The Tla Film and Video Guide: The Discerning Film Lover's Guide: 2000-2001

Reviews over 9,500 films, and includes star, director, genre, country, and theme indexes

The TLA Film and Video Guide (2000-2001) boasts that it's designed for the "discerning film lover." And while it does contain reviews of recent pop schlock (the cover includes a picture of Cameron Diaz with her infamous hairstyle from Something About Mary), its focus is really on foreign, independent, and art films. Since this guide is designed to navigate viewers toward quality films, there is a noticeably large number of three-and-a-half and four star reviews--which has a tendency to make the commentators seem like cheap dates. Still, there are some refreshing moments of moxie. For example, the writers find the 1992 remake of Night and the City, an almost-forgotten film starring Robert DeNiro and Jessica Lange, to be on a par with the classic 1950 original. And regarding the famous fiasco Ishtar: "if you can erase all preconceptions, you may find it funny; particularly the intentionally horrendous Hoffman-Beatty duets." They also claim that in Schindler's List "Spielberg bypasses the heart and goes right for the jugular ... [the film] is alternately impressive, maudlin, focused, and well-acted." A stronger editorial hand might have refined repetitious expressions and corrected the punctuation, but David Bleiler and his crew of commentators have nonetheless created an attractive volume whose capsule reviews are generally more thorough than most books of this genre. --Raphael Shargel