A dialogue about cinema's legacy and best directors through essays by
three of the best long-form critics out there, collected from the
legendary NYPress for the first time.
Comprising of the kind of long-form criticism that is all too rare these
days, the weekly film columns in the NYPress included polemics,
reviews, interviews, festival reports and features. A far cry from what
is often derisively termed the consumer report mode of criticism,
Cheshire, Seitz and White were passionately engaged with the film
culture of both their own time, and what had come before. They
constituted three distinctly different voices: equally accomplished, yet
notably individual, perspectives on cinema. Their distinctive tastes and
approaches were often positioned in direct dialogue with each other, a
constant critical conversation that frequently saw each writer directly
challenging his colleagues. Dialogue is important in criticism, and here
you can find a healthy example of it existing under one proverbial roof.
This three-way dialogue between Cheshire, Seitz and White assesses the
1990s in cinema, along with pieces on New York's vibrant repertory scene
that allow us to read the authors' takes on directors such as Hitchcock,
Lean, Kubrick, Welles, Fassbinder and Bresson; as well as topics such as
the legacy of Star Wars, film noir, early film projection in New York
City, the New York Film Critics Circle, Sundance, the terrorist attacks
of 9/11 and the emerging cinema of Iran and Taiwan.
