Classic Film

Long before Mary Poppins danced across the rooftops and into the hearts of millions, Robert and Richard Sherman were struggling songwriters in Los Angeles, trying to find their voices—and their futures. In this vivid and deeply researched narrative, author and Disney historian Todd James Pierce traces the unlikely path that brought the Sherman brothers to Walt Disney's attention, and how their personal history, musical genius, and emotional lives shaped the film's unforgettable songs and surprising storyline.

We are all classicists - we come into touch with the classics on a daily basis: in our culture, politics, medicine, architecture, language, and literature. What are the true roots of these influences, however, and how do our interpretations of these aspects of the classics differ from their original reality?

A beloved, bestselling classic of humorous and nostalgic Americana—the book that inspired the equally classic Yuletide film and the live musical on Fox. The holiday film A Christmas Story, first released in 1983, has become a bona fide Christmas perennial, gaining in stature and fame with each...

Mark Kermode’s compelling study of this horror classic was originally published in 1997, and then extensively updated and expanded in 2003 to incorporate the discovery of new material. This revised edition documents the deletion and reinstatement of key scenes that have now been integrated into the film to create The Exorcist: The Version You’ve Never Seen. Candid interviews with director William Friedkin and writer/producer William Peter Blatty reveal the behind the-scenes battles which took place during the production.

Twelve dramatisations of the best love stories ever written, performed by star casts Treat yourself to this stunning collection of classic stories of love, loss, obstacles overcome and desperate attraction. This is a beautiful, moving and at times thrilling listen which takes you on a journey...

A legendary fusion of science fiction and horror, Ridley Scott's Alien (1979) is one of the most enduring films of modern cinema – its famously visceral scenes acting like a traumatic wound we seem compelled to revisit. Exploring the ways in which Alien compels us to think about otherness, Luckhurst demonstrates how and why this interstellar slasher movie, this old dark house in space, came to coil itself around our darkest imaginings about the fragility of humanity.

Ridley Scott's dystopian classic Blade Runner, an adaptation of Philip K. Dick's novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, combines noir with science fiction to create a groundbreaking cyberpunk vision of urban life in the twenty-first century. In his innovative and nuanced reading, Scott Bukatman details the making of Blade Runner and its steadily improving fortunes following its release in 1982.

In this compelling study, Joshua Clover undertakes the task of decoding the film. Examining The Matrix's digital effects and how they were achieved, he shows how the film represents a melding of cinema and video games (the greatest commercial threat to have faced Hollywood since the advent of television) and achieves a hybrid kind of immersive entertainment. He also unpacks the movie's references to philosophy, showing how The Matrix ultimately expresses the crisis American culture faced at the end of the 1990s.

Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation (2003) brings two Americans together in Tokyo, each experiencing a personal crisis. Both are distant — emotionally and spatially — from their spouses. They are lost until they develop an intimate connection. In the film’s poignant, famously ambiguous closing scene, they find each other, only to separate. In this close look at the multi-award-winning film, Suzanne Ferriss mirrors Lost in Translation’s structuring device of travel: her analysis takes the form of a trip, from planning to departure...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER! “Convincing and illuminating.” —The Atlantic A compelling, intelligent, and timely exploration of the horror genre from one of Columbia University’s most popular professors, shedding light on how classic horror films demonstrate larger cultural attitudes about...

The Empire Strikes Back (1980), the second film in the original Star Wars trilogy, is often cited as the ‘best’ and most popular Star Wars movie. In her compelling study, Rebecca Harrison draws on previously unpublished archival research to reveal a variety of original and often surprising perspectives on the film, from the cast and crew who worked on its production through to the audiences who watched it in cinemas.

Drawing on Daphne du Maurier's short story and contemporary newspaper reports of bird attacks in California, Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds (1963) featured Tippi Hedren in her first starring role. Camille Paglia's compelling study considers the film's aesthetic, technical and mythical qualities, and analyses its depiction of gender and family relations. A film about anxiety, sexual power and the violence of nature, it is quintessential Hitchcock.

Stanley Kubrick hailed The Shining as 'the scariest horror film of all time' before its release in 1980. Though the film opened to poor reviews, it has since become one of the most admired horror films in cinema history. Exerting an enormous influence on popular culture, The Shining has spawned a vast array of interpretations and conspiracy theories. Roger Luckhurst's illuminating study explores the film's themes, tropes and resonances through a detailed analysis of sequences and performances.

Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life is one of the best-loved films of Classical Hollywood cinema, a story of despair and redemption in the aftermath of war that is one of the central movies of the 1940s, and a key text in America's understanding of itself. This is a film that remains relevant to our own anxieties and yearnings, to all the contradictions of ordinary life, while also enacting for us the quintessence of the classic Hollywood aesthetic.

Africa Screams is a 1949 American adventure comedy film starring Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, directed by Charles Barton and written by Earl Baldwin, that parodies the safari genre.

This study of Jaws (1975) examines how Steven Spielberg's breakout film not only redefined the thriller but also pioneered the summer blockbuster, cementing his reputation as a master filmmaker. Against the odds of a catastrophic location shoot, 27-year-old Spielberg delivered a film so effective that it became the highest-grossing movie of its time, transforming Hollywood's approach to event cinema.

Guillermo del Toro's cult masterpiece, Pan's Labyrinth (2006), won a total of 76 awards and is one of the most commercially successful Spanish-language films ever made. Blending the world of monstrous fairytales with the actual horrors of post-Civil War Spain, the film's commingling of real and fantasy worlds speaks profoundly to our times. This study of Guillermo del Toro's cult masterpiece places 'Pan's Labyrinth' in its cultural and historical contexts, and provide an illuminating analysis of the film's techniques, themes and meanings.

Angel and the Badman is a 1947 American Western film written and directed by James Edward Grant and starring John Wayne, Gail Russell, Harry Carey, and Bruce Cabot. The film is about an injured gunfighter, who is nursed back to health by a young Quaker woman and her family, whose way of life influences him and his violent ways. Angel and the Badman was the first film Wayne produced and in which he starred, and was a departure for this genre when it was released. Writer-director James Edward Grant was Wayne's frequent screenwriting collaborator.

The raids happen at night. Searches by the police are regular, tearing homes apart down to the nails, the officers' intentions a mystery. This time, it's not SC they are trying to find, but someone else entirely. Nothing will stop them, even if it means traveling halfway across the globe to chase a centuries-old myth of a rare power.

From New York Times bestselling author Scott Eyman, this is the story one of the most influential studios in film history, from its glory days under the leadership of legendary movie mogul Darryl F. Zanuck up to its 2019 buyout by Disney. March 20, 2019 marked the end of an era -- Disney took...