HOW COPPOLA BECAME CAGE

2 MORE

Tunnelling worms and moving castles…

THE WORLDS OF DUNE ★★★★★

Film journalist Tom Huddleston hails Frank Herbert’s Dune as ‘probably the most widely read sci-fi novel in history… without doubt the most influential’. Here, he deepdives into the landmark tome’s own influences (from Shakespeare’s Macbeth to T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom). With Huddleston glossing over the movies by David Lynch and Denis Villeneuve (and Jodorowsky’s aborted adaptation), this scrupulously researched effort is very much geared to those eager to unpick the original text’s daunting density. JAMES MOTTRAM

STUDIO GHIBLI

★★★★★

Updated to include The Boy and the Heron, this fourth edition of Colin Odell and Michelle Le Blanc’s beginner’s guide covers everything from the early work of the studio’s two figureheads (Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata) to other projects and coproductions, alongside brisk overviews of every Ghibli release and the themes that bind them. Keen followers of animation won’t find anything too surprising here, but for those new to Ghibli – and the box-office numbers for Miyazaki’s latest suggest there will be a few – this is a good place to start.

★★★★★ ZACH SCHONFELD OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

How do you sum up an actor like Nicolas Cage? Wisely, journalist Zach Schonfeld doesn’t try to capture the whole kaleidoscope in one volume, instead zeroing in on the early years. Working up to perhaps the peak of Cage’s career to date, 1995’s Leaving Las Vegas - the film that won him an Oscar - this study of the movies that shaped the star ends before he morphed into an action hero in The Rock.

Smartly, this avoids the need to plough through Cage’s later CV, which may be peppered with occasional brilliance (Adaptation, Mandy and the recent Dream Scenario) but is also filled with a lot of dross. Instead, Schonfeld rewinds to Cage’s childhood as part of the Coppola clan, tracing the influence of James Dean on the impressionable teen, as he considers an actor who for the past four decades has ‘absorb[ed] peculiar influences like a Dustbuster gone berserk’.

Though Cage declined to participate in the book, leaving something of a gap, Schonfeld does interview myriad collaborators (David Lynch, Elizabeth Shue, Mike Figgis, Amy Heckerling…), allowing him to cover cult classics (including Wild at Heart, Raising Arizona and Vampire’s Kiss) in surprising depth. Thorough, considered and entertainingly written, this is a valiant effort to rescue Cage from being the one-man meme machine he’s become in recent years.

ALFRED HITCHCOCK STORYBOARDS ★★★★★

TONY LEE MORAL TITAN

The night classes in life drawing that Hitch took as a young man at the University of London served him well in his directing career, giving him the tools to convey precisely what he wanted before a single frame was filmed. Moral’s fourth book on the Leytonstone legend draws on storyboards from nine classics – including Psycho, The Birds and The 39 Steps – to celebrate both his meticulous pre-planning and his unmatched mastery of cinematic composition. NEIL SMITH

SCREEN DEEP ★★★★★

ELLEN E. JONES FABER & FABER

Subtitled How film and TV can solve racism and save the world, journalist Jones’ critical yet hopeful study shows how screen stories can enforce and – potentially – dismantle white privilege. Jones navigates a history of cultural racism assiduously, ranging from The Birth of a Nation to blackface in sharp, brisk prose. Interviews and insight are deployed to explore how change might occur: from the Sunken Place to Small Axe, Jones reveals how our viewing could expand our empathies and expose structural prejudice. KEVIN HARLEY

THE FATAL ALLIANCE: A CENTURY OF WAR ON FILM ★★★★★

DAVID THOMSON HARPERCOLLINS

Thomson’s latest takes 1914 as its starting point, ‘as world war and world cinema came into being in the same burst of change’. This eloquent observation is followed by more provocative ones, Thomson arguing that film tends to trivialise global wars, and that America had a more marginalised role in them than it likes to think. And that’s in just the first two pages. This articulate analysis stimulates and challenges, even as it skips wildly between case studies. MATT LOOKER