When Movies Mattered: Reviews from a Transformative Decade

by Dave Kehr

If you have ever wanted to dig around in the archives for that perfect Sunday afternoon DVD and first turned to a witty weekly column in the New York Times, then you are already familiar with one of our nation’s premier film critics. If you love movies—and the writers who engage them—and just happen to have followed two of the highest circulating daily papers in the country, then you probably recognize the name of the intellectually dazzling writer who has been penning pieces on American and foreign films for over thirty years. And if you called the City of the Big Shoulders home in the 1970s or 1980s and relied on those trenchant, incisive reviews from the Chicago Reader and the Chicago Tribune to guide your moviegoing delight, then you know Dave Kehr. 

When Movies Mattered presents a wide-ranging and illuminating selection of Kehr’s criticism from the Reader—most of which is reprinted here for the first time—including insightful discussions of film history and his controversial Top Ten lists. Long heralded by his peers for both his deep knowledge and incisive style, Kehr developed his approach to writing about film from the auteur criticism popular in the ’70s. Though Kehr’s criticism has never lost its intellectual edge, it’s still easily accessible to anyone who truly cares about movies. Never watered down and always razor sharp, it goes beyond wry observations to an acute examination of the particular stylistic qualities that define the work of individual directors and determine the meaning of individual films.

From current releases to important revivals, from classical Hollywood to foreign fare, Kehr has kept us spellbound with his insightful critical commentaries. When Movies Mattered will secure his place among our very best writers about all things cinematic.

 

Genres: Film, Nonfiction, Media Tie In, Essays, Criticism

290 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2011

About the author

David Kehr is an American museum curator and film critic. For many years a critic at the Chicago Reader and the Chicago Tribune, he later wrote a weekly column for The New York Times on DVD releases. He later became a curator within the department of film at the Museum of Modern Art (New York).

Reviews

[Josh]

Before taking a job as adjunct curator of film at MoMA last December, Dave Kehr was one of the best American writers of film history and criticism, working for the Chicago Reader, Chicago Tribune, New York Daily News, Film Comment, and New York Times. His first book is a collection of reviews and essays written primarily for the Chicago Reader between the years 1974 and 1986. Though I take issue with the title (movies still matter to me, and to Kehr, too, I'm sure), I have no complaints about the content. Whether I agree with his opinions or not, I always learn a little something about each film and director Kehr covers. His reviews are thoughtful, extremely detailed, and based on careful, close readings of what's in the frame, not speculation and theory about what's outside it. He's particularly strong at taking complex analyses of the form and structure of a movie and the personal stylistic and technical choices made by a director and turning those analyses into graceful, readable, entertaining prose. My favorite pieces here are about John Cassavetes and George Romero, but he's also at his best when writing about Albert Brooks, Alfred Hitchcock, Eric Rohmer, Blake Edwards, Clint Eastwood, and Jean-Luc Godard.

[Robert]

I grew up on Kehr's film reviews for the Chicago Reader. These reviews, along with his subsequent work for the Chicago Tribune, New York Daily News, and his current DVD column for the New York Times, display an encyclopedic knowledge of film history and aesthetics that is lacking in too many modern movie critics. At the same time, he is the rare critic capable of communicating his enthusiasm for mainstream Hollywood films and more esoteric art house films with the same voice, with the belief that there is an audience capable of intelligent appreciation of multiple genres, multiple auteurs.

This book collects a sampling of his early essays on films and directors written between 1974 and 1986. I actually discovered Kehr after these essays were written, so it's a delight to dig into them now.

[Brandon]

The most compulsively readable book of film writing I've come across. Wondered at first if I found it so engrossing since I read most of it waiting on line at jury duty, but the rest was just as good at home. Now to watch everything on his lists of favorites at the end of the book...

[R.J. Gilmour]

The book is a collection of Kehr's film reviews from the 1970s and 1980s. Each review is only 2-3 pages in length and provides not only a narrative overview of the film, but also Kehr's unique analysis about the content and structure and how it fits in the larger historiographical universe.

"For other filmmakers, the Holocaust has simply been a way of eliciting a programmed response from an audience of adding zap to otherwise routine, formulaic melodramas and thrillers. But the problem with all of these films is that once they've decided to incorporate these events into a fictional narration, the Holocaust ceases to be a fact and becomes a rhetorical device-just another cog in a storytelling machine designed to produce pity and terror, structurally interchangeable with such other arbitrary symbols of evil as the giant shark in Jaws or the high-rise fire in The Towering Inferno. No matter how noble the filmmaker's intentions, to "use" the Holocaust in a story is inevitably to reduce it, transform it, betray it." 62

"Shoah is not a historical documentary-a film that seals its subject up in a hazy, distant past-but a movie made entirely in the present tense. For Lanzmann, the Holocaust isn't over: it persists in the traces it has left in the landscape, in the memories it has left in people's minds, and in the echoing absence-the absence of six million people-it has left in European life." 62

[Richard Chandler]

Indispensable

[Simon Popek]

4,0 ⭐️

[Micah ☔️]

The Hitchcock piece, as well as the opening suite reviewing the best film of each year, comprise some of the best film criticism I’ve ever read.

[Christopher Mantafounis]

This really is just ('just') movie reviews, anthologised from Kehr's tenure with The Chicago Reader when print media could be truly intellectual, a word I use without irony. So, it may not be a coherent 'book' (qua book) in the sense that pages are readily skippable depending on the reader's foreknowledge, and there is no thesis except to evidence my prior statement about the quality of discussion of the arts in the mainstream. But it's indispensable. Dave Kehr is our greatest living film critic (I think?; and Jonathan Rosenbaum is our greatest active film critic?) and here he is at a peak, importantly operating in an essay format rather than the capsule review style which defined his later career. He is curiously humourless—which isn't to say dour—in some "infelicitous prose" as he puts in the self-effacing introduction, which is a perfectly self-describing phrase; yet there is a wealth of insight here that any fan of the cinema should appreciate. Plus, top-ten lists!

[Peter Keough]

I first came in contact with Dave Kehr's criticism in 1983 when I was teaching a writing course as a TA at the University of Illinois at Chicago. For a class in criticism I chose his review of "Sudden Impact"(included in this book) because I really didn't like the movie and disagreed with his assessment of it. But as we discussed the film and the review I started to see Dave's point and was finally convinced that "Sudden Impact" was a indeed a great movie and Eastwood was a major director. That was back when movie critics mattered -- do they still?

[Moe]

Volume II of Dave Kehr's movie essays. Excellent. Dave Kehr's autopsy of a movie is super rich: he describes the stylistic choices and techniques of a director, draws comparisons to his other movies, and then point out influences from other directors or other eras of movie history, then gives you his own view on what matters about the movie. I wish there was a Dave Kehr's review for every movie ever made

[Simon]

Great collection of essays and reviews from longtime Chicago Reader critic Dave Kehr.