Spoilers Part 1

by Anne Billson

Anne Billson wrote her first professional film review in 1980. In the three decades since then, her writing has been published in dozens of publications, including the Sunday Correspondent, Tatler, New Statesman & Society, the Sunday Telegraph, the Guardian, GQ, the Times, Vogue and Elle. She has also written regularly for websites such as the First Post and the Arts Desk, and has had several books published, including three horror novels.

Billson combines in-depth knowledge of her field with an eminently readable and unpretentious style, and makes sometimes surprising and controversial observations with wit and elegance. Quite simply, she's a must-read for anyone interested in film.

113 pages, Kindle Edition

First published February 6, 2012

About the author

ANNE BILLSON is a film critic, novelist, photographer, style icon, wicked spinster, evil feminist, and international cat-sitter who has lived in London, Tokyo, Paris and Croydon, and now lives in Belgium. She likes frites, beer and chocolate.

Her books include SUCKERS (an upwardly mobile vampire novel), STIFF LIPS (a Notting Hill ghost story), THE EX (a supernatural detective story) and THE COMING THING (Rosemary's Baby meets Bridget Jones) as well as several works of non-fiction, including BILLSON FILM DATABASE, BREAST MAN: A CONVERSATION WITH RUSS MEYER, and monographs on the films THE THING and LET THE RIGHT ONE IN.

Her latest book is CATS ON FILM, the definitive work of feline film scholarship.

She sometimes writes about film for the Guardian, and is currently working on a screenplay and a sequel to her vampire novel, SUCKERS. She has three blogs: multiglom.com (the Billson Blog), catsonfilm.net (a blog about cats in the cinema), and lempiredeslumieres.com (photographs of Belgian beer, bars and sunsets).

Reviews

[S. Wilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great collection of film reviews from the same time period in which I first became interested in film as more than just entertainment. Anne Billson's critiques encapsulate the snarky, low-rent cinephile swagger of the eighties underground film fan, and I'm sincere when I say that I mean that in a nice way. Like other critic's spawned from the horror film worshipers of the pre-internet small press, Billson manages to counter a deep knowledge of and respect for film history with a healthy cynicism about the current state of the move-going experience. The selection of films reviewed in this collection highlight some of the major film events of the early nineties, whether it's the emergence of a new talent with Reservoir Dogs, or the death of a childhood fantasy with Hook, and reading her reviews in chronological order serves as a time-capsule of cinematic exploration as seen through a sarcastic stranger's slightly jaded eyes.