World Cinema: Critical Approaches

Although it is required for my International Cinema class at WVState U, I am enjoyably helped by these thorough, brief analyses.

ok to be perfectly honest, i was not excited when i signed up for World Cinema in college. I figured we will watch international movie hits or short films made by the big studios. boy was i wrong. I never even heard of 3rd cinema before reading this book.i found this book very enlightening and interesting but it does get dull if you are not real fan of cinema outside of the U.S.It certainly teaches you a lot about all the different cinemas of the world and their influence on the world.the best part for me was actually understanding parts of the films we were watching after reading about them in this book.I would not recommend this for fun reading but its certainly teaches you a good amount.

I used this book of Course for a World Cinema class at Virginia Commonwealth University. The book serves as more of a secondary reference. At times, it even contradicts itself when relating to certain film movements. If you are new to film, this may be something to look at because it is holistic. However, if you have a bit of a film background you will probably be more against this book than for it. Lastly, it does provide examples of movies to watch within the chapter and I found this to be its greatest asset.

Being used as a textbook in a World Cinema class, it falls short despite its diverse information and highly lexical cinematic language. It has loads of information that can keep a student informed for the rest of their life, but being blindly assigned a set limit of pages to read in a week forces the book's shortcomings to come into focus. It's run on sentences, mind numbing lexicon, and horribly boring page design make this textbook a chore that does not seem worth completing, which is especially frustrating given it's full knowledge on such an important subject.