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August 15, 2005
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.

November 1, 2005
When Pulitzer Prize-winning " Washington Post " critic Hunter was growing up in the 1950s, his tastes were shaped not in theaters that showed foreign films but in one that specialized in B movies. That accounts for the organization of his reviews by genre and for the straitjacket genre-mindedness puts on the book's coverage. More than most review collections, this one suffers from undue attention to movies that weren't worth the ink even when they were released. Does anyone still want to read about " Lethal Weapon 4" or " G.I. Jane" ? Yet when Hunter tackles such worthwhile releases as " L.A. Confidential" and " Black Hawk Down" , and revived classics (e.g., " High Noon" , " The Third Man" ), he does it with amusing verve and genuine acumen. Hunter acknowledges the limitations of the lowbrow, noting that " The Godfather" represents "the difference between a great genre film and a great film," but his love of plebeian pleasures seems to blind him to the rewards of more elevated fare. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2005, American Library Association.)