Tom McSorley traces the genesis, production, and reception of Egoyan's fourth feature film, from its Cannes Film Festival premiere to its North American commercial release.

In a culture that often understands formal experimentation or theoretical argument to be antithetical to pleasure, Atom Egoyan has nevertheless consistently appealed to wide audiences around the world. If films like The Adjuster, Calendar, Exotica, and The Sweet Hereafter have ensured him international cult status as one of the most revered of all contemporary directors, Egoyan's forays into installation art and opera have provided evidence of his versatility and confirmed his talents. Throughout his career, Atom Egoyan has shown himself to possess the rarest kind of singularity. As Jonathan Romney puts it, Egoyanþs 2preoccupations and tropes have been so consistent that he's practically created his own genre3 (1995, 8). Hrag Vartanian adds, 2Egoyanesque has become a word to film aficionados, commonly understood to mean a cinematic moment that examines sexuality, technology and alienation in the modern world3 (2004). For this singularity, Egoyan is widely hailed as a true auteur, ƯƯsomeone carrying on the legacy of the European art-house traditions of Bergman, Godard, and Truffaut. Certainly, his work bears a most recognizable signatureƯƯthere is no confusing an Egoyan work with anyone elseþs. Like his art-house predecessors, Egoyan clearly intends that his work be, as Dudley Andrew puts it, 2read rather than consumed,3 that is, viewed meditatively, reflected upon, and discussed (2000, 24). And indeed, in this world in which filmmaking has become commonplacewhere, as Egoyan has said, 2what used to be a rarified activity is now available to anyone with a digital camera and a computer3 (2001b, 18) he intends through much of his work to recall an earlier image culture in which artists had an ability to produce something that gained its power precisely through its rarity.

The films of Atom Egoyan immerse the viewer in a world of lush sensuality, melancholia, and brooding obsession. From his earliest films Next of Kin and Family Viewing, to his coruscating Exotica and recent projects such as Where the Truth Lies, Egoyan has paid infinite attention to narrative intricacy and psychological complexity. Traumatic loss and its management through ritual return as themes in his films as he explores personal scenarios of mourning and broader issues of genocide, exile, and postmemory, in particular in relation to his own Armenian heritage. In this study, Emma Wilson closely analyzes the range of Egoyan's films and their visual textures, emotional control, and perverse beauty. Offering a full-scale chronological overview of Egoyan's work on films up to and including Where the Truth Lies, Wilson shows the persistence and development of certain structures and themes in Egoyan's cinema: questions of exile and nostalgia, trauma and healing, the family and sexuality. While drawing on ideas about intercultural cinema, Wilson also sets Egoyan's films in the context of contemporary Canadian cinema and European art-house cinema. Egoyan's own comments on his films thread throughout Wilson's analyses, and the book features a recent interview with the director.

One of Canada's pre-eminent auteur filmmakers, Atom Egoyan has been celebrated internationally, earning multiple awards from the prestigious Cannes and Toronto Film Festivals and an Academy Award nomination. One of his most accomplished and controversial early works, The Adjuster, is a dark drama about the complex and intense relationship between an insurance adjuster and his clients. In this accessible analysis, Tom McSorley traces the genesis, production, and reception of Egoyan's fourth feature film, from its Cannes Film Festival premiere to its North American commercial release. The book locates The Adjuster in the larger context of Canadian cinema history's peculiar and often troubled evolution, and offers a provocative interpretation of the film's unique analysis of the malaise of materialism in North American culture. Richly illustrated and featuring new interview material with Egoyan himself, this study in the Canadian Cinema series offers an insightful review of one of Atom Egoyan's most searching, unsettling films.

Take One's Essential Guide to Canadian Film is the most exhaustive and up-to-date reference book on Canadian film and filmmakers, combining 700 reviews and biographical listings with a detailed chronology of major events in Canadian film and television history. Compiled by Wyndham Wise, the editor and publisher of Take One, Canada's most respected film magazine, with a foreword by Canadian director Patricia Rozema, this is the only reference book of its kind published in English. Each film title is listed with credits, a mini review, and significant awards. Biographical listings of directors, producers, actors, writers, animators, cinematographers, distributors, exhibitors, and independent filmmakers are accompanied by date and place of birth, date of death if applicable, a brief career overview, and a filmography. Wise celebrates Canadian achievement on both a national and an international scale, and juxtaposes the distinctly Canadian with Canada's exports to Hollywood: Maury Chaykin and Jim Carrey, John Candy and William Shatner, Mon Oncle Antoine and Porky's, Highway 61 and Meatballs, The Red Violin and The Art of War. From great early Hollywood stars like Walter Huston, Fay Wray, Mary Pickford, Norma Shearer, and Marie Dressler, to our current crop of star directors - including Patricia Rozema, Atom Egoyan, David Cronenberg, Denys Arcand, Peter Mettler, Guy Maddin, and Robert Lepage - Canadians have made an important but largely unrecorded contribution to the history of world cinema. Impressive for its breadth of coverage, refreshing in its opinionated informality, this comprehensive and lively look at Canadian film culture at the start of the twenty-first century admirably fills the gap.

Contributions by Patrick de Haas. Screenplay by Atom Egoyan. Text by Paul Virilio.

David Fincher: Mind Games is the definitive critical and visual survey of the Academy Award– and Golden Globe–nominated works of director David Fincher. From feature films Alien 3, Se7en, The Game, Fight Club, Panic Room, Zodiac, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Social Network, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Gone Girl, and Mank through his MTV clips for Madonna and the Rolling Stones and the Netflix series House of Cards and Mindhunter, each chapter weaves production history with original critical analysis, as well as with behind the scenes photography, still-frames, and original illustrations from Little White Lies' international team of artists and graphic designers. Mind Games also features interviews with Fincher's frequent collaborators, including Jeff Cronenweth, Angus Wall, Laray Mayfield, Holt McCallany, Howard Shore and Erik Messerschmidt. Grouping Fincher's work around themes of procedure, imprisonment, paranoia, prestige and relationship dynamics, Mind Games is styled as an investigation into a filmmaker obsessed with investigation, and the design will shift to echo case files within a larger psychological profile.