Left in the Dark

Stuart Klawans
January 2002     ISBN: 1560253657

Critic Stuart Klawans has covered the movie scene from Hoop Dreams (loved it) to Gladiator (hated it) and from Lone Star (hated it) to Unforgiven (loved it). A friend of independent filmmaking (but not of its pretensions), an enemy of big-budget productions (except when they're entertaining), Klawans doesn't forget that each of us needs some joy in the dark.

Here is the best of his funny, sharp and revelatory film writing for The Nation, and a selection of reviews and essays from The New York Times, The Village Voice, Film Comment and other journals. Klawans explains how to approach a masterpiece by Abbas Kiarostami as if it were a strange dog; why David Lynch would disappoint a visiting Martian; and what The Rage: Carrie 2 tells us about rage and Carrie. All this, plus insight into the quieter refinements of Moulin Rouge, the correct Talmudic interpretation of Natural Born Killers and the reasons why they were never wrong, the Old Masters (Renoir, Dreyer, Semb�ne and early 1930s Warner Brothers). Informing all of these pieces is Klawans's advocacy of "real imagination," which flourishes on the border between fiction and documentary.

"The genuine heir to James Agee and Manny Farber: someone who can mix political and aesthetic analysis with a lightness, sanity, humor, indignation, and elegant prose style that is dazzling to read."
--Phillip Lopate, Cineaste

"Watching a movie with Left in the Dark as your guide is like suddenly being able to truly distinguish the light from the darkness up there on the screen."
--Rabbi Burton L. Visotzky

"Klawans is funny, sharp, wise, sane, learned, humane, passionate, often profound, occasionally flippant, sometimes angry, and a literary stylist of the first water. He is also a movie critic. The combination is dangerous."
--Luc Sante

Stuart Klawans began writing film reviews for The Nation in 1988. His book Film Follies: The Cinema Out of Order was a finalist for the 1999 National Book Critics Circle Awards.