Rainer on Film ─ Thirty Years of Film Writing in a Turbulent and Transformative Era

From American Beauty (overrated) to The Night of the Hunter (masterpiece), this collection of Peter Rainer's film criticism spans the course of his illustrious 30-year career, which dates back to the early 1980s. It is drawn from a wide range of publications, including the Christian Science Monitor, the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, Los Angeles magazine, the Los Angeles Times, New Times Los Angeles, and New York magazine, and is arranged thematically with chapters such as “Overrated, Underseen”; “Some Masterpieces”; “Documentaries”; “Issues (Mostly Hot Button)”; “Comedies—Intentional and Unintentional”; and “Literary and Theatrical Adaptations.” Rainer covers films both well-known and obscure and writes in depth about many film auteurs—Stanley Kubrick, Alfred Hitchcock, Steven Spielberg, the Coen Brothers, Mike Leigh—and New Generation icons, such as Sofia Coppola and Paul Thomas Anderson. The careers of actors ranging from Marlon Brando and Jessica Lange to Robert DeNiro are also given an extensive examination. No film buff's collection is complete without this comprehensive compilation that showcases the best work from a master contemporary film critic.

Peter Rainer is the film critic for the Christian Science Monitor, a columnist for Bloomberg News, the president of the National Society of Film Critics, and a regular reviewer for National Public Radio. Previously, he was the film critic at the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, the Los Angeles Times, New Times, and New York magazine. He edited the critics’ anthology Love and Hisses and wrote and coproduced documentaries for A&E on Sidney Poitier and the Hustons. He was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Criticism in 1998, and in 2010 he won the National Entertainment Journalism Award for Best Online Entertainment Critic. He lives in Santa Monica, California.