Now Playing at the Valencia: Pulitzer Prize-Winning Essays on the Movies » (Bargain)

Stephen Hunter has written 16 novels. The retired chief film critic for The Washington Post, where he won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Criticism, he has also published two collections of film criticism and a nonfiction work, American Gunfight. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland.

Evanston, Illinois, was an idyllic 1950s paradise with stately homes, a beautiful lake, a world-class university, two premier movie houses, and one very seedy movie theater - the Valencia.

This was the site of Washington Post film critic Stephen Hunter's misspent youth. Instead of going to school, picking up girls, or tossing a football, Hunter could be found sitting in the fifteenth row, right-hand aisle seat of the Valencia, sating himself on one B-list movie after another.

The Valencia had a sticky floor, smelly bathrooms, ancient popcorn, and a screen set in a hideously tacky paper-mache castle wall. It was also the only place in town to see westerns, sci-fi pictures, cops'n'robbers flicks, slapstick comedy, and Godzilla.

In Now Playing at the Valencia, the author of such bestselling novels as Havana and Pale Horse Coming has compiled his favorite movie reviews written between 1997 and 2003, bringing to the discussion the passionate feelings for cinema he discovered in the '50s, a time when genres were forming, mesmerizing stars played unforgettable characters, and enduring classics were made. While filmmaking has changed tremendously since Hunter first frequented the Valencia, the view from the fifteenth row, and the thrill of down and dirty entertainment, has remained the same.

Publishers Weekly

Transferring his boyhood passion for 1950s B-movies to today's digitized blockbusters, Washington Post critic Hunter celebrates Hollywood's great populist entertainments. He gathers his reviews of the last decade's worth of pictures, grouped by such genres as westerns, sci-fi and war movies. (A military buff, Hunter can identify the make and model of every filmic badass's automatic weapon and reliably tears up at the sight of a band of brothers holding out against hopeless odds.) A fiction writer, too, Hunter offers superb descriptions of imagery and atmosphere, the rush of action and the aura of actors, but his rapt openness to movies' dazzling phenomena sometimes overwhelms his discernment. To pick a schlockfest at random, his review of Mission: Impossible 2 mixes evocative observations (dewy Thandie Newton is "an embryo floating in her little sac of nourishing fluid") with overstimulated blurb-mongering ("M:I-2 rocks so hard it rocks its way off the planet"). Some of the deadline-driven pieces are no deeper than a strip of celluloid, but others on Hollywood gunfights, say, or the worldview of conspiracy movies thoughtfully probe the ideology of cinema. Written in a vigorous, demotic style, these essays are more fun than the films they discuss. Agent, Esther Newberg. (Nov.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.