Schickel found writing this collection “a rather playful business”; readers will find it infused with his joy.
A noted critic celebrates the pleasure of movies.
By his own count, film critic Schickel (Conversations with Scorsese, 2011, etc.) has seen 22,590 movies. After a 40-year career as “a professional moviegoer,” he admits that he prefers popular movies to “art” films, although his eclectic list of keepers includes some decidedly arty directors, such as Wim Wenders and German expressionist F.W. Murnau. Beginning with the first two decades of the talkies, Schickel praises the exemplary Charlie Chaplin in a movie not well regarded by others, The Circus (1928). To the author, the climax, which “features Chaplin doing a high-wire act while beset by a troop of monkeys,” is “breathtaking in its intricacy, and its thrills.” Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) seems to him “the greatest of the Dracula movies,” but he believes Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) and M (1931) to be overrated. Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) was “a great act of modernism”; William Wellman’s The Public Enemy (1931), an iconic gangster picture. The author remarks on virtually every director, from D.W. Griffith to Rouben Mamoulian (a “half-forgotten genius”), Clint Eastwood to Steven Spielberg. He thinks Woody Allen is “trapped by his gift” of creating comedy. Annie Hall (1977), though a huge hit, is only a “charming movie, but scarcely an overpowering one,” and Radio Days (1987) seems to Schickel “one of Woody’s most accomplished films.” Although he concedes that Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) “is not everyone’s dish of tea,” he deems it “an important film because there were not many before it that were essays in pure insanity.” A great admirer of Martin Scorsese, Schickel thought Mean Streets (1973) was clumsy, but Raging Bull (1980) and Taxi Driver (1976) were masterpieces.
Schickel found writing this collection “a rather playful business”; readers will find it infused with his joy.Pub Date: June 23, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-375-42459-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
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