PHILIP FRENCH

For nearly half a century Philip Frenchs writing on cinema has been essential reading for filmgoers, cinephiles and anyone who enjoys witty, intelligent engagement with the big screen. His vast knowledge of the medium is matched by his love for it. I Found It at the Movies collects some of the best of Philip Frenchs film writing from 1964 to 2009. Its subjects are as various, entertaining and challenging as cinema itself: Kurosawa and the Addams family; Satyajit Ray and Doris Day; from Hollywood and the Holocaust to British cinema and postage stamps. I Found It at the Movies is an illuminating companion to the world of the cinema. I Found It at the Movies is the first of three collections of Philip Frenchs writings on film and culture

Westerns is the classic account of the emergence, growth and flowering of one of the most perennially popular film genres. When it was first published thirty years ago it was welcomed by reviewers in Europe and the United States as a major work. In this new edition, fully revised and updated, with a new introduction, both movie buffs and general readers have the opportunity to engage again with one of the sharpest film critics of our time. The book focuses on the political, historical and cultural forces that shaped the western, dealing especially with the thirty years after World War II. It considers the treatment of Indians and Blacks, women and children, the role of violence, landscape and pokerplaying, and it advances the theory that most westerns of those years fit into four principal categories that reflect the styles and ideologies of four leading politicians of the era: John F. Kennedy, Barry Goldwater, Lyndon Johnson and William Buckley. Since the book was first revised in 1977, there has been, as the author predicted there would be, a steady decline in the number of westerns made for TV and the cinema, but the genre remains highly influential and reflects the social and psychological currents in American life. In the 1990s Academy Awards for best movie went to Kevin Costners Dances with Wolves and Clint Eastwoods Unforgiven, the first time that westerns were so honoured since Cimarron won an Oscar in 1930. French takes in these and other films, such as Heavens Gate, the costly failure that brought down the studio that produced it, and brings the story of the western into the twenty-first century as the genre that was renewed in Cold Mountain, Open Range, Hidalgo and The Alamo.

Notes from the Dream House is a best of selection of reviews by the celebrated Observer film critic Philip French. Spanning half the history of cinema, his reviews cover a great variety of films, from westerns and gangsters to art movies and musicals the hits and the misses, the good, the bad and the ugly.French takes on films as disparate as The Gospel According to St Matthew and Ted, The Remains of the Day and Caligula. His reviews are personal, witty, and sharply perceptive. Time and again he reveals not only an encyclopaedic knowledge of cinema but also an erudition, an enthusiasm, and a boundless curiosity. Taken together, they form an illuminating commentary on modern culture; but above all they are a distillation of one mans lifelong love of cinema, a worthy memorial to one of the most respected and beloved of modern critics.