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“HAVE YOU SEEN … ?”: A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films

By David Thomson, Knopf, 1,007 pages, $45

Nobody – give or take Anthony Lane – writes about film with more interest, flourish and nuance than David Thomson. Both versions of his Biographical Dictionary of Film belong in every film library worthy of the name. This work, made up of single-page entries of films he admires, from 1903's The Great Train Robbery to Eastern Promises and There Will be Blood, is unvaryingly intelligent, surprising and full of insight, such as this snippet on The Godfather, Part II: “That darkness that [cinematographer] Gordon Willis created for the first film was authentically Italian, walnut brown, church-like. But the darkness here is more mannered. Its wearers begin to stroke it and admire its sheen. There are prolonged shots of Michael [Corleone, played by Al Pacino] in his solitude that are reverential as well as crushing. There is a depressive quality to the film, especially as it can find no way out of its labyrinth. In other words, the film cannot come up with a way for the Mafia to be ousted, or for their sardonic nihilism to be disproved. And you feel the weight of despair settling on [director] Francis Coppola himself, like earth falling on a coffin.”

Many of the entries are standard, such as Citizen Kane and Grand Illusion, but others are unexpected treats: John Carpenter's genre-defining Halloween, Preston Sturges's subversively manic The Miracle of Morgan's Creek. Some readers may find their own favourites absent. (Where's Diva?) Nonetheless, Thomson has given us another great gift, and is hereby forgiven such an unaccountable lapse.

SON OF THE BEST 100 MOVIES YOU'VE NEVER SEEN

By Richard Crouse, ECW, 304 pages, $17.95

Crouse is a sort of Canadian version of David Thomson, and this sequel to The Best 100 Movies You've Never Seen focuses winningly on the arcane, the little-known and the unjustly forgotten. Among the delights to be found, the hilarious 1972 made-for-TV western Evil Roy Slade; Russ Meyer's cult classic Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, with the indelible Tura Satana as bad-time girl Varla; and 1953's darkly charming, Nova Scotia-set The Little Kidnappers.

YOU MUST REMEMBER THIS: The Warner Brothers Story

By Richard Schickel and George Perry, Running Press, 480 pages, $53.50

Warner Brothers was always the studio with a social conscience, a noir tinge even to its comedy. The studio was begun by four brothers from Poland, and its history is a history of Hollywood: It produced the first talkie, The Jazz Singer, rode out the Depression with movies about gangsters and social misfits, made screwball comedies, Casablanca and the great Looney Tunes cartoons. Its stars included Bogart and Cagney, Davis and Crawford. Hitchcock, Eastwood and Scorsese are among its directorial alumni. And in this sumptuous book, loaded with photos and posters, two distinguished film critics do indeed make us remember all those wonderful moments.

THE B LIST

Edited by David Sterritt and John Anderson, Da Capo, 240 pages, $17

Members of the National Society of Film Critics delve into film noir, science fiction and other genres to unearth, lovingly, such B-movie gems as Detour, Red Planet Mars, King Creole and Peeping Tom.

A HISTORY OF FILM MUSIC

By Mervyn Cooke, Cambridge University Press, 502 pages, $27.95

From its arresting Jaws cover montage to the Busby Berkeley image on the back, this work by a distinguished British music professor is a scholarly and lively look at the uses of music in the cinema, from its discussion of composers both classical (Stravinsky) and film-oriented (John Williams) to its deployment by directors such as Hitchcock.

SPELLBOUND BY BEAUTY : Alfred Hitchcock and His Leading Ladies

By Donald Spoto, Harmony, 324 pages, $30

And speaking of Hitchcock, prolific Hollywood biographer Spoto devotes his third book on the master to a look at his peculiar and not entirely savoury obsessions with actresses, especially blond actresses, and especially Grace Kelly and Tippi Hedren.

EVERYTHING IS CINEMA: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard

By Richard Brody, Metropolitan Books, 701 pages, $44

New Yorker editor Brody's first book is a monumental, exhaustively researched assessment of the life and works of the resident Marxist of France's cinematic New Wave. The book makes a strong case for the importance of Godard's revolutionary film work, but does not spare his considerable personal flaws, such as anti-Semitism.

THE WORLD AND ITS DOUBLE: The Life and Work of Otto Preminger

By Chris Fujiwara, Faber & Faber, 479 pages, $38.50

Boston critic Fujiwara makes a strong case for the importance of the under-appreciated Austria-born Preminger, who, as an independent force in Hollywood, broke social ground with films about drug use (The Man With the Golden Arm) and rape (the superb courtroom drama Anatomy of a Murder). Preminger had a deserved reputation for difficulty on the set, but any man who directed the noir classic Laura can be forgiven a great deal.

SCORSESE BY EBERT

By Roger Ebert, University of Chicago Press, 297 pages, $33.50

The great director and the prominent critic sort of grew up together; that is, a young Ebert wrote the first review a Scorsese film ever received (Who's That Knocking at My Door), and has subsequently reviewed and interviewed the filmmaker on many occasions. And what he wrote is brought together in this merging of two iconic careers.

CANADIAN ANIMATION: Looking for a Place to Happen

By Chris Robinson, John Libbey Publishing, 258 pages, $37.50 Robinson, director of the Ottawa International Animation Festival, toured the country in search of our best independent animators, all the while fighting personal demons, inner and outer. The result: a comprehensive, glossy (full of colour photos) and informative look at what has become a Canadian specialty.