A veteran film critic offers a lively, opinionated guide to thinking and talking about movies -- from Casablanca to Clueless Whether we are trying to impress a date after an art house film screening or discussing Oscar nominations among friends, we all need ways to look at and talk about movies. But with so much variety between an Alfred Hitchcock thriller and a Nora Ephron romantic comedy, how can everyday viewers determine what makes a good movie? In Talking Pictures, veteran film critic Ann Hornaday walks us through the production of a typical movie -- from script and casting to final sound edit -- and explains how to evaluate each piece of the process. How do we know if a film has been well-written, above and beyond snappy dialogue? What constitutes a great screen performance? What goes into praiseworthy cinematography, editing, and sound design? And what does a director really do? In a new epilogue, Hornaday addresses important questions of representation in film and the industry and how this can, and should, effect a movie-watching experience. Full of engaging anecdotes and interviews with actors and filmmakers, Talking Pictures will help us see movies in a whole new light-not just as fans, but as film critics in our own right.

With the candid quirkiness of Awkward Family Photos and the confessional intimacy of PostSecret, Ransom Riggs's Talking Pictures is a haunting collection of antique found photographs—with evocative inscriptions that bring these lost personal moments to life—from the author of the New York Times bestselling illustrated novel Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. Each image in Talking Pictures reveals a singular, frozen moment in a person’s life, be it joyful, quiet, or steeped in sorrow. Yet the book’s unique depth comes from the writing accompanying each photo: as with the caption revealing how one seemingly random snapshot of a dancing couple captured the first dance of their 40-year marriage, each successive inscription shines like a flashbulb illuminating a photograph’s particular context and lighting up our connection to the past.

Tales of the Talking Picture is a fabulous science-fiction fantasy novel by Tom Slemen about a boy who comes into possession of an old oval portrait of a woman named Rhiannon Tanglewyst, who happens to be a witch who has been trapped within the picture for centuries. Rhiannon tells Matthew and his troublesome girlfriend, a Goth named Christina, fantastical tales from the future and the past, from a grisly and terrifying account of what really happened to the crew of the Mary Celeste, to the strange mission of a secret agent who must face a chilling foe in the guise of a child? The imaginative tales also cover battling wizards, The Titanic, the sinister Sunday King, the heart-warming tale of a boy who befriends a giant alien insect, and a petty crook who makes the mistake of trying on an electronic thinking cap?only to discover the Ultimate Answer to the Universe? Tales of the Talking Picture is a guaranteed feelgood read from one of England's master storytellers, Tom Slemen!

THE STORY: 1929, Harrison Texas. Myra Tolliver makes her living playing the live music for the silent pictures. She makes barely enough to survive, caring for herself and her teenage son, Pete. As borders in the home of the Jacksons, Myra supplemen

Images flash across the screen. Photographs appear on walls, on cans, on the sides of buses, in magazines, books, newspapers, computers. We are bombarded with thousands of photographs each day: they are perhaps our major source of information, inspiration, and irritation. But what if you had to choose a single image out of that avalanche - one photograph that you couldn't stop thinking about, that changed your ideas, your aesthetics, your perception of reality? Seventy of the most interesting people of our era - both famous and unknown - were asked to choose that one image for Talking Pictures. The results are startling, profound, funny, and deeply revealing about our psychology and our times. From glossy fashion photography to devastating portraits of the Holocaust, from family snapshots to the shimmering artwork of master photographers such as Irving Penn, Andre Kertesz, and Imogen Cunningham, from Life magazine photo essays to a five-hundred-times magnification of the adhesive on a Post-it, the range of images in Talking Pictures reveals not only the strength of individual obsession and the power of history and imagination, but, more importantly, the peculiar truths about ourselves and our times that can be seen only in photographs.

In No Talking, Andrew Clements portrays a battle of wills between some spunky kids and a creative teacher with the perfect pitch for elementary school life that made Frindle an instant classic. It’s boys vs. girls when the noisiest, most talkative, and most competitive fifth graders in history challenge one another to see who can go longer without talking. Teachers and school administrators are in an uproar, until an innovative teacher sees how the kids’ experiment can provide a terrific and unique lesson in communication.

A history of audiobooks, from entertainment & rehabilitation for blinded World War I soldiers to a twenty-first-century competitive industry. Histories of the book often move straight from the codex to the digital screen. Left out of that familiar account are nearly 150 years of audio recordings. Recounting the fascinating history of audio-recorded literature, Matthew Rubery traces the path of innovation from Edison’s recitation of “Mary Had a Little Lamb” for his tinfoil phonograph in 1877, to the first novel-length talking books made for blinded World War I veterans, to today’s billion-dollar audiobook industry. The Untold Story of the Talking Book focuses on the social impact of audiobooks, not just the technological history, in telling a story of surprising and impassioned conflicts: from controversies over which books the Library of Congress selected to become talking books—yes to Kipling, no to Flaubert—to debates about what defines a reader. Delving into the vexed relationship between spoken and printed texts, Rubery argues that storytelling can be just as engaging with the ears as with the eyes, and that audiobooks deserve to be taken seriously. They are not mere derivatives of printed books but their own form of entertainment. We have come a long way from the era of sound recorded on wax cylinders, when people imagined one day hearing entire novels on mini-phonographs tucked inside their hats. Rubery tells the untold story of this incredible evolution and, in doing so, breaks from convention by treating audiobooks as a distinctively modern art form that has profoundly influenced the way we read. Praise for The Untold Story of the Talking Book “If audiobooks are relatively new to your world, you might wonder where they came from and where they’re going. And for general fans of the intersection of culture and technology, The Untold Story of the Talking Book is a fascinating read.” —Neil Steinberg, Chicago Sun-Times “[Rubery] explores 150 years of the audio format with an imminently accessible style, touching upon a wide range of interconnected topics . . . Through careful investigation of the co-development of formats within the publishing industry, Rubery shines a light on overlooked pioneers of audio . . . Rubery’s work succeeds in providing evidence to ‘move beyond the reductive debate’ on whether audiobooks really count as reading, and establishes the format’s rightful place in the literary family.” —Mary Burkey, Booklist (starred review)