From the Oscar-winning blockbustersAmerican BeautyandShakespeare in Loveto Sundance oddities likeAmerican MovieandThe Tao of Steve, to foreign films such asAll About My Mother, the latest volume in this popular series features a chronological collection of facsimiles of every film review and awards article published inThe New York Timesbetween January 1999 and December 2000. Includes a full index of personal names, titles, and corporate names. This collection is an invaluable resource for all libraries.

In a recent book, Following 9/11: Religion Coverage in the New York Times, Christopher Vecsey examines journalistic definitions of “religion,” before and (especially) after the terrible events of September 11, 2001. Here he explores Times portrayals of the cumulative religious tradition called Judaism, embodied by peoples who have called themselves Jews—from antiquity to modernity, throughout the world, and especially in the United States, where a plurality of Jews live today and where the Times is published. To understand Judaism today is to fathom its diverse texts, beliefs, rituals, ethics, and institutions, the contemporary concerns of Jews, and the relationships not only among Jews, but also between Jews and gentiles, and the continuing impact of anti-Semitism upon Jewish life. Since the 1940s, Jews and Judaism have been profoundly affected by the horrific course of the Holocaust, and by the formation of Israel as a Jewish nation-state. These have been the major themes in the Times' treatment of Judaism—chronicled in thousands of articles. Like an insider to Jewish tradition, the paper recounts favorite holy day recipes and tales of survival and travail in a multi-national and assimilative world. In so doing, however, the paper probes not only concurrence within Judaism, but more tellingly, a complex, multi-cultural, at-odds-with-itself Jewishness. Rather than thinking of the Times as a mouthpiece for Jewish interests, it is far more accurate to say that the Times has analyzed, like an outsider, the paradoxes, the tensions, and the culture wars in contemporary Jewish existence, in order to define pluralistic Judaism as a political, cultural, religious entity. The Times treats Judaism humanistically, showing that it is the Jewish people who are most important to Judaism, not merely the texts, the theology, or the institutions. The paper works from perspectival Talmudic principles, reporting multiple viewpoints in the circle of Jewish faith, observance, contestation, and disbelief, constantly questioning all sources, as an observant instrument of inquiry into Jewish existence, to expose Judaism's points of conflict as well as its areas of consensus.

Mel Brooks is often regarded as one of Hollywood's funniest men, thanks to such highly successful films as The Producers, Blazing Saddles, and Young Frankenstein. His films do have a tendency to turn out much like the jokes that comprise them--hit-or-miss, one minute shoot-the-moon brilliant and the next minute well short of laughs. This work provides a thorough synopsis and thematic analysis for each of his twelve films along with complete cast and production credits: The Producers (1968), The Twelve Chairs (1970), Blazing Saddles (1974), Young Frankenstein (1974), Silent Movie (1976), High Anxiety (1977), History of the World--Part 1 (1981), To Be or Not to Be (1983), Spaceballs (1987), Life Stinks (1991), Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993), and Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995).

Brittany Murphy (1977-2009) was an American film, television, and stage actress, singer, voice artist, and film producer. Beginning her career, 1995's Clueless proved to be her breakthrough film; notable roles followed in Girl, Interrupted (1999), Don't Say a Word (2001), 8 Mile (2002), and Just Married (2003). Despite the lead in Uptown Girls (2003), the production of The Ramen Girl (2008), and a long-running voice role on the animated television series King of the Hill (1997-2010), subsequent leading roles were less successful. Her later acting years were plagued by scandal and bad press, and the once critically acclaimed actress died of pneumonia at the young age of 32, shrouded by mystery. The first to span her life and career, this biography surveys Murphy's films, television appearances, stage shows, music videos, and public appearances in the order in which they were made. Critical reactions to and awards earned for her works are featured as is a selection of portraits, film stills and posters.

An eclectic and insightful collection of essays predicated on the hypothesis that popular cultural documents provide unique insights into the concerns, anxieties and desires of their times. 1950s popular culture is analysed by leading scholars and critics such as Christopher Frayling, Mark Jancovich, Kim Newman and David J. Skal.

Film and cinema.

To what extent have Hollywood feature films shaped the meanings that Americans attach to alcoholics, their families, and the alcoholic condition? To what extent has the mass culture of the movie industry itself been conceptually shaped by a broad, external societal discourse? Norman Denzin brings to his life-long study of alcoholism a searching interest in how cultural texts signify and lend themselves to interpretation within a social nexus. Both historical and diachronic in his approach, Denzin identifies five periods in the alcoholism films made between 1932 and the end of the 1980s, and offers a detailed critical reading of thirty-seven films produced during these six decades. "Professor Denzin has produced a searching and provocative interpretation of more than a half-century of Hollywood's social and personal construction of the problem drinker in America. Readable by both lay persons and specialists, Denzin's book provides us with the most comprehensive understanding of this topic to date."--Stanford M. Lyman, Robert J. Morrow Eminent Scholar in Social Science, Florida Atlantic University "An eminent sociologist and leading authority on alcoholism, Denzin also writes skillfully about films as films and is comfortable with postmodern interpretive theoryà a genuinely interdisciplinary work of the first order." --Robert L. Carringer, author, The Making of Citizen Kane "Denzin has gone on an exhaustive bar-crawl through hundreds of movies, returning with evidence that the film about drinking is a genre of its own. He writes from sound knowledge about alcoholism--which, unlike other diseases, is frequently viewed with bittersweet romanticism."--Roger Ebert Norman K. Denzin is professor of sociology, cinema studies, and interpretive theory at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He was awarded the George Herbert Mead Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction. He is the author of several books, including Screening Race: Hollywood and a Cinema of Racial Violence, The Recovering Alcoholic, Interpretive Ethnography, Images of Postmodernism: Social Theory and Contemporary Cinema, and Interpretive Interactionism.

A study of 28 films by the major postwar German director, Volker Schlondorff, examining them in historical, economic and artistic contexts. The authors seek to reveal a complexity and formal ambitiousness of Schlondorff that is comparable to that found in Wenders, Herzog and Fassbinder.