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This is an essential guide for anybody interested in cult films. Films like The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed up Zombies, Basket Case, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and other bona fide celluloid moments of madness.

The book is informative, witty, hugely enjoyable and will set you off on the trail to search out these classics of cult cinema. Enjoy the journey.

Over the course of the eight feature films he has directed since 1979, Michael Mann has shown himself, time and again, to be a rigorous, honest dramatist, a maker of solid worlds. So much so that in America, at least, he tends to be underrated. The most respectful of his critics often define him (a bit too simply) as a “realist.” Certainly, whether the subject is thievery (The Jericho Mile, Thief, Heat), killers (Manhunter, Collateral), frontier life (The Last of the Mohicans), the nuanced struggle between the news media and corporate money (The Insider), or that of a celebrated athlete looking to find his life’s meaning in a world of bigotry (Ali), Mann seeks authenticity above all. Whatever suspense, entertainment value, and emotional or philosophical insight his work may yield rises from a truthfully imagined, painstakingly observed set of human beings and their warring intentions. This book explores Mann’s multifaceted oeuvre, including his most recent film, Miami Vice.

Much praised and much missed after its premature cancellation, Firefly was the first SF TV series to be conceived by Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy and cocreator of Angel. Set five centuries in the future, it is a show where the mysterious personal pasts of the crew of the tramp spaceship Serenity continually surface. In fact, it’s a Western in space where the losers in a Civil War are heading out to a barren frontier. Mal Reynolds is a man embittered by the war, yet whose love of his comrades perpetually dents his cynicism - even in the 14 episodes that exist we see him warm to the bubbly young mechanic Kaylee, the preacher Book, the idealistic doctor Simon, even to the often demented River, Simon’s sister, the psychic result of malign experiments.

Firefly is also about adult emotional relationships, for example Kaylee’s crush on Simon, the happy marriage of Mal’s second officer Zoe and the pilot Wash, the disastrous erotic stalemate between Mal and the courtesan Inara. Individual episodes deal with capers going vaguely wrong, or threats narrowly circumvented; character and plot arcs were starting to emerge when the show was cancelled.

And now Titan Books has to published Firefly: The Official Companion: Volume One, a highly illustrated guide to the first six episodes, including annotated scripts and profiles of all the cast.

The idea behind The 50 Best Movies for the Movie Fan was for the author to express his subjective opinions on the best English language films in cinema history, ranked from number 50 down to number 1…but it became much more than that. Stan Russo has chosen to critique, analyze or just plain talk about close to 500 movies in total, including a number of foreign films that have impacted hardcore cinema fans and the top movie lists from two other well-known sources. Russo hopes to spark debate with his choices. While every movie fan will no doubt challenge aspects of this list, the goal of this volume is to be exposed to great films that may have been overlooked.

From Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931) to Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940), this tome explores a diverse and fascinating era in world cinema.

The stock market crash of 1929 had left the America—and the globe—in a devastating depression that would not begin to lift until World War II. With so many jobless, penniless, broken people singing the blues, is it any wonder that Hollywood strove to distract viewers from their misery with comedies like Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936), Capra’s feel-good Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), and the Marx Brothers’ hilarious Duck Soup (1933), thrillers such as Hitchcock’s seminal The 39 Steps (1935) or Hawks’s Scarface (1932), or the epic romantic classic Gone with the Wind (1939)?

While American moviegoers flocked to the theaters to escape their troubles and find solace in the magical world of Hollywood movies, filmmakers in Europe were experimenting with new techniques in a medium that had only recently gained sound; Fritz Lang’s German Expressionist M (1931) and Jean Renoir’s anti-war masterpiece La Grande Illusion (1937) greatly enhanced cinema as an art form, while Leni Riefenstahl’s visually stunning Olympia (1936-38) pushed the limits of the medium’s technical capacities. It’s clear that while the 1930s was a time of poverty and struggle for many people, the world of cinema was much enriched.

Cult Rock Posters 1972-1982 by Roger Crimlis and Alwyn Turner is due to be published on Monday September 25.

The launch will be followed by a small exhibition of rock & roll posters at Bamalama Posters, 55 Leather Lane, London EC1N 7JT from Thursday, September 28th until October 20th.

According to the publisher:

The Film Geek Files comprises the most essential interviews, essays and reviews of Tarantino’s career - from geekish video-store clerk to the cult figure he is today. This definitive, illustrated anthology also contains personal comment from Tarantino himself on writing his screenplays, the struggle to make his own movies, and his favourite film genres. To an avid fan market, The Film Geek Files will provide both an entertainment and an education.

Charles Pappas’ Its A Bitter Little World is a tour through sixty years of the language of film noir. It’s also the sort of book that can be easily dipped into, every time providing another reminder of just how widespread and widely influential film noir has become. Or, as the author points out:

True noir changes with the hemlines, the TV shows, and the Billboard top ten. It Toyota’d out of the city and into the desert (U Turn, Red Rock West), zipped up a down jacket and mushed north (Fargo), rewound into the past (Miller’s Crossing, Chinatown, The Two Jakes, L.A. Confidential), fast-forwarded into the future (Blade Runner), microscoped The Joy of Sex cover to cover (Body Heat), and crammed the CliffNotes for French deconstructionists (The Usual Suspects, Memento). Its piano-key colors are now beetle blacks, lab-coat whites, gargoyle grays, tobacco-stain browns, and autopsy reds.

For as long as people continue to make films, people will continue to make film noir. This book is a timely reminder of why.

In the 1960s, producer and distributor named K. Gordon Murray started to build a career out of importing a unique collection of horror films from Mexico into the US.

From monster movies with a clear debt to the 1930s Universal films to the lucha libre horror films featuring El Santo and the “Wrestling Women” - recently referenced by Jack Blacks Nacho Libre - these films offered good camp fun and, inevitably, inspired a cult following.

Now Doyle Green attempts to place Mexploitation films in their historical and cultural context, and provides close textual readings of a representative sample, showing how they can be seen as important documents in the cultural debate over Mexico’s past, present, and future.

There’s pictures, too.

The Cinema of George A. Romero: Knight of the Living Dead is the first in-depth study in English of the career of this foremost auteur working at the margins of the Hollywood mainstream in the horror genre. In placing Romero’s oeuvre in the context of literary naturalism, the book explores the relevance of the director’s films within American cultural traditions and thus explains the potency of such work beyond ’splatter movie’ models.