The Political Companion to American Film is an encyclopedic collection of critical essays offering provocative social and political commentary on the work of filmmakers (from Woody Allen to Darryl Zanuck) and other film personalities (from Charles Chaplin to John Wayne), film genres (from crime Movies to World War II Animated Propaganda Cartoons), racial and ethnic portrayals (from African Americans to Native Americans), social issues (from Big Businessmen to the Small Town), theoretical and critical issues (from the Auteur Theory to Postwar American Film Criticism), economic and industrial...

Cineaste, America's leading magazine on the art and politics of the cinema, has been acclaimed worldwide for its interviews with filmmakers and film critics. In the early 1980s, a collection of some of the best of these was published as The Cineaste Interviews. Now, Cineaste Interviews 2 takes on the aesthetic and political issues that have dominated the film scene over the last twenty years. The focus of this particular collection of twenty-five interviews is on the role of the director.