We at Penguin Putnam mourn the death of Pauline Kael, a singularly unique voice in American letters. She will be sorely missed.In her decades-long career, Pauline Kael established herself as the most renowned and respected movie reviewer in the field. The breadth of her knowledge of film history and technique, her insight into the arts of acting and directing, and her unfailing wit and candor endeared her to movie lovers everywhere.For Keeps offers the best of Kael's reviews and other writings on movies from the collections that have marked her matchless career, starting with I Lost it at the Movies (1965), through Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Deeper into Movies (a National Book Award winner), The Citizen Kane Book ("Raising Kane", the full text on the making of the movie, is included here), and all the others in a glorious run concluding with Movie Love in 1991. Once Kael retired from regular reviewing, her reputation only increased, and for the inimitable real thing, readers must turn to this volume to sample her perspicacity, fluency, and style. More than 275 reviews are arranged chronologically -in effect, a history of 30 years of movies. This ultimate compendium from America's most eloquent, passionate, and provocative critic is a boon to serious moviegoers and an indispensible companion to film in the age of technological and pop culture overload.

“A remarkable encyclopedia.” — TV Guide “A must-browse for media freaks.” — USA Today “Irresistible and enthralling.” — Hartford Courant “Full of fool’s gold and genuine TV treasures.” — The New York Post The three hundred best and worst TV series ideas— known in the industry as “pilots”— that never made it to primetime. From the adventures of a Samurai D.A. to the antics of an invisible alien baby, Lee Goldberg details the greatest shows you never saw.

This year-by-year, behind-the-camera look at Hollywood's most successful movies, from 1939 to the present, offers intriguing details for the trivia buff, glamour and gossip for the star seeker, and all the facts for the film and media maven. From Gone with the Wind to Apollo 13, this entertaining guide presents the complete story behind the top five releases at the box office for each year. 328 photos.

More thon forty years ago, Robert Warshow wrote that "the unresolved problem of 'popular culture' . . . has come to be a kind of nagging embarrassment to criticism." Despite the rise of academic trends like cultural studies, we don't have a criticism that speaks to the actual, immediate experience of seeing and responding to popular culture. Warshow argued that the evasion of the popular arts in his time was due to a "disastrous vulgarization of intellectual life" that corrupted American liberalism from the 1930s to the 1950s. Political correctness then, like political correctness since the 1960s, had led to "organized mass disingenuousness" on the part of intellectuals who turned away from developing a vocabulary for describing the immediate, aesthetic experience and used irony instead, even about their own experiences. But, says Warshow, "a whole literature cannot be built on irony." Warshaw died a young man of 37 in 1955, but he left as his legacy a series of essays for The Partisan Review, Commentary, The Nation, and other journals. These writings, the cornerstone of a major account of the role of mass culture in our lives, were first gathered and published as a book in 1962. A number of essays have been anthologized frequently, and the book as a whole has achieved cult status for a number of discerning critics. "A legendary little book, partly because its author died at the age of 37, but mostly because it stands as a virtually unique representative from its period of a consistently open-minded, moral, aesthetic, and political engagement with commercial culture." -Louis Menand

The Grossis an all-access pass to the movers, shakers, and fakers who make Hollywood run. Tinseltown is an edgy place where risk-taking is a way of lifeand the risks now run into the hundreds of millions of dollars. Summertime, when the studios unfurl their most expensive and effects-laden "tent-pole pictures," has become the only season in which Hollywood makes money, and so, as this book illustrates, the summer season provides an ideal microcosm for scrutinizing the mega-budget-driven revolution that has forever changed the movie business. Bart interviews all the key players, including studio executives, producers, directors, and stars, to show how creativity and commerce hang in a dangerous balance in the new Hollwood.

A master film critic is at her witty, exhilarating, and opinionated best in this career-spanning collection featuring pieces on Bonnie and Clyde , The Godfather , and other modern movie classics “Film criticism is exciting just because there is no formula to apply,” Pauline Kael once observed, “just because you must use everything you are and everything you know.” Between 1968 and 1991, as regular film reviewer for The New Yorker , Kael used those formidable tools to shape the tastes of a generation. She had a gift for capturing, with force and fluency, the essence of an actor’s gesture or the full implication of a cinematic image. Kael called movies “the most total and encompassing art form we have,” and her reviews became a platform for considering both film and the worlds it engages, crafting in the process a prose style of extraordinary wit, precision, and improvisatory grace. Her ability to evoke the essence of a great artist—an Orson Welles or a Robert Altman—or to celebrate the way even seeming trash could tap deeply into our emotions was matched by her unwavering eye for the scams and self-deceptions of a corrupt movie industry. Here are her appraisals of era-defining films such as Breathless , Bonnie and Clyde , The Leopard , The Godfather , Last Tango in Paris , Nashville , along with many others, some awaiting rediscovery—all providing the occasion for masterpieces of observation and insight, alive on every page.

As the title Jar Jar Binks Must Die indicates, Daniel M. Kimmel is not only a film critic with strong opinions, he's also a fan. In this collection of essays, he covers movies from Metropolis (1927), answering the absurd claim that the restoration of this silent classic negated its status as a science fiction film, to how Star Trek, Avatar, Moon, and District 9 may have made 2009 a "miracle year" for the genre. Along the way he looks at neglected works like Things to Come (1936), explains why remakes aren't always bad, and how seeing E.T. in an empty screening room changed his mind about Steven Spielberg. Whether to rediscover old favorites or add new titles to your Netflix queue, this is a must-have for lovers of SF movies. Author Bio Daniel M. Kimmel is a past president of the Boston Society of Film Critics. When it was discovered he is also a science fiction fan he started getting invitations to participate at a number of SF conventions, which he continues to do. He reviewed for the Worcester Telegram and Gazette and now writes for Northshoremovies.net. He is a correspondent for Variety, the "Movie Maven" for the Jewish Advocate and teaches film--including a course on SF and horror--at Suffolk University. His essays on classic science films have appeared in several publications including Clarkesworld, Space and Time, and the Internet Review of Science Fiction. He is the author of a history of FOX TV, The Fourth Network (2004) which received the Cable Center Book Award. His other books include a history of DreamWorks, The Dream Team (2006) and I'll Have What She's Having: Behind the Scenes of the Great Romantic Comedies (2008). He is also the author of three novels: Shh! It's a Secret: a novel about Aliens, Hollywood, and the Bartender's Guide (2013) Time On My Hands: My Misadventures In Time Travel (2017), and Father of the Bride of Frankenstein (2019).