"Film noir" evokes memories of stylish, cynical, black-and-white movies from the 1940s and '50s--melodramas about private eyes, femmes fatales, criminal gangs, and lovers on the run. James Naremore's prize-winning book discusses these pictures, but also shows that the central term is more complex an[...]

In this richly detailed study, James Naremore focuses on the work of film acting, showing what players contribute to movies. Ranging from the earliest short subjects of Charles Chaplin to the contemporary features of Robert DeNiro, he develops a useful means of analyzing performance in the age of me[...]

In 1895, Louis Lumiere supposedly said that cinema is "an invention without a future." James Naremore uses this legendary remark as a starting point for a meditation on the so-called death of cinema in the digital age, and as a way of introducing a wide-ranging series of his essays on movies past an[...]

"On Kubrick" is a critical study of Stanley Kubrick's career, beginning with his earliest feature, "Fear and Desire" (1953), and ending with his posthumous production of "A.I., Artificial Intelligence" (2001). Organized in six parts ('The Taste Machine', 'Young Kubrick', 'Kubrick, Harris, Douglas', [...]