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.

A celebrated photographer for 40 years, Ellen Graham has worked with magazines across America, photographing some of the world's most talked-about people: actors, artists, performers, socialites, and the glitterati that we are all obsessed with. Graham's

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 his most inventive exploration of the medium yet, David Thomson—one of our most provocative authorities on all things cinema—shows us how to get more out of watching any movie. Guiding us through each element of the viewing experience, considering the significance of everything from what we see and hear on-screen—actors, shots, cuts, dialogue, music—to the specifics of how, where, and with whom we do the viewing, Thomson explicates the movie watching experience with his customary candor and wit. Delivering keen analyses of films ranging from Citizen Kane to 12 Years a Slave, in How to Watch a Movie, Thomson shows moviegoers how to more deeply appreciate both the artistry and the manipulation of film—and in so doing enriches our viewing experience immensely.

"Wright shrinks back from nothing."—The Village Voice "Wright belongs to a school of exactly one."—The New York Times Book Review "Wright has found a way to wed fragments of an iconic America to a luminously strange idiom, eerie as a tin whistle."—The New Yorker "C.D. Wright is one of America's oddest, best, and most appealing poets."—Publishers Weekly A companion to her astonishing collection of prose Cooling Time, C.D. Wright argues for poetry as a way of being and seeing, and calls it "the one arena where I am not inclined to crank up the fog machine." Wright's passion for the genre is pure inspiration, and in her hands the answer to the question of poetry is poetry. From "In a Word": I love the nouns of a time in a place, where a sack once was a poke and native skag was junk glass not junk and junk was just junk not smack and smack entailed eating with your mouth open, and an Egyptian one-eye was an egg, sunny side up, and a nation sack was a flannel amulet, worn only by women, to be touched only by women, especially around Memphis. Red sacks for love and green for money… C.D. Wright's most recent volume, One With Others, was a National Book Award finalist. Among her many honors are the Griffin Poetry Prize and a MacArthur Fellowship. She teaches at Brown University and lives outside of Providence, Rhode Island.