* Film & Media Studies

This best-selling text is a succinct guide to thinking critically and writing precisely about film. With numerous student and professional examples along the way, this engaging and practical guide progresses from taking notes and writing first drafts to creating polished essays and comprehensive research projects. Moving from movie reviews to theoretical and critical essays, the text demonstrates how an analysis of a film becomes more subtle and rigorous as part of a compositional process. Both an introduction to film study and a practical writing guide, this brief text introduces students to film terms and the major film theories to enable them to write more critically. For individuals who want to think and write critically about film.

Two books in one: a handy guide to the process of academic writing and a brief but thorough introduction to the basics of film form, film theory, and film analysis. Clear, accessible, and surprisingly affordable, it's the only writing guide a student of film will ever need.

For more than forty years, readers of Melbourne newspapers and journals - and radio listeners - have learned about the latest films through the interpretations and judgments of Brian McFarlane. Over that time McFarlane's reviews of and articles on film have featured in The Age, Australian Book Review, Cinema Papers, Inside Story, Meanjin, Metro, Screening the Past, Senses of Cinema, Sight & Sound, and many other sources online, on air and on paper. This selection of McFarlane's writings on film, taken as a whole, tells a story about what has brought us back to the cinema again and again, from recent times to a now more distant past. In his attuned but easy style, sprinkled with wit and insight, our guide brings back memories, fills gaps in our knowledge, triggers conversations, and inspires delight and enthusiasm. Making a Meal of It is a first-rate resource for film buffs and excellent dinner-table company.