Jake Wilson

As film critics go, Geoffrey O’Brien is a lover, not a fighter: unconcerned with starting quarrels or settling scores, he simply aims to share his pleasure in what he has seen. Perhaps his remarkably good temper stems from the fact that he is not a full-time critic, but an example of that nearly extinct species, the all-round man of letters. He is editor-in-chief of the Library Of America series, and oversaw the latest edition of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations; he has published six collections of poetry, along with books on pop music, hard-boiled fiction, and the history of Times Square.

In many ways, Steven Soderbergh could be described as an exemplary postmodern film-maker: smart, prolific, and pragmatic, at ease with Hollywood blockbusters and low-budget experiments alike. He knows enough about the nuts and bolts of technique to serve as his own cinematographer, and enough about the science of deal-making to sustain a parallel career as a producer (thirty films and counting, including such notable titles as Todd Haynes’s Far from Heaven [2002]).

In many ways, Steven Soderbergh could be described as an exemplary postmodern film-maker: smart, prolific, and pragmatic, at ease with Hollywood blockbusters and low-budget experiments alike. He knows enough about the nuts and bolts of technique to serve as his own cinematographer ...

If you share my view that Andy Warhol (1928–87) ranks among the most important film-makers who ever lived, ‘Our Kind of Movie’ will be your kind of book. A sophisticated yet direct writer with firsthand knowledge of the 1960s queer underground, art critic Douglas Crimp is equipped to do justice to Warhol’s manifold gifts: the perverse wit, the ceaseless formal invention, and, not least, the soul. 

Can a work of art be a classic without being ‘great’ – or even, by some standards, particularly good? Jane Mills has no doubt about the canonical position of Jedda (Charles Chauvel, 1955) in Australian cinema, yet admits that her own response falls short of love. This ambivalence stems not only from Jedda’s technical flaws, but also from its message: though the film may not be a white supremacist tract like D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915), it is plain that Chauvel and his wife, Elsa, nearing the end of their long collaborative career, took for granted that biological ‘race’ was destiny.