Book Review: “The Last Action Heroes” by Nick De Semlyen

Nick De Semlyen, the editor of movie magazine Empire, recently published a film history book with a very clear title, The Last Action Heroes: the Triumphs, Flops, and Feuds of Hollywood’s Kings of Carnage. De Semlyen’s book focuses on eight of Hollywood’s major action stars of the eighties and nineties: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Jean-Claude …

Book Review: “Keanu Reeves Most Triumphant” by Alex Pappademas

Last week while walking on Fourth Street in Long Beach, I stumbled upon Casita Bookstore where I discovered “Keanu Reeves Most Triumphant: The Movies and Meaning of an Irrepressible Icon” by the Los Angeles-based writer Alex Pappademas. Like Keith Phipps’s recent “The Age of Cage: Four Decades of Hollywood Through One Singular Career,” Pappademas’s 2022 …

Scott Frank’s Shaker

Scott Frank is a long-time screenwriter and more recent director best known for his screenplays for Logan and Minority Report (among other box office successes) as well as being the creator of the Neflix series Godless and The Queen’s Gambit. His first novel, Shaker, was published in 2016, and I became aware of it that …

The Seminal and Influential Sidney Lumet

Published last year, Maura Spiegel’s Sidney Lumet: A Life is an absolutely first-rate biography. It is probably the strongest single director biography I’ve ever read and definitely one of the best showbiz biographies I’ve come across. The book is heavily researched, provides astute analysis of Lumet’s work and personal life, and Spiegel does a fine …