tricky book to track down at a decent price (it was a lucky charity shop find for me), Hollywood A Go-Go was first published in 1987, when the rise and demise of Cannon Films was still fresh, and a little less nostalgic (the excellent documentary film Electric Boogaloo certainly had a lot more affection).

At the heart of the story is the fractious relationshop between Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, and Yule doesn’t disappoint in his relaying of their tale. It’s very much worth the effort to track this one down.

Buy Hollywood A Go-Go on Amazon

A few others worth mentioning, that i’ve read and nearly put on the main list….

Gavin Edwards – Last Night At The Viper Room

Michael Uslan – The Boy Who Loved Batman

Patrick Swayze and Lisa Niemi – Time Of My Life

Tom Shone – Blockbuster

And I’m about to start reading My Indecision Is Final . Expect to see that on the main list soon…

Lead image: BigStock

Simon Brew | @SimonBrew

Editor, author, writer, broadcaster, Costner fanatic. Now runs Film Stories Magazine.

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35 Best Movies Based on Books That Are Actually Worth Watching

There are a lot of movies based on books. There are very few good movies based on books.

That's not a knock on Hollywood–it can be challenging to fit a novel's worth of plot and character development into a few hours of entertainment. That's why the best films based on books often feel more like a companion piece than a true retelling of a best-selling paperback. Some, like the 2019 movie adaptation of Little Women , play with the story or add in new scenes to appeal to a modern audience. Others benefit from the glitz and glam that Hollywood brings. Netflix's film version of To All the Boys I've Loved Before , for example, comes with an engaging soundtrack that elevates the romance onscreen.

Below you'll find some of the best movies based on books available for streaming right now. We also included the real-life novels that inspired them so you can add to your reading list. No chance of boredom here. (Need more? We've also got a guide to the best movies based on romance novels .)

All products featured on Glamour are independently selected by our editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, we may earn an affiliate commission.

1. Lady Chatterley’s Lover (2022)

The book: Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence

D.H. Lawrence's novel about an affair between a gamekeeper and an upper-class woman is notorious for its explicit descriptions of sex—so much so that the book was banned for obscenity in several countries. Onsreen, stars Emma Corrin and Jack O'Connell have a natural chemistry that only adds to the steaminess.

Available to stream on Netflix

2. Pride and Prejudice (2005)

The book: Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Jane Austen's classic story of love and bad first impressions has been adapted many times over. But this film version, starring Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen, takes a more realistic approach than other film versions. As a result, enemies turned lovers Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy come to life onscreen.

Available to rent on Amazon Prime Video

3. If Beale Street Could Talk (2018)

The book: If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin

James Baldwin's 1974 novel If Beale Street Could Talk , about a young woman trying to clear the name of her boyfriend after he was wrongfully accused of a crime in New York, is an incredible read. So only someone with a vision like Barry Jenkins, who wrote and directed this adaptation, could bring it to the big screen. The Oscar-nominated film received numerous awards, including a best supporting actress win for Regina King's performance.

Available to stream on Hulu

4. The Wizard of Oz

The book: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum

What can be said about The Wizard of Oz that you don't already know? The 1939 classic starring Judy Garland enhances L. Frank Baum's children's fantasy novel through its innovative use of Technicolor, memorable performances, and a beloved score that includes “Over the Rainbow.”

Available to stream on Amazon Prime Video

5. Little Women (2019)

The book: Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

There's a reason Little Women has been adapted for film seven times. Louisa May Alcott's semiautobiographical novel about sisters Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy has stood the test of time, and it's still just as relatable now as it was in 1868, when it was published. The most recent remake stars Laura Dern, Meryl Streep, and Saoirse Ronan and is arguably the best interpretation of Alcott's story.

Available to buy on Amazon Prime Video

6. Crazy Rich Asians (2018)

The book: Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan

Where do we even begin with this one? The fashion! The romance! The drama! Constance Wu and Henry Golding lead the romantic comedy about a Chinese American woman who travels to Singapore to meet her boyfriend's family. Sounds simple enough, right? Wrong. His family is one of the richest and well-known families in the country, and his mother is not exactly welcoming of her son's new romance.

Available to stream on HBO Max

7. Gone Girl (2014)

The book: Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

We could write a dissertation about Gone Girl, and it still wouldn't be long enough to dive into the complicated issues tackled in the movie. Here's what you need to know: The David Fincher–directed mystery movie is about a husband who becomes a suspect in his wife's disappearance. The thriller tackles parenting, manipulation, misogyny, and most of all, marriage. When it comes to movie adaptations of books, this is near the top of the list.

8. A Simple Favor (2018)

The book: A Simple Favor: A Novel by Darcey Bell

Nothing's simple about A Simple Favor . Perhaps the best part of the crime thriller is Blake Lively and Anna Kendrick's odd yet enthralling dynamic. You'll be scratching your head from start to finish as you try to figure out what exactly is going on in the film.

9. Sense and Sensibility (1995)

The book: Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen

Another Jane Austen movie makes the list because…well, there are just so many good adaptations of her work. Emma Thompson and Kate Winslet lead this film about a sensible and reserved older sister, Elinor, and her romantically inclined and eagerly expressive younger sister, Marianne.

10. The Devil Wears Prada (2006)

The book: The Devil Wears Prada: A Novel by Lauren Weisberger

Meryl Streep plays the coldest, scariest, most intimidating boss at the fictional fashion magazine Runway . Anne Hathaway's character is clueless and unfashionable, and fancies herself a serious journalist. Their characters clash yet somehow find a way to work together. The movie is elevated by the performances, and you might find yourself surprisingly moved at the end.

11. The Color Purple (1985)

The book: The Color Purple by Alice Walker

The story of Celie (played by Whoopi Goldberg) is one that will stay with you. The movie is based on the novel of the same name by Alice Walker and portrays the problems Black women faced during the early 20th century, including domestic violence, poverty, racism, and sexism. Celie's journey spans a 40-year time period.

12. The First Wives Club (1996)

The book: The First Wives Club by Olivia Goldsmith

We love everything about this movie: the acting, the humor, and the friendship of three reunited friends. The film follows the women, played by Bette Midler, Goldie Hawn, and Diane Keaton, deciding to get revenge on their ex-husbands after the death of a close friend.

13. To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before (2018)

The book: To All the Boys I've Loved Before by Jenny Han

Laura Jean and Peter Kavinsky's romance is sure to go down as one of this generation's most popular love stories. The trilogy of teen romantic comedy books by Jenny Han turned Netflix movies are popular for a reason. Yes, there are some common tropes used in the plot. However, the film adaptations somehow still feel fresh, unique, and effortlessly heartwarming.

14. The Harry Potter series (2001–2011)

The book: The Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling

Who could have known that the boy who lived would start an international phenomenon? Readers and audiences of all ages have been obsessed with the Wizarding World for decades, and it's easy to see why: The friendship, the magic, the excitement and the humor are as enthralling in the movies as they are in the books.

Available to stream on Peacock

15. Hidden Figures (2016)

The book: Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race by Margot Lee Shetterly

If you're in the mood for a feel-good movie, then look no further. Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, and Janelle Monáe star in this movie about the three Black women who worked at NASA during the early years of the space program. They were an integral part of launching astronaut John Glenn into orbit. This true story is most likely not one you learned about in school.

Available to stream on Disney+

16. The Silence of the Lambs (1991)

The book : The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris

Anthony Hopkins plays Hannibal Lecter, who famously asks Jodi Foster's character, “Well, Clarice…have the lambs stopped screaming?” If you don't know what that means, there's only one way to find out: Queue up the classic thriller for movie night.

17. The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999)

The book: The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith

This sexy classic is actually part of a series about the Tom Ripley, a social-climbing mimic who will lie, cheat, and even murder his way up the ranks of wealthy midcentury Manhattanites. The movie features Gwyneth Paltrow, Matt Damon, and Jude Law at their golden, glowy, youthful best, and a striking performance from the late Philip Seymour Hoffman.

18. It (2017)

The book: It by Stephen King

This chilling horror classic has terrified generations. In a small New England town, a group of unlikely friends find themselves caught in the clutches of a mysterious shape-shifting killer who takes the form of whatever you fear most.

19. The Princess Diaries (2001)

The book: The Princess Diaries by Meg Cabot

The ultimate glow-up! Mia Thermopolis is an awkward, nerdy high school outcast who discovers she's actually royalty in this modern twist on the Cinderella story. Peppered with observations about friendship, love, and growing up, the books are as funny as the movie. The young adult book series, written like a diary, will make you fall even more in love with Mia than the film adaptation did. Don't be surprised if you find yourself wanting to wear Doc Martens after reading.

20. The Joy Luck Club (1993)

The book: The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan

The Chinese American immigrant experience is explored in detail in this adaptation of Amy Tan's novel, which follows a group of women living in San Francisco's Chinatown as they support one another through heartbreak and triumph.

21. The Princess Bride (1987)

The book: The Princess Bride by Willam Goldman

This beloved classic is like five fairy tales combined into a sparkling family comedy that's much easier to follow than the book it's based on. Featuring a host of quirky character actors and quotable lines, this is essentially a meme factory from before there was such a thing. Don't fight Grandpa; it's time for a love story (you'll get that reference once you watch the movie).

22. Election (1999)

The book: Election by Tom Perrotta

This dark comedy about the ruthlessness of politicians features a breakout performance from a young Reese Witherspoon and taught a generation to recognize the Tracy Flicks in their lives. It's become a catchword often hurled unfairly at women with ambition, but it also accurately describes the kind of earnest yet hollow striving we see in so many people, no matter their gender, today.

23. The Shawshank Redemption (1994)

The book: Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption by Stephen King

The highest-rated movie on IMDb, this classic is parodied (and homaged) all over the place, a favorite of both fans and critics. It's a drama, to be sure, but as far as prison stories go, watchable and even a little hopeful.

24. Atonement (2007)

The book: Atonement: A Novel by Ian McEwan

Beware: This story is a bummer. Though famous for its library sex scene and the debut of a young Saoirse Ronan, Atonement is mostly a war story, and a devastating one at that. No one gets away clean in this tale of love, loss, lies, and regret.

25. Jurassic Park (1993)

The book: Jurassic Park: A Novel by Michael Crichton

This blockbuster keeps getting rebooted for a reason: It's just cool to watch dinosaurs chase people! Yes, there's a lesson here about overstepping the bounds of science and hubris in the face of nature, but mostly, T-Rex go chomp-chomp.

26. The Godfather trilogy (1972–1990)

The book: The Godfather by Mario Puzo

The greatest achievement in the history of American cinema? This crime epic has been praised for its performances, filmmaking, quotable lines, and archetypal characters. It's rich with symbolism and history, but actually a straightforward and pleasant watch. Never meandering or slow, the story is gripping, if devastating.

27. The White Tiger (2021)

The book: The White Tiger: A Novel by Aravind Adiga

This film adaptation of Aravind Adiga's 2008 novel follows a man named Balram Halwai (Adarsh Gourav, in his first leading role) who was born into poverty and uses his wit and cunning to build a successful career as an entrepreneur.

28. The United States vs. Billie Holiday (2021)

The book: Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs by Johann Hari

Andra Day was nominated for an Academy Award for best actress for her portrayal of legendary singer Billie Holiday in this biographical film, which was based in part on Johann Hari's book about the history and impact of drug criminalization.

29. Room (2015)

The book: Room by Emma Donoghue

Both the book and the film adaptation of this intense story follow a kidnapped young woman and her son, who we learn was born in captivity. When they finally escape their abuser, the child gets to experience the outside world for the first time in his life.

30. Emma (2020)

The book: Emma by Jane Austen

Jane Austen's novel, about a spoiled heiress who amuses herself by meddling in the lives of her neighbors, has been adapted to film before. But the 2020 version, starring Anya Taylor-Joy in the titular role, is one of the best thanks to its excellent casting, whimsical costume and set design, and modern approach to the source material.

31. Clueless (1995)

Yes, Emma again! One of Jane Austen’s best books, it also inspired this coming-of-age teen comedy starring Alicia Silverstone, Stacey Dash, Brittany Murphy, and Paul Rudd. Says screenwriter and director Amy Heckerling, “I loved [ Emma ] when I read it in college—it’s the most modern story with the most perfect character, the most lovable, flawed person that you’re rooting for. Then I looked at what could make the bones for the present day high school teenagers, and if I ever thought like, wait, how would this happen, I would just go back to Emma and there were the answers.”

32. The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012)

The book: The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky

Movie adaptations across all genres exist, and that includes YA Emma Watson, Ezra Miller, and Logan Lerman lead this coming-of-age drama about a shy teenager experiencing the many highs and lows of freshman year of high school.

33. The Lord of the Rings series (2001–2003)

The book: The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien

Epic fantasies naturally translate well to the big screen, but nobody does it like this movie series . And now you can follow up your rewatch by diving into Rings of Power, a new TV show that's set thousands of years before the events of The Lord of the Rings .

34. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)

The book: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon by Wang Dulu

Directed by Ang Lee, this epic was a critical and commercial success with 10 Oscar nominations, including one for best picture and a win for best foreign language film.

35. The Paddington movies (2014, 2017)

The book: The Paddington books by Michael Bond

We didn't think Paddington, a beloved fictional character in children's literature, could get any cuter—and then we saw him on the big screen. In fact, Paddington 2 ranks among our favorite movie sequels of all time. If you can watch it without crying…how?

The 53 best book-to-film adaptations ever, ranked

From the page to the silver screen.

The book is always better than the film. That's what they say, isn't it?

Perhaps it's not always true, though. The classic criticism is film adaptations leave too much out. But would The Lord of the Rings movies be better with Tom Bombadil shoehorned in? And do you really want modern movies to get even longer?

Books and films are different formats, but both thrive on strong stories and believable characterisation. The best film adaptations take some of those elements, or the character of a novel, and make them sing on the silver screen.

Today we're going to list some of the best book-to-movie adaptations to date. Some remain faithful to the writer’s original book; some take the source material into previously unimagined areas. All, however, are utterly brilliant.

The best book-to-film adaptations ever

1 . The Godfather (Mario Puzo)

Film: 1972 Director: Francis Ford Coppola

Mario Puzo himself assisted on the screenplay for Coppola’s classic. Unsurprisingly, therefore, the film stays faithful to the manner and quality of the book. Some backstories are eliminated, while others appear in The Godfather II. The ending of the film is actually more gloomy than the book. But both film and book complement each other perfectly.

>> Read the book

2 . The Silence Of The Lambs (Thomas Harris)

Film: 1991 Director: Jonathan Demme

That The Silence of the Lambs is a great movie goes without saying – it won the Big Five (best film; best director; best actor/actress and best writing) at the Oscars. But it’s also a wonderfully sympathetic reworking of Harris’s original text. The horrific themes in Harris’s book are handled in a subtle and taut fashion.

3 . To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee)

Film: 1962 Director: Robert Mulligan

If Harper Lee’s epoch-defining novel is about tolerance and compassion in the face of hatred and violence, then Robert Mulligan’s adaptation has it spot on. The casting of Gregory Peck as the heroic Atticus Finch is pitch perfect, while Scout and Jem, the book’s central protagonists, fare equally well. A truly fantastic film of a fantastic book.

4 . Fight Club (Chuck Palahniuk)

Film: 1999 Director: David Fincher

Critics often attack Hollywood for castrating a book’s central premise or diluting its message so as to garner a bigger audience. This was not the case with Fight Club. Writer Chuck Palahniuk himself has applauded Fincher’s adaptation – while acknowledging that some simplifying had to take place. Fight Club presaged a decade of magazine articles debating man’s emasculation. It was visceral, inflammatory and, above all, entertaining. A brilliant book, and film.

5 . No Country For Old Men (Cormac McCarthy)

Film: 2007 Director: The Coen brothers

Like Dickens before him, Cormac McCarthy’s rich, multi-layered books are tailor-made for cinematic adaptation. That doesn’t mean that bringing them to life is an easy process – the Coen Brothers had to streamline the plot of the grand No Country For Old Men, but the result was film gold.

6 . One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest (Ken Kesey)

Film: 1975 Director: Miloš Forman

Before The Silence of the Lambs scooped the Oscar’s Big Five, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was the last film to achieve such a laudable feat. Forman’s reworking of Ken Kesey’s anti-authoritarian book is a stunning piece of cinema. Kesey claimed to have hated it, despite never allegedly never seeing it. Whatever, the film is hypnotic from beginning to end.

7 . Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)

Film: 2019 Director: Greta Gerwig

Innumerable TV and movie adaptations of Alcott’s 1868 novel Little Women have been attempted over the years. But Greta Gerwig’s 2019 version is comfortably the best. It’s effortless and playful, painting the relationships of the March family sisters without dipping into the saccharine sentimentality that has given several earlier versions an unwanted aftertaste. The cast is superb too. Florence Pugh, Emma Watson, Saoirse Ronan and Eliza Scanlen play the sisters. And both Laura Dern and Timothee Chalamet shine in supporting roles.

8 . The Body (Stephen King)

Film: Stand By Me, 1986 Director: Rob Reiner

This archetypal coming-of-age movie from Rob Reiner began as a Stephen King novella in the same collection as the tales that were later adapted as Apt Pupil and The Shawshank Redemption. Although as American as apple pie (lots of which is regurgitated in the film), the universal themes of childhood, loss of innocence and looking back upon such times with acceptable nostalgia strike a chord with everyone.

9 . American Psycho (Bret Easton Ellis)

Film: 2000 Director: Mary Harron

Ellis’s novel skewers the vapidity at the heart of contemporary American culture with alarming accuracy – Harron’s film is slightly more comedic, and is a hugely enjoyable romp with a magnificent central performance from Christian Bale. A three-in-a-bed-violent-death romp, if you will.

10 . Dune (Frank Herbert)

Dune is a movie that needs to be seen on the big screen. It is a stunning adaptation of the Frank Herbert novel, with director Denis Villeneuve cementing himself as one of the greatest sci-fie directors around. The movie showcases the first part of the novel, introducing us to Paul Atreides and his family who are entrusted with protecting a planet that has the most precious thing in the galaxy on it - spice. It has been confirmed that there will be a Part Two of the movie, which is fantastic news.

11 . Heart Of Darkness (Joseph Conrad)

Film: Apocalypse Now, 1979 Director: Francis Ford Coppola

Coppola’s hallucinatory meditation on the Vietnam War has its roots in Joseph Conrad’s colourful novella Heart of Darkness. Set at the end of the 19th Century in the Belgian Congo and concerned with ivory transporter Marlow’s obsession with ivory trader Kurtz, the book explores multiple themes such as colonialism and racism. While Coppola’s film is more sprawling it certainly addresses these concerns.

12 . Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? (Philip K. Dick)

Film: Blade Runner, 1982 Director: Ridley Scott

Blade Runner is very loosely based on Dick’s cult novel, but Ridley Scott’s dystopian sci-fi thriller is a film for all ages, thanks to a stunning ensemble cast led by Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer and Sean Young. The long-gestating 2017 sequel successfully recreates the magic.

13 . Wiseguy (Nicholas Pileggi)

Film: Goodfellas, 1990 Director: Martin Scorsese

Wiseguy, by journalist Nicolas Pileggi, is a celebrated work of non-fiction that told the story of mobster-turned-FBI informant Henry Hill and his life in and around the Lucchese family for 25 years. Martin Scorsese, who knew this subject intimately, was the ideal director to bring this fascinating story to life. His film, retitled Goodfellas, is possibly the greatest gangster movie of all time.

14 . The Shining (Stephen King)

Film: 1980 Director: Stanley Kubrick

It’s well known that Kubrick was fast and loose with Stephen King’s source material – King himself wasn’t initially impressed with Kubrick’s picture, a stance that seems to have softened with time. However, however, however… that is not to deny the brilliance of Kubrick’s chilling, mesmerising and alarming film. As a faithful adaptation of a book, it’s pretty risible, but as an iconic piece of cinema it’s superb.

15 . L.A. Confidential (James Ellroy)

Film: 1997 Director: Curtis Hanson

L.A. Confidential was the novel that finally saw James Ellroy compared to the likes of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, those arbiters of hard boiled fiction. Hanson’s reworking of Ellroy’s gritty and at times labyrinthine page-turner restructured the plot, but kept the book’s soul. In doing so, he reinvented film noir for the dying embers of the 20th Century.

16 . Lord Of the Rings (JRR Tolkien)

One of the most spell-binding adaptations of a book series ever, Peter Jackson's Lord Of the Rings is a stunning trilogy that more than does the book justice. Despite being over 20 years old now, the effects still make your jaw drop and if you really want to go the distance, then the Extended Editions are the only way.

17 . The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (Stieg Larsson)

Film: 2009 Director: Niels Arden Oplev

Superior to David Fincher’s 2011 Hollywood remake, this is an unsettling film that executes its distressing motives superbly by paying close attention to Steig Larsson’s alarming book. Some scenes are taken from later books in Larsson’s Millennium Series, but this in no way undermines the excellence of Oplev’s taut thriller.

18 . Trainspotting (Irvine Welsh)

Film: 1996 Director: Danny Boyle

Staying faithful to Irvine Welsh’s intense and graphic book wouldn’t have served the interests of film. So it’s to Danny Boyle’s credit that he brings alive Welsh’s ragtag collection of misfit dreamers, ferocious drunks and comedic chancers in an Edinburgh blighted by heroin addiction. It sounds remarkable now, but Welsh had made fiction cool again when he penned this, ahem, addictive book: Boyle, assisted by Ewan McGregor, Robert Carlyle, Kelly McDonald and co, did the same for film. They came as close with the 2017 sequel to recapturing lightning in a bottle as anyone ever manages.

19 . Brokeback Mountain (Anne Proulx)

Film: 2005 Director: Ang Lee

When her 1997 short story was filmed by Ang Lee, author Anne Proulx proclaimed: “I may be the first writer in America to have a piece of writing make its way to the screen whole and entire.” Moreover, the end product is an exceptional piece of cinema: a love story, which happens to be between two men but speaks to the doomed romantic in everyone.

20 . The Remains Of The Day (Kazuo Ishiguro)

Film: 1993 Director: James Ivory

James Ivory might move the time period slightly in his adaptation of Kazou Ishiguro’s celebrated novel from the 1930s to the 1920s, but this is a sterling treatment. The tone is exquisite, capturing the ideas of dignity, service and loyalty impeccably. Like the novel, the film’s depiction of an England at a crossroads between modernity and aristocracy is unforgettable.

21 . Sense & Sensibility (Jane Austen)

Film: 1995 Director: Ang Lee

Sense & Sensibility was Jane Austen’s first published novel: an unabashed romantic novel, with a side order of biting social critique, Ang Lee’s adaptation remained resolutely faithful to the mores of the early 19th Century, while fusing it with accepted Hollywood practices. Emma Thompson penned the screenplay and starred alongside Kate Winslet and Hugh Grant in what is accepted as the best Austen adaptation to date.

22 . Gone With The Wind (Margaret Mitchell)

Film: 1939 Director: David O. Selznick

In truth it would have been a folly not to include this Tinseltown classic. Margaret Mitchell’s novel ran to an incredible 1,037 pages and the film is similarly unstinting in its devotion to telling the story, clocking in at nearly four hours. This dramatic retelling of the events preceding, during and following the American Civil War is rightly feted. Clark Gable, Vivien Leigh, Olivia de Havilland and Leslie Howard shine like the Hollywood royalty that they were.

23 . True Grit (Charles Portis)

Film: 2010 Director: The Coen brothers

The first adaptation of Charles Portis’s novel starred John Wayne and while noted for its excellence as a film, it certainly toned down the violent imagery and brutality in the book. The Coen brothers pay homage to the book by retaining much of the story; framing it squarely in the eyes of the original narrator Mattie Ross and ending the film like the book, 25 years after the events depicted. A marvellous film.

24 . IT (Stephen King)

Film: 2017 Director: Andy Muschietti

We already had a TV adaptation of Stephen King’s IT, before ths film. The Tim Curry take on the book’s killer clown Pennywise is regarded as one of the all-time-great horror performances. But the 2017 film is a better watch all-round, and went on to become the highest grossing horror movie of all time. It took over $700 million at the box office.

25 . The Maltese Falcon (Dashiell Hammett)

Film: 1941 Director: John Huston

By the time first-time director Huston came to bring Hammett’s hard boiled classic to the screen, it had already been adapted twice. This version is the one that is remembered to this day, though. Humphrey Bogart’s portrayal of the morally ambiguous private detective Sam Spade set in stone the idea of the enigmatic investigator, while the wise-crackin’ dialogue and iconic cinematography live on in the films of Tarantino, Scorsese et al.

26 . Room (Emma Donoghue)

Film: 2015 Director: Lenny Abrahamson

You are more likely to know Room the film rather than the 2010 book by Emma Donoghue. The movie won Best Director and Best Actor Oscars for Brie Larson and Lenny Abrahamson. And its story is a grim one. A woman is held captive in suburbia for seven years, and raises her son in this prison.

27 . All Quiet On The Western Front (Erich Maria Remarque)

Film: 1930
 Director: Lewis Milestone

Routinely referred to as the quintessential anti-war film, All Quiet on the Western Front draws heavily from Remarque’s similarly harrowing novel. Upon its release in 1930 – just a year after the book was published – it was regarded as a powerful statement of intent from the then fledgling movie industry. Its potency hasn’t dulled in the intervening years.

28 . Emma (Jane Austen)

Film: 2020 Director: Autumn de Wilde

This 2020 version of Emma plays up the humour and bite of the source material, adhering a little less closely than some Austen-ites might like for a better on-screen effect. But much of the same spirit, and those period costumes, remains. It’s a film with real rhythm. Those up for an even looser take on Emma should not miss 1995’s Clueless, a near-perfect film, if not one quite closely tied to the book enough to make this list.

29 . Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (John le Carré)

Film: 2011 Director: Tomas Alfredson

When shown on television in 1979, the adaptation of John le Carré’s much-admired Cold War spy thriller ran to 315 minutes over seven episodes. How to squeeze that into a feature film? Well, Tomas Alfredson did it with aplomb. Gary Oldman is an inspired choice as the understated, stoic and anti-Bond George Smiley: the supporting cast – including Colin Firth, Tom Hardy, John Hurt and Benedict Cumberbatch – just add extra excellence. Le Carré must have been happy with the result because he makes a cameo appearance.

30 . The Sheep-Pig (Dick King-Smith)

Film: Babe, 1995 Director: Chris Noonan

Dick King-Smith’s charming story about a pig that proves to be the equal of any sheepdog was given the fantasy big screen treatment in 1995. Noonan encapsulated the spirit of the book in his magical film and in doing so could be held directly responsible for huge swathes of folk experimenting with vegetarianism in the mid-Nineties.

31 . Empire Of The Sun (J.G. Ballard)

Film: 1987 Director: Steven Spielberg

Although it didn’t set the box office alight upon its release in 1987, Steven Spielberg has consistently championed the merits of this adaptation of JG Ballard’s semi-autobiographical novel. Spielberg argues this film is his best expression of the ‘loss of innocence’. The book, which charts a young boy’s adventures in a Japanese internment camp during World War 2, certainly deals with these issues.

32 . Requiem For A Dream (Hubert Selby, Jr)

Film: 2000 Director: Darren Aronfsky

Both Selby, Jr’s novel and Aronfsky’s superb adaptation of it highlight the unending fallacy of the American Dream. The backdrop to these unattainable dreams is heroin addiction, and while the novel is perhaps harder hitting than the film, the latter’s dreamy, opiate-like quality makes it similarly absorbing.

33 . Great Expectations (Charles Dickens)

Film: 1946 Director: David Lean

There have been untold adaptations of Dickens novels, but this remains the benchmark. From the unforgettable opening scenes on the marshes to its all-star cast (Alec Guinness, John Mills, Jean Simmons and Martita Hunt’s haunting Miss Havisham), this is a spellbinding piece of cinema. It’s also a wonderful homage to the book – the themes of social change and honest endeavour remain at its core.

34 . The Age Of Innocence (Edith Wharton)

Film: 1993 Director: Martin Scorsese

In what remains his most uncharacteristic film to date – yes, even more so than Hugo – Martin Scorsese shines an uncomfortable light upon the romantic and societal practices of upper class life in New York in the 1870s. Edith Wharton’s classic novel is handled with subtlety and nuance from Scorsese and the leads – Daniel Day-Lewis, Winona Ryder and Michelle Pfeiffer – are uniformly entrancing.

35 . Don't Look Now (Daphne Du Maurier)

Film: 1973 Director: Nicolas Roeg

Daphne du Maurier said that this and Alfred Hitchcock’s reworking of Rebecca were the only adaptations of hers that she had any time for. An ominous story of a husband and wife attempting to recover from the death of their daughter by staying in Venice, it reeks of menacing and barely disguised violence. A startling, terrifying film that lingers long in the memory.

36 . The Big Sleep (Raymond Chandler)

Film: 1946 Director: Howard Hawks

Hawks’s superb version of Raymond Chandler’s novel works for many reasons. Yes, the partnership of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall as Philip Marlowe and Vivian Rutledge is inspired, but it’s the manner in which all involved maintain the enigmatic core of Chandler’s book that really delights. Film noir at its finest and one of the best film adaptations ever.

37 . The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie (Muriel Spark)

Film: 1969 Director: Ronald Neame

Muriel Spark’s remarkable novel detailing the vicious titular teacher was first turned into a play, from which Neame’s film was then made. The experimental nature of the book, which often flashed forward in time, was abandoned in favour of a more realistic narrative, but this wasn’t done at the expense of the book’s frightful and captivating story.

38 . Moby-Dick (Herman Melville)

Film: 1956 Director: John Huston

Long considered one of the great American novels, John Huston’s powerful vision of Herman Melville’s book is equally enduring. Gregory Peck mesmerises as the unbalanced Captain Ahab, while Orson Welles nearly steals the show with a wonderful cameo. There are some divergences between book and film, but fans of Melville’s tale generally applaud this bold and brilliant film.

39 . Jaws (Peter Benchley)

Stephen Spielberg is fantastic at taking pulpy books and making masterpieces out of them. The book of Jaws is just that: a dark, pulpy tale about a shark terrorising a small community. The main themes of the book are in the movie, but the film elevates everything far beyond the quality of the prose in the book. Where the characters are (ironically) underwritten in the novel, they shine on the big screen.

40 . Silver Linings Playbook (Matthew Quick)

Film: 2012 Director: David O. Russell

A critical and commercial success, David O. Russell’s adaptation of Matthew Quick’s acclaimed debut novel is a rare and marvellous thing. A superlative and sympathetically handled adaptation – a fact that deserves mention because of the sensitive subject material of bipolar disorder – it surprises, entertains and provokes in equal measure. Bradley Cooper is astounding in a serious role, and Jennifer Lawrence demonstrates a maturity way beyond her years. A film that will wear well, and, hopefully, send viewers to Quick’s excellent book.

41 . Jurassic Park (Michael Crichton)

As he did with Jaws, Stephen Spielberg once more took on a pulpy book about a creature that terrorises humans, swapping out sharks for dinos. The book is... fine. But it has none of the emotional heft of the movie, none of the adrenaline rush, none of the wonder of the film. Spielberg adds his layer of brilliance to proceedings and (once again) crafts one of the best blockbusters ever made.

42 . Brighton Rock (Graham Greene)

Film: 1947 Director: John Boulting

Remade in 2010 with Sam Riley playing the dazzling antihero Pinkie, Greene’s book is constantly ripe for cinematic interpretation. It’s the 1947 version, though, that stands the test of time. Richard Attenborough sparkles as the psychopathic gangster, while the criminal underbelly of interwar Brighton is also brought chillingly to life.

43 . The 39 Steps (John Buchan)

Film: 1935 Director: Alfred Hitchcock

There have been four film versions of John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps: this, the first, by an ambitious director by the name of Alfred Hitchcock is without question the best. Perhaps not the most faithful to Buchan’s original book, but certainly the best. Hitchcock’s thrilling spy drama weaves a magical web of intrigue and suspense.

44 . Lolita (Vladimir Nabokov)

Film: 1962 Directo r: Stanley Kubrick

One of the posters for Lolita, Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s notorious 1955 novel proclaimed: ‘How did they ever make a movie of Lolita?’. Indeed. The subject material – essentially paedophilia – had to be toned down in the censorious Sixties and much of the graphic sexual scenes contained in the book had to be implied on film. That Kubrick made such a colourful and provocative film is a testament to his genius behind the camera.

45 . Rum Punch (Elmore Leonard)

Film: Jackie Brown, 1997 Director: Quentin Tarantino

Elmore Leonard and Quentin Tarantino would appear a combustible mix on paper – either the latter’s adaptation of the former’s Rum Punch would be nothing short of brilliant; or, it would stink. Thankfully, it was the first version. Tarantino amended a few details – the name obviously, and the protagonist’s ethnicity, but, for an iconoclast he remained remarkably faithful to Leonard’s book. It pays handsome and stylish dividends.

46 . David Copperfield (Charles Dickens)

Film: The Personal History of David Copperfield, 2019 Director : Armando Iannucci

Solid gold satirist Armando Iannucci took a slightly unconventional approach to his 2019 adaptation of David Copperfield. Colourblind casting sees Dev Patel lead, an inspired choice. There’s a lot of joy in this film version too, even as several of the book’s characters fall into destitution. Breezy, bright and colourful, The Personal History of David Copperfield is worth streaming

47 . Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption (Stephen King)

Stephen King's novella is a beautifully written look at how having patience, hope and perseverance will help you succeed, no matter how dark the situation you find yourself in. The film version takes these themes - and the plot about a wrongly convicted person and there plight for freedom - and pins them to two of the best cast characters ever: Tim Robbins as Andy Dufresne and Morgan Freeman as Red' (who was a ginger white man in the book). Stunning stuff.

48 . Wuthering Heights (Emily Brontë)

Film: 1939 Director: William Wyler

Laurence Olivier – the actor’s actor – portraying the brooding Heathcliff and the elegant Merle Oberon playing opposite him as Cathy are the pair that bring to life one of literature’s greatest (and doomed) love affairs. For brevity’s sake, Wyler omits the second half of Brontë’s masterpiece, but this adaptation captures all the gothic majesty of the book.

49 . Poor Things (Alasdair Gray)

Film: 2023 Director: Yorgos Lanthimos

This Oscar-nominated movie is thought of predominantly as a work of auteur director Yorgos Lanthimos. But it is based on a novel by Alasdair Gray, published in 1992. Bella is brought to life, salvaged from the dead body of a woman who committed suicide. She begins childlike, but rapidly matures as she discovers the great and the awful in the world around her.

50 . The Zone of Interest (Martin Amis)

Film: 2023 Director: Jonathan Glazer

London Fields is perhaps Martin Amis’s best-known novel. But could The Zone of Interest change that? It was Amis’s second-last novel, and became an Oscar-winning film in 2023, directed by Jonathan Glazer. It’s a fictional look into the life of Rudolf Höss, who was a key figure in Adolf Hitler’s Nazi infrastructure. The film is set just outside the Auschwitz concentration camp, where Höss’s family live a relatively idyllic life just out of sight of the horror.

51 . Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (anon)

Film: The Green Knight, 202 Director: David Lowery

This arthouse fantasy movie isn’t based on a pulpy page-turner but a 14th century poem and published in 1839. Dev Patel is Gawain, a knight of the round table to must test his courage and take on the green knight. It’s dream-like, and touches on the horrific at times, conjuring a sense of the mystical in a way few fantasy films ever have. Directed by David Lowery, who made 2017’s A Ghost Story and, in a rather different vein, Peter’s Dragon.

52 . A Kestrel For A Knave (Barry Hines)

Film: Kes, 1969 Director: Ken Loach

Barry Hines’s brutal yet sensitive handling of Billy Casper’s relationship with a kestrel is replicated in Ken Loach’s classic adaptation. There are no happy endings and no saccharine-coated pill to help ease the dissection of social class and no attempt. It is the film that the book deserves. Marvellous in other words.

53 . Doctor Zhivago (Boris Pasternak)

Film: 1965 Director: David Lean

The tumultuous years spanning World War 1 and the Russian Revolution are bought dynamically to life in Lean’s acclaimed adaptation of Pasternak’s work of genius. The complexity of the novel is vividly realised onscreen thanks to the marvellous cast that includes Omar Sharif, Julie Christie, Alec Guinness, Tom Courtenay, Rod Steiger and Ralph Richardson.

SOMETHING MISSING FROM OUR SHORTLIST?

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Best Movie Guides & Reviews Books of 2024

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Movie Guides & Reviews Books are essential for movie enthusiasts who want to stay up-to-date with the latest releases and make informed decisions about what to watch. These books provide comprehensive reviews of films, as well as recommendations based on genre and theme. They also include detailed information about the cast and crew, as well as behind-the-scenes insights. Whether you're a casual moviegoer or a die-hard film buff, Movie Guides & Reviews Books are a valuable resource for anyone looking to enhance their cinematic experience.

At a Glance: Our Top Picks

Top 10 Movie Guides & Reviews Books

Star wars: complete locations.

Star Wars: Complete Locations is a visual guide that takes readers on a journey through the various worlds and locations in the Star Wars galaxy. With over 50 full-color cross-section artwork and 3-D maps, readers can explore the intricate details of cities, landscapes, and battle sites. The book also includes new cross-section artwork from Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Published by DK, this book is a must-have for any Star Wars fan who wants to dive deeper into the universe. Overall, this book is an excellent addition to the Star Wars franchise, providing in-depth knowledge and stunning visuals that will surely satisfy any fan.

But Have You Read the Book?: 52 Literary Gems That Inspired Our Favorite Films (Turner Classic Movies)

But Have You Read the Book? is a must-read for both film enthusiasts and book lovers. Turner Classic Movies presents a collection of 52 classic films and the literary works that inspired them. The author Kristen Lopez examines what makes these works exceptional adaptations, whether faithful to the book or not. The book is engaging and informative, taking the reader on a tour of various routes from page to film. The essays are impressively entertaining and erudite, with a fine reading list to follow. If you're a big reader who loves movies, this cleverly designed anthology is irresistible.

Star Wars: The Visual Encyclopedia

Star Wars enthusiasts will love Star Wars: The Visual Encyclopedia by DK, a comprehensive pictorial guide to the Star Wars universe. The book covers everything from characters and creatures to technology and geography, featuring more than 2,500 images. The book is organized into sections for easy navigation and includes a full history of galactic politics, the Jedi Council, and the Empire. The book is a celebration of all things Star Wars and is a must-have addition to any fan's collection.

Avatar The Way of Water The Visual Dictionary

Dive into the world of Avatar: The Way of Water with this visually stunning guide. The book, created in collaboration with James Cameron’s Lightstorm Entertainment and written by experts who worked on the film, provides exclusive details about the characters, creatures, vehicles, weapons, and locations of Pandora. With a foreword by Sigourney Weaver, this book is a must-have for Avatar fans of all ages. The book is unique in its comprehensive and detailed coverage of the latest adventure in Pandora, making it a perfect gift for any fan of the franchise.

The Star Wars Archives. 1977-1983. 40th Ed

The Star Wars Archives. 1977–1983. 40th Ed. is a must-have for any Star Wars fan. This book, made with the full cooperation of Lucasfilm, takes you through the making of the original trilogy, providing fresh insights into the creation of a unique universe. Complete with script pages, production documents, concept art, storyboards, on-set photography, stills, and posters, this is the authoritative exploration of the original saga as told by its creator. The book also includes a narration by George Lucas himself. It's a fascinating read that offers a glimpse into the making of one of the most iconic movie franchises of all time.

The World of Avatar: A Visual Exploration

The World of Avatar: A Visual Exploration is a celebration of James Cameron's Avatar, the highest-grossing film of all time. This book offers a glimpse into the majestic world of Pandora, its unique geology, flora and fauna, and the customs and beliefs of its people, the Na’vi. It combines original movie stills and artwork with stunning imagery from Cirque du Soleil’s Avatar-inspired show and Disney World’s Pandora—The World of Avatar. With a foreword by Avatar star Zoe Saldana and an introduction by producer Jon Landau, this book concludes with a "sneak peek" of Avatar 2, fueling excitement for its release in December 2022. The World of Avatar is a must-have for fans of the franchise and anyone who appreciates the art of film and video books.

Godzilla: The Ultimate Illustrated Guide

Godzilla: The Ultimate Illustrated Guide is a must-read for any fan of the iconic monster. This book provides an in-depth look at the history of Godzilla, from its early days in black and white to the modern-day blockbusters. The book includes fascinating facts and figures, as well as stunning illustrations that bring the monster to life. The author, Graham Skipper, is a lifelong fan of Godzilla and his passion for the subject shines through in the book. Overall, this is an excellent reference work that is both informative and entertaining.

Marvel Studios The Marvel Cinematic Universe An Official Timeline

The Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) is vast and complex, but fear not! Marvel Studios The Marvel Cinematic Universe An Official Timeline is here to guide you through it all. This filmmaker-endorsed guide, created in collaboration with Marvel Studios, provides answers to the biggest questions about the MCU, from its beginning to the present day. With exclusive infographics, illuminating timelines, and stunning movie stills, this book is a must-have for any MCU fan. The book is written by notable entertainment journalists Anthony Breznican, Amy Ratcliffe, and Rebecca Theodore-Vachon. This is a fantastic resource for anyone interested in the superhero comics and graphic novel category.

The New York Times Book of Movies: The Essential 1,000 Films to See

The New York Times Book of Movies is a collection of reviews for the 1,000 most important, popular, and influential movies of all time. The book includes critiques of beloved Hollywood milestones from Stanley Kubrick, Steven Spielberg, Alfred Hitchcock, and Orson Welles. It also features lists of best films by category and year, as well as unique recommendations and sidebars for the modern viewer. This book is an excellent resource for movie buffs and students who want to learn more about cinema history and its evolution. Overall, The New York Times Book of Movies is a relevant and indispensable gift and reference, particularly in an era when most people rely on the internet for information.

Star Wars: The Essential Atlas

The Star Wars: The Essential Atlas is a comprehensive guide that maps the entire galaxy of the Star Wars universe. This fully illustrated, full-color guide is a galaxy-spanning trove of vital statistics and information ranging from astronomical and geographical to historical and political. It includes dozens of detailed maps and charts, pertinent data, and accompanying facts on the Empire, the Clone Wars, the adventures of Han Solo, the Sith Wars, and much more. This book is the ultimate gateway to space fantasy’s most brilliantly imagined and endlessly intriguing galaxy.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

1. what is the most trusted movie review site.

IMDb. IMDB is the most popular movie site with a user-generated rating feature. It provides all the necessary information like reviews, ratings, images, videos, etc. that you may need to decide if the movie is worth watching or not.

2. Is there a Goodreads for movies and TV shows?

Trakt.tv is an app allowing you to track which movies you are watching. It can also be used as Goodreads for movies and shows allowing you to find what to watch.

3. Who is the best movie reviewer?

Arguably the most famous U.S. film critic of all time, Roger Ebert reviewed movies for the Chicago Sun-Times for nearly fifty years. With former television partner Gene Siskel, Ebert popularized the basic "thumb's up" or "thumb's down" rating system.

During our movie guides & reviews book research, we found 1,200+ movie guides & reviews book products and shortlisted 10 quality products. We collected and analyzed 20,990 customer reviews through our big data system to write the movie guides & reviews books list. We found that most customers choose movie guides & reviews books with an average price of $19.10.

Wilson Cook is a talented writer who has an MFA in creative writing from Williams College and has published more than 50 books acquired by hundreds of thousands of people from various countries by now. He is an inveterate reading lover as he has read a vast amount of books since childhood.

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“In 1984, The Books of Blood were published … they shocked and frightened millions of people around the world … this film dares to open those pages again.” These are the words that start Hulu’s very loose adaptation of Clive Barker ’s “Books of Blood,” based on one of the most influential series of short stories ever put to the page. While it may seem unfair to compare an adaptation to its excellent source, the creators here lay down that gauntlet right from the beginning, and then fail to meet their own standard.

Originally conceived as an anthology series, "Books of Blood" has now been reduced to an anthology film, three stories with loose connections in terms of plot but all about people who learn that they shouldn’t mess with the other side. If creator Brannon Braga had been allowed to expand this into the series it should have been, it might have worked, but it feels like a half-hearted project in every way in this form. Would I judge this differently if it were three episodes sent to press for a new Hulu series instead of a complete feature? Maybe, but I’d still be nervous about where it was going next.

In one of this production's strangest decisions, only one of these three stories is actually based on a Barker composition, and even that one (the actual story called “The Book of Blood” that opens the anthology) has been liberally altered. The other two are original, reportedly conceived by Braga and Barker. If they were part of a larger series that returned to Barker stories, they might fit in better, but here they feel like they have almost no connection to the anthology collection of  Books of Blood , bearing little resemblance to the dark, twisted visions of Barker’s writing. There’s something about Barker that makes him incredibly hard to translate to other mediums—films like “Rawhead Rex” and “Lord of Illusions,” both based on Barker stories from Books of Blood bear this out even further. So I suppose it makes sense that Braga was scared of how Barker’s deeply literary surrealism would work on Hulu. But then why associate the film with such a beloved property? It’s only going to pale in comparison.

“Books of Blood” opens with two criminals seeking payment from a bookseller, who tells one about the existence of a $1 million book and where to find it. Cut from that opener to the story of “Jenna,” starring an effective Britt Robertson as a young woman who flees her home after a traumatic incident and the decision to go off her meds. Jenna has issues with the world around her, particularly the sounds it makes. The emphasis on the creepiness of human mouth sounds like chewing does feel very Barker, and Jenna wears noise-canceling headphones to drown out the world. She ends up at a bed and breakfast, where she learns that leaving home is the worst mistake she’s ever made. Robertson gives the best performance in the film and, to be fair, an arc here about things hidden in the walls also feels distinctly Barker—picture what was hiding in an average house in “ Hellraiser ”—but Braga can’t find the grisly tone this story needed overall, letting it drag in a way that gets less and less interesting.

Anna Friel anchors the second story, “Miles,” as a woman who grieves the loss of her son when she’s approached by a man (Ravi Gavron) who claims to be able to communicate with the dead boy. Like the character in the first short story in Books of Blood , he has been chosen as the vessel to tell the stories of the dead, but this version of the character has a dark secret. Friel is solid and Braga creates more of the right bloody tone here, but it feels distinctly like an introduction to an anthology series more than the centerpiece of a film.

“Books of Blood” circles back around to its first story (and then its second and third again) in the final stretch, attempting to tie together an anthology film into something that’s kind of one story when one sits back and looks at the whole picture. Sadly, what it’s trying to do in this form is a little blurry, especially with a cheap twist involving Jenna, and worst of all it's boring. Anyone who’s read Books of Blood will tell you there’s nothing boring about them, even at their worst. The greatest sin here is that "Books of Blood" is too generic to be remembered, despite bearing the name of someone who redefined the genre. 

Premieres today on Hulu.

Brian Tallerico

Brian Tallerico is the Managing Editor of RogerEbert.com, and also covers television, film, Blu-ray, and video games. He is also a writer for Vulture, The Playlist, The New York Times, and GQ, and the President of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

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Film credits.

Books of Blood (2020)

Britt Robertson

Patrick Schwarzenegger

Rafi Gavron

Yul Vazquez

Cory Lee as Chelsea

Andy McQueen as Steve

Etienne Kellici as Miles

Saad Siddiqui as Dan

Seamus Patterson as Tony

Sean Skerry as Lasky

• Brannon Braga

Writer (based on the book)

• Clive Barker

Cinematographer

• Michael Dallatorre
• Joel J. Richard

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Great movies can come from anywhere, and as this list indicates, they can also come from any genre from thriller to sci-fi. We’ve selected eight great movies that were adapted from books (some of which are better than others). Here’s why you should check them out.

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While it's usually to her credit, Jamie Lee Curtis has occasionally made statements that get her into a bit of trouble. The Hollywood star is well-known for speaking her mind, but she stepped in it following an interview at Comic-Con in which she was asked whether she knew what phase the Marvel Cinematic Universe was now in. "Bad" was her simple, one-word reply, and it's that reply that incensed so many superhero fans.

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