Quite astonishing, wrote one critic, and this, often very dreamy, book of 1915!!! is exactly this. I am not a movie critic, just a reader and this book was a delight to read. It deals about the era of the silent movies, around 1915 when there were no Rambos or Terminators running across the screen with Qsound and computerised warping effects. It was the time when everything had to be expressed in gestures, like a moving picture book, because of the lack of sound.
The author therefore comes with a lot of interesting theories and opinions of how a story could and should be elegantly communicated in a moving picture. He even comes up with a theory of why California is as crazy as Hollywood seems to most of us now.
This work has to be a classic of movie pictures, just like The Art of War for the military, or Keynes for economics, and for people that are, like me, just interested readers of all kind of subjects, also highly recommended.

I read this back in the early 60's when I was about 14 or so. I am still laughing. You will not believe the way this guy writes.It is indescribable. If you are lucky enough to come upon a copy, buy it. You will be so glad you did. Bruce Jay Friedman is a national treasure. His take on life is at first glance quite askew..but, upon further reading, you will find that he "writes" like you "think." I've never experienced this with any other writer. Check out his other books, as well...especially the Lonely Guy's book of Life.

Stanley Kauffmann was born in 1916 and worked at various jobs (actor, director, novelist) before sending in an unsolicited review to The New Republic in 1958. They accepted it, and soon Kauffmann was TNR's full-time film critic. Except for short stints as drama critic for The New York Times and as a book reviewer for TNR (during which Pauline Kael served as the magazine's film critic), Kauffmann has retained his position ever since. Today, at nearly 86-years-old, Kauffmann continues to write literate, penetrating, lucid essays for TNR. He is, quite simply, the greatest critic the world of cinema has produced to date.

"A World on Film" was Kauffmann's first collection of film criticism. Consisting of reviews and essays written between 1958 and 1965, it amply demonstrates the insight, passion and probity of Kauffmann's approach to film. It also displays his extraordinary talents as a writer. Each review is a finely-crafted work in itself. While Pauline Kael tended to ramble (and ramble) in her reviews, departing far from the subject at hand in order to write about herself, Kauffmann is focused and concise, saying in a few words what most critics say in several paragraphs. His assessments are fair and evenhanded; Roger Ebert once aptly described Kauffmann as the "sanest of critics."

In short, "A World on Film" is a fine introduction to Kauffmann, film criticism and cinema circa 1958-1965. It also makes for very pleasurable reading in itself.

For more than four decades Stanley Kauffmann has been the film critic for the New Republic. Now after three decades of the reign of Martin Peretz over that journal he is that rarest of creatures, a truly non-ideological critic. He is consistently sensible and sane, and always worthy to be read. For those who think that Roger Ebert is too vulnerable to the slick products of Hollywood, or that the late Pauline Kael was too voluble and dogmatic, Kauffmann is always available as an alternative.

This collection of reviews covers 1993-2000 and is somewhat more selective than his previous books. There is praise of Abbas Kiarostami and much enthusiasm for Emma Thompson. Michelangelo Antonioni is given a final review, there is a touching obituary for Marcello Mastroianni, and another touching, and very brief, one for James Stewart. Neil LaBute and Todd Solondz are praised for their ruthlessly unsentimental approach. Pulp Fiction is treated somewhat warrily. Forrest Gump goes completely unmentioned. Fargo and All About my Mother get very guarded praise. Eyes Wide Shut and The End of the Affair are subjected to special criticism. Among foreign films Kauffmann singles out for praise Ken Loach, Gianni Amelio, Zhang Yimou, Daniel Bergman's film of his father Ingmar's autobiography, and Erick Zonca.

I find myself disagreeing more with Kauffmann in this collection. I myself do not think that Amistad is a better film than Kundun. Kundun may be excellent, it may be overly respectful, but in my view Amistad is little more than competent and worthy. It strikes me as odd that in American Beauty Kauffmann should praise Annette Bening's acting, since the script caricatures her character as a spiteful gargoyle. (Still, Kauffmann has the movie right: "at the finish of the picture, we're left feeling that Ball has had a trial run with them: now he needs to go back and really use them to some enlightening and organically whole purpose.") At one point in his praise of Schindler's List, he notes the scene of a child hiding in a latrine and says it is mememorable in the same way as the famous photograph of a child being marched away from the Warsaw ghetto. I would argue that Spielberg's shot cannot be memorable as the original photo, since it is obviously been too clearly designed to resemble it. Another weakness of the collection is that there are fewer dismissive reviews. His criticism is actually one of his strengths, as one sees in the pans he wrote last year of Moulin Rouge and The Man Who Wasn't There.

Nevertheless, Kauffmann is an intelligent and literate man, and he is properly pessimistic about the future of film, as the students he tought earlier in the last decade are too impatient and spoiled to recognize the virtues of silent movies, or black and white movies or subtitled ones. They often have no sense of history, either of the movies as an art form or of the wider society. Kauffmann, who quotes Shaw and Graham Greene several times to good effect, is depressed but not desponsdent. And so one should look at, among other things, a fine essay on adapting Mozart to the screen, a surprisingly undeferrential review of Touch of Evil, and a review of the European background and soil of Billy Wilder.

This collection of six years' (1993-98) of thoughtful and passionate criticism (movie reviews and film theory, and related book reviews) is a delight, and a wonderful primer - on thinking and writing about movies. An elegant and informative Foreword by Michael Wood provides biographical material on Stanley Kauffmann, a lifelong theater and film critic, film and theater professor, and essayist.

Kauffmann sent his first (unsolicited) film review to The New Republic in 1958, and has been their film critic since then. Kauffmann : "The mere physical act of film-going is part of the kinesis of my life- the getting up and going out and the feeling of coming home, which is a somewhat different homecoming feeling from anything else except the theater...To have my life unpunctuated by the physical act of film going is almost like walking with a limp, out of my natural rhythm."

This terrific collection has been divided into a few sections: "Reviews," "Reviewings," "Comment," and "Books." The reviews are written deceptively simply, one of Kauffmann's many subtle abilities. He draws you into his view of a film and its possibilities (realized or not) with gentleness and assuredness. He is never noisy, flippant, or condescending. When he objects to something (and he does, often) he lays it out clearly - and humanely. It's a pleasure.

Kauffmann can be funny, too, and has an innate sense of what is worth re-telling. Kauffmann's wonderful review of Kevin Brownlow's biography of director David Lean starts off: "David Lean began life as a dunce. His kindergarten teacher told his mother that she was afraid he would never be able to read and write. He managed to disprove that prediction, buy otherwise there was little sparkle." Of course Lean, raised a Quaker in London, discovered movies at age 13, and everything changed.

Kauffmann eagerly promotes his favorites (Emma Thompson is one, he has much respect for Warren Beatty, and pays close attention to smaller, unsung filmmakers) and is painstakingly fair to actors and filmmakers -in consistently thoughtful uses of his pulpit. He begins his review of a small Iranian film, "Through the Olive Trees," by expressing his thanks to the friend who prompted him to first have a look at its director's work, and then he thanks the director himself. Kauffmann is a man who loves the medium, and reveres its potential to provide hope and transformation - along with a lot of fun.

These great pieces are definitely worth reading and rereading.