February Books

The project was motivated in part by NPR and Slate’s New Black Film Canon, launched in 2016 and updated in 2023. “It was a great list,” Clark tells Deadline’s Zac Ntim. “But the little thing that rankled with me was how American-focused it was. As someone of Black British and Caribbean heritage who has worked on several Black films from around the world, here at Criterion and at BAM, it felt like a good opportunity to make some links and present things with context and a flow.”

“Strikingly designed by Violetta Boxill, and boasting a beautiful foreword by John Akomfrah,” writes Alex Ramon for the BFI, “The World of Black Film offers a chronological survey, with a two-page spread dedicated to each title. From production history to star study to more personal reflections, each entry packs a lot into a relatively small space, and Clark never discusses a film in isolation.”

John Yau, the poet, critic, and author of more than fifty books, is currently working on That Glamorous Country, a collection of pieces on every movie and television show he watched with fellow poet and critic John Ashbery. “He showed me that I could be a fanboy because I was one,” writes Yau for the Paris Review. “He made it clear that I did not need to be embarrassed about my enthusiasms, which ran the gamut, from the campy science fiction and badly made horror films of Ed Wood to the low-angled, stationary camera of Yasujiro Ozu and Hong Kong noir films starring Chow Yun-fat.” The brief introduction is followed by memories of watching William Wyler’s The Letter (1940), Joseph Cornell’s Rose Hobart (1936), and Robert Zemeckis’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988).

In his latest newsletter, Patrick Preziosi writes that novelist James M. Cain (The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce) had a “fear of being commonplace, of being unwillingly reduced to the baser predilections of characters [that] gave him a voice charged with believable rancor when he narrated from these lower depths. Never have identification and animosity been so mercilessly tangled in American letters.”

The new Bookforum features Greg Cwik on Melissa Anderson’s collection The Hunger: Film Writing, 2012–2024;Christian Lorentzen’s conversation with A. S. Hamrah about the two books he released in December, Algorithm of the Night: Film Writing, 2019–2025 and Last Week in End Times Cinema; and Erika Balsom on Catherine Breillat’s I Only Believe in Myself: Conversation with Murielle Joudet. “While Breillat’s subject is always sex,” writes Balsom, “many of her works are in fact not especially explicit at the level of what is shown; their provocation resides more in the shamelessness of her gaze.”

From tomorrow through Saturday, Anthology Film Archives will present Scott MacDonald Selects: Birth, Earth, Screen, Sky, a series coprogrammed by MacDonald and three of his former students. MacDonald’s latest book is Comprehending Cinema, and introducing his interview for Film Comment, Paul Attard writes that the “prose is a rarity in academic writing: unpretentious, jargon-free, and marked by a sustained, granular attention to his subjects that few writers bring. Case in point: the first time I spoke with experimental filmmaker Ernie Gehr, he noticed I was carrying a printed copy of his interview with MacDonald from decades earlier. He told me there was little reason to ask him anything; that interview, he said, already ‘had it all.’”

Marya E. Gates talks with Maggie Hennefeld, the author of Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes and Death by Laughter: Female Hysteria and Early Cinema, about frequenting the Pordenone Silent Film Festival and Il Cinema Ritrovato and programming screenings at the Trylon in Minneapolis. One program Hennefeld singles out is Mario Roncoroni’s Filibus: The Mysterious Air Pirate (1915) with live music by Dreamland Faces. Filibus is a thriller “about a lesbian cross-dressing air pirate who flies in on a steampunk dirigible and anesthetizes wealthy men and then redistributes their jewels and seduces their wives and sisters,” says Hennefeld. “The silent era was definitely way more radical than 2026, sadly, and more queer.”

The editors of World Records introduce a roundtable discussion on Pooja Rangan’s The Documentary Audit: “Documentary films often announce their moral probity through aural metaphors. They ‘give voice to the voiceless’ and they ask publics to listen: to bear witness, to hold power to account, and to adjudicate what counts as reality. But these metaphors—listening as oversight, listening as accountability, listening as verification—often obscure the values embedded in the conventions of attention and comprehension that documentary forms make normative, especially in pursuit of justice.”

Paul Fischer, the author of the well-reviewed A Kim Jong-Il Production: The Extraordinary True Story of a Kidnapped Filmmaker, His Star Actress, and a Young Dictator's Rise to Power and The Man Who Invented Motion Pictures: A True Tale of Obsession, Murder, and the Movies, introduces his new book at Air Mail and the Hollywood Reporter.The Last Kings of Hollywood: Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg—and the Battle for the Soul of American Cinema is a “narrowly focused work [that] offers only a smattering of new details,” finds Caryn James in the New York Times, but in the Atlantic, Michael O’Donnell writes that Fischer “derives a fresh idea from a period that has already been exhaustively studied in books and documentary films. Instead of lauding the triumph of the solo artist or eulogizing the uniqueness of a bygone time, Fischer demonstrates the evergreen value of collaboration.”

The original Star Wars was the highest-grossing movie of 1977, and Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind came in at #3. And #2? Hal Needham’s Smokey and the Bandit, starring Burt Reynolds. “Urban critics sneered,” writes Jim Hemphill at IndieWire, “but audiences between the coasts saw themselves—or at least who they wanted to be—in Reynolds’s authority-defying bootlegger, and they kept Smokey and the Bandit in theaters for months.” For Hemphill, Gary Schneeberger and James L. Neibaur’s The Burt Reynolds Films is “a read that, like its subject, exhibits a breezy superficial charm before giving way to genuine depth and multiple rewards.”

In his book on Arthur Penn’s 1967 milestone movie, They Kill People: Bonnie and Clyde, a Hollywood Revolution, and America's Obsession with Guns and Outlaws, Kirk Ellis considers the film “and the New Hollywood from a variety of angles—filmmaking, the social turmoil of the ’60s, America’s complex relationship with outlaws in general and guns in particular,” writes Mark Athitakis in the Los Angeles Times. “It’s a meaty yet accessible book that captures the lightning-in-a-bottle nature of the generation’s ur-text, capturing the unlikely nature of its creation and the somewhat dodgy nature of its legacy.”

Those who read Spanish will want to know about Un destino común: Intervenciones públicas y conversaciones, a collection of lectures Lucrecia Martel delivered between 2009 and last year. Other new and noteworthy titles include Martine Beugnet’s Blur, the latest volume in the Cutaways series edited by Erika Balsom and Genevieve Yue, and Curating Deviance: Programming the Queer Film Canon, Marc Francis’s dive into what repertory cinemas had to offer between 1968 and 1989.

Next month will see the release of I Walked into My Shortcomings, a collection of writing by and interviews with the late filmmaker Ken Jacobs. Tony Lee Moral’s A Century of Hitchcock: The Man, the Myths, the Legacy will be out in June, and so, too, will The Art of Star Wars: Andor, Phil Szostak’s behind-the-scenes companion to the series created by Tony Gilroy, who has written the foreword.

“Every page has ideas that we talked about over the course of a million meetings, and it’s just so good,” Gilroy tells Brian Davids in the Hollywood Reporter. Early in the promotional tour for Andor, Disney asked Gilroy to avoid using the words fascism and genocide, but he’s off the leash now. “You get out your Fascism for Dummies book for the fifteen things you do, and we tried to include as many of them as we could in the most artful way possible,” says Gilroy. “How were we supposed to know that this clown car in Washington was going to basically use the same book that we used?”

Derailed by the pandemic, Unrecorded Night was to have been a Netflix series written and directed by David Lynch and featuring Laura Dern and Naomi Watts. Recently on Reddit, Jennifer Lynch let it be known that the screenplays are “likely to be published by myself and my siblings as a way to offer what could not be realized, to those who would have loved it. I beg everyone to wait for this release and not hunt down what will likely be unauthorized versions and would soil the beautiful work Dad created.” Running Press, in the meantime, has just published Scott Meslow’s A Place Both Wonderful and Strange: The Extraordinary Untold History of Twin Peaks.

In 2010, Peter Tonguette, writing for Cineaste, called Sam Wasson’s Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.: Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and the Dawn of the Modern Woman “highly informative, insightful, and often witty.” Now Alena Smith, the creator of the Apple series Dickinson, is working on a film based on the book starring Lily Collins as Hepburn.