The decade from 2000 to 2009 is framed, at one end, by the traumatic catastrophe of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and, at the other, by the election of the first African American president of the United States. In between, the United States and the world witnessed the rapid expansion of new media and the Internet, such natural disasters as Hurricane Katrina, political uprisings around the world, and a massive meltdown of world economies. Amid these crises and revolutions, American films responded in multiple ways, sometimes directly reflecting these turbulent times, and sometimes indirectly couching history in traditional genres and stories. In American Cinema of the 2000s, essays from ten top film scholars examine such popular series as the groundbreaking Matrix films and the gripping adventures of former CIA covert operative Jason Bourne; new, offbeat films like Juno; and the resurgence of documentaries like Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. Each essay demonstrates the complex ways in which American culture and American cinema are bound together in subtle and challenging ways.

From New Yorker film critic Richard Brody, Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard presents a "serious-minded and meticulously detailed . . . account of the lifelong artistic journey" of one of the most influential filmmakers of our age (The New York Times). When Jean-Luc Godard wed the ideals of filmmaking to the realities of autobiography and current events, he changed the nature of cinema. Unlike any earlier films, Godard's work shifts fluidly from fiction to documentary, from criticism to art. The man himself also projects shifting images—cultural hero, fierce loner, shrewd businessman. Hailed by filmmakers as a—if not the—key influence on cinema, Godard has entered the modern canon, a figure as mysterious as he is indispensable. In Everything Is Cinema, critic Richard Brody has amassed hundreds of interviews to demystify the elusive director and his work. Paying as much attention to Godard's technical inventions as to the political forces of the postwar world, Brody traces an arc from the director's early critical writing, through his popular success with Breathless, to the grand vision of his later years. He vividly depicts Godard's wealthy conservative family, his fluid politics, and his tumultuous dealings with women and fellow New Wave filmmakers. Everything Is Cinema confirms Godard's greatness and shows decisively that his films have left their mark on screens everywhere.

" I feel like Scott Ryan could have written this directly to me and others in our generation who have basically ' given up' on movies. It is at once tribute and eulogy, so bittersweet." - Screenwriter Helen Childress (Reality Bites) " The nineties are lucky to have Scott Ryan." - Actress Natasha Gregson Wagner (Two Girls and a Guy, Lost Highway) Ah, the nineties. Movies were something in those days. We're talking about a decade that began with GoodFellas and ended with Magnolia, with such films as Malcolm X, Before Sunrise, and Clueless arriving somewhere in between. Stories, characters, and writing were king; IP, franchise movies, and supersaturated superhero flicks were still years away. Or so says Scott Ryan, the iconoclastic author of The Last Days of Letterman and Moonlighting: An Oral History, who here turns his attention to The Last Decade of Cinema-- the prolific 1990s. Ryan, who watched just about every film released during the decade when he was a video store clerk in a small town in Ohio, identifies twenty-five unique and varied films from the decade, including Pretty Woman, Pulp Fiction, Menace II Society, and The Shawshank Redemption, focusing with his trademark humor and insight on what made them classics and why they could never be produced in today's film culture. The book also includes interviews with writers, directors, and actors from the era. Go back to the time of VCR' s, DVD rentals, and movies that mattered. Turn off your streaming services, put down your phones, delete your Twitter account, and take a look back at the nineties with your Eyes Wide Shut, a White Russian in your hand, and yell " Hasta la vista, baby" to today's meaningless entertainment. Revel in the risk-taking brilliance of Quentin Tarantino, Amy Heckerling, Spike Lee, Robert Altman, Paul Thomas Anderson, and others in Scott Ryan's magnum opus, The Last Decade of Cinema.

This publication is a major evaluation of the 1970s American cinema, including cult film directors such as Bogdanovich Altman and Peckinpah.

A chronicle of the massive transformation in Hollywood since the turn of the century and the huge changes yet to come, drawing on interviews with key players, as well as documents from the 2014 Sony hack

A fascinating year-by-year history of American film in the seventies, a decade filled with innovations that reinvented the medium and showed that movies can be more than entertainment. In The Seventies: The Decade That Changed American Film Forever, Vincent LoBrutto tracks the changing of the guard in the 1970s from the classic Hollywood studio system to a new generation of filmmakers who made personal movies targeting a younger audience. He covers in kaleidoscopic detail the breadth of American cinema during the 1970s, with analyses of the movies, biographical sketches of the filmmakers, and an examination of the innovative production methods that together illustrate why the seventies were unique in American film history. Featuring iconic filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and Francis Ford Coppola and films such The Godfather, Jaws, Taxi Driver, and The Exorcist, this book reveals how the seventies challenged the old guard in groundbreaking and exciting ways, ushering in a new Hollywood era whose impact is still seen in American film today.

Between 1967 and 1976 a number of extraordinary factors converged to produce an uncommonly adventurous era in the history of American film. The end of censorship, the decline of the studio system, economic changes in the industry, and demographic shifts among audiences, filmmakers, and critics created an unprecedented opportunity for a new type of Hollywood movie, one that Jonathan Kirshner identifies as the "seventies film." In Hollywood's Last Golden Age, Kirshner shows the ways in which key films from this period—including Chinatown, Five Easy Pieces, The Graduate, and Nashville, as well as underappreciated films such as The Friends of Eddie Coyle, Klute, and Night Moves—were important works of art in continuous dialogue with the political, social, personal, and philosophical issues of their times. These "seventies films" reflected the era's social and political upheavals: the civil rights movement, the domestic consequences of the Vietnam war, the sexual revolution, women's liberation, the end of the long postwar economic boom, the Shakespearean saga of the Nixon Administration and Watergate. Hollywood films, in this brief, exceptional moment, embraced a new aesthetic and a new approach to storytelling, creating self-consciously gritty, character-driven explorations of moral and narrative ambiguity. Although the rise of the blockbuster in the second half of the 1970s largely ended Hollywood’s embrace of more challenging films, Kirshner argues that seventies filmmakers showed that it was possible to combine commercial entertainment with serious explorations of politics, society, and characters’ interior lives.