A critical introduction to the best of international film-makers in the last 50 years...

This is an acutely perceptive collection of essays defining the work of fifty film-makers of the modern era. The shape of cinema is today unrecognizable from that in the 1950s but film criticism has perhaps not kept pace with changes after 1960, when cinema became modern . The collection addresses this deficit by examining the most important directors since 1960. It includes the film-makers of the French New Wave and New German Cinema, extends its attention to earlier modernists like Luis Buñuel and Robert Bresson and speculates on the significance of masters like Andrei Tarkovsky and popular film-makers like Steven Spielberg. It also encompasses a whole range of more recent cinema from Abbas Kiarostami to Béla Tarr. As befits the enormous variety in the range of cinema covered, each of the essays is strikingly different in its emphasis although they are all lucidly and engagingly written. Also included are definitive assessments of five key Indian film directors Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak, Adoor Gopalakrishnan, G. Aravindan and Raj Kapoor.