This Is How You Fight The Battle for Movies

In our media-dystopic, attention-predator 21st century, what's happened to movies? Not just this week's movies-all movies, the 130-plus-years of cinema's legacy? Do we have to fight to keep it alive?

Michael Atkinson votes yes, with gloves off. One of America's most widely published and notoriously contentious film pundits, Atkinson assembles here a quarter century's worth of testament and interrogation, of cinema's myriad manifestations and experiences, and of our often confounded relationship with it-the meanings and secrets and truths found at the heart of moviegoing.

From the covert significance of The Little Rascals and The Blair Witch Project to Hitler's favorite movies and the quantum-ness of the JFK assassination footage-reassessing silent masterpieces, finding hidden codes in classics, dissecting New Wave figures, resurrecting neglected wonders, tearing "blockbuster" culture down-Atkinson delves deep and wide, waging a one-man culture war for movieheads, to rescue an art form under siege.