James Naremore

In a comprehensively revised and updated new edition, James Naremore provides an illuminating critical account of the films of Stanley Kubrick, from his earliest feature, Fear and Desire (1953), to the posthumously-produced A.I. Artificial Intelligence (Steven Spielberg, 2001). Naremore offers provocative analyses of each of Kubrick's films, considering his emphasis on the absurdity of combat, as seen in Paths of...

James Naremore's study of Max Ophuls' classic 1948 melodrama, Letter from an Unknown Woman, not only pays tribute to Ophuls but also discusses the backgrounds and typical styles of the film’s many contributors—among them Viennese author Stephan Zweig, whose 1922 novella was the source of the picture; producer John Houseman, an ally of Ophuls who nevertheless made questionable changes to...

"Film noir" evokes memories of stylish, cynical, black-and-white movies from the 1940s and '50s—melodramas about private eyes, femmes fatales, criminal gangs, and lovers on the run. James Naremore's prize-winning book discusses these pictures, but also shows that the central term is more complex and paradoxical than we realise. It treats noir as a term in criticism, as an expression of...