NEVER COMING TO A THEATER NEAR YOU

Los Angeles Times/NPR film critic Turan presents a book-length favorites list.

Whip-smart and to the point, the author’s cogent movie reviews are perfect for reading in the newspaper over your morning coffee, and he’s even better on the radio. Unfortunately, these brief pieces don’t work as well between hard covers. The premise of here is admirably simple: these are the films that have affected Turan the most, and for the best. The result is a joyously hopscotch catalogue of cinema, everything from John Sayles to John Frankhenheimer, highbrow to lowbrow (though not surprisingly, indie critical faves are overrepresented), but since the pieces are uniformly positive, a numb feeling soon sets in. And since the reviews are not long enough to really get into the meat of a film, Turan is forced to present his views rather plainly, with laudatory adjectives paraded one after another to the point of sounding like a press release (“Prepare to be astonished by ‘Spirited Away’ ”).

Blame it on the format, but that still doesn’t make this a compelling read.