FABER AND FABER

Tim Burton is one of the great modern-day visionaries of cinema, a director who has fabricated his own deliciously nightmarish universe in movies as extraordinary as Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands, Mars Attacks! and The Nightmare before Christmas – not to mention his twisted takes on the tales of Batman, Sleepy Hollow and Planet of the Apes.

The greatest criminal minds of all time finally meet their match in this, the Coen brothers’ riotous Deep South reinvention of Alexander Mackendrick’s beloved 1955 Ealing comedy.

Tom Hanks stars as Goldthwait Higginson Dorr, a charlatan professor who has assembled a crew of crooks to try and pull off the heist of the century. Their base of operations is the root cellar of an unsuspecting church-going lady by the name of Mrs Munson (Irma P. Hall). The story they offer Mrs Munson is that they are a band of musicians in need of a place to practise their church music. But it fast becomes apparent that Dorr’s gang – ‘hippety-hop’ enthusiast Gawain MacSam, demolition ‘expert’ Garth Pancake, Vietnamese ex-tunnel rat ‘The General’, and football jock Lump – may not be up to the mission at hand.

Imagining Reality takes the reader on a tour of the evolution of documentary film as an increasingly vibrant, polemical, experimental and entertaining form. It gathers a wide-ranging collection of writings by and about such groundbreaking documentary-makers as Vertov, Flaherty, Marcel Ophuls, Chris Marker, Kieslowski, Claude Lanzmann, and Nick Broomfield.

From Peter Bogdanovich – director, screenwriter, actor, and cinema scholar – 25 fascinating portraits of Hollywood’s most acclaimed movie actors and actresses: stars whom he has known, admired, and occasionally worked with. Bogdanovich captures brilliantly – in their own words and his – the personality, the work, the style and the enduring iconic appeal of America’s movie greats.

Schrader on Schrader is an essential set of dialogues with one of the most genuinely fascinating and uncompromising writer-directors in American film.

Raised as a Calvinist and hence forbidden to partake of ‘worldly pleasures’ such as movies, Paul Schrader nevertheless defied his upbringing to become first a leading film critic, then a star pupil among the US ‘movie brat’ generation of the 1970s: writing the coruscating screenplays for Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and Raging Bull and directing such provocative pictures as Blue Collar, Hardcore and American Gigolo. Maturity has never sated his appetite for attacking ‘difficult’ material, from adapting Kazantzakis’ The Last Temptation for Scorsese, to filming the singular lives of Mishima and Patty Hearst.

Lynch on Lynch, edited by Chris Rodley, is the definitive work on the career of the cinematic genius behind such films as Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive, The Elephant Man and Twin Peaks.

Scorsese on Scorsese, edited by Ian Christie, provides the definitive exploration of the works of the iconic film director, Martin Scorsese, the man behind films such as Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Goodfellas, Gangs of New York, Kundun and The Wolf of Wall Street, among many others.

What does a movie producer actually do for a living? Is ‘producing’ any more than writing cheques and smoking fat cigars? Helen de Winter, herself an intrepid young producer, discovers a job that requires the combined skills of a wheeler-dealer, a diplomat, a stern but doting parent, and a clinical psychiatrist.

In May 1979, Francis Ford Coppola unveiled a ‘work in progress’ cut of his film, Apocalypse Now, at the Cannes Film Festival. After winning the prestigious Palme d’Or, the convention-shattering film was nominated for eight Academy Awards and became a worldwide phenomenon. In 2001 Coppola introduced a new version – wholly re-edited from the original raw footage – that included forty-nine minutes of never-before-seen footage: Apocalypse Now Redux.

The Hours is David Hare’s screen adaptation of Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. In Richmond, England in 1923, Virginia Woolf is setting out to write the first words of her new book. In Los Angeles in 1951, a housewife, Laura Brown, is contemplating suicide. And in present-day New York, a hostess, Clarissa Vaughan, is planning a party for her friends. In extraordinary and ingenious ways, the film shows how a single day – and the novel Mrs Dalloway – inextricably link the lives of three very different women.