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Icons in the Fire: Reviewing British Cinema in the 1980s and 1990s

Icons in the Fire: The Decline and Fall of Almost Everybody in the British Film Industry, 1984-2000  is the third and final book in Alexander Walker's trilogy exploring British cinema from the beginning of the 1960s to the end of the 1990s.  The first of the three,  Hollywood England , covered the period from the early 1960s to the beginning of the 1970s and the second,   National Heroes , from the 1970s to the early 1980s. Icons in the Fire picks up the story from the mid-1980s and covers the period until 1999.
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2022: The Year in Review

It's the end of another year, and so time for the now-traditional Cinema Essentials end of year review.  So what's been happening on the site this year? Well, you might be thinking "Not much!". And you could be forgiven for that. But things have still been ticking over, even if it hasn't been quite as busy this year. Me, trying to think of something interesting to say about  Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit . We Are 5 Cinema Essentials celebrated its 5th birthday in July. That means this site has now been running for nearly five and a half years, which is longer than six of Liz Taylor's marriages.

Classic TV: Sharpe

Based on the novels by Bernard Cornwell, the TV series Sharpe  provided Sean Bean with his most famous role as Richard Sharpe, a British army officer fighting against the French during the Napoleonic Wars. The series followed Sharpe's wartime exploits across 14 feature-length television films, originally broadcast between 1993 and 1997. These were followed by two additional two-part stories set in India and broadcast in 2006 and 2008. 

Book Review: The Young Alfred Hitchcock's Moviemaking Masterclass, by Tony Lee Moral

The Young Alfred Hitchcock's Moviemaking Masterclass  explores Alfred Hitchcock's approach to filmmaking from almost every angle, breaking the process down into its essential elements. These include scripting, casting, working with actors, camera work, editing and set design. The author also looks at the director's use of sound, music - including both music scores and diegetic music - and even film promotion and marketing, appropriately calling Hitchcock not only the master of suspense, but also "the master of marketing". The book also looks at Hitchcock's working methods and preferences, including his working with screenwriters to develop stories into scripts, his storyboarding of particular sequences and even his visualising of a film before it was made, with Hitchcock often claiming that actually making the film was the dull part.

The 12 Best Peter Sellers Films

Peter Sellers was one of the great comedy stars, and one of the great comic character actors, of the 20th century. Originally coming to prominence in the 1950s in the BBC radio series The Goon Show , his remarkable repertoire of voices soon found him coming to the attention of film makers.