Not to Be Missed ─ Fifty-Four Favorites from a Lifetime of Film

As a child in 1950s Brooklyn, Kenneth Turan often turned to television programs like ?Million Dollar Movie” on WOR-TV. Featuring a much-loved theme song from Gone with the Wind, ?Million Dollar Movie” would run one feature film twice a day, every day, all week. It was there that he developed a life-long love of the world of the movies.

One of the most discerning critics writing today, Kenneth Turan offers insights that are sure to delight and inspire movie-lovers of all kinds in his latest book, Not To Be Missed. As sophisticated and illuminating as the films they discuss, Turan’s sketches are a blend of cultural analysis, historical anecdote and sordid Hollywood controversy, astute critical appraisals, all suffused with his abiding love for the silver screen.

Turan's favorite films range across all genres, low and high. From All About Eve to Seven Samurai to Spirited Away, these are now timeless films?classic and contemporary, familiar and obscure, with big budgets and small?each as interesting as the lives of the authors and actors that made the usually two-or-so-hour-long cinematic experience itself.

Ernst Lubitsch loved to act out the scenes he was shooting in front of his cast. Laurence Olivier’s torrid love affair with Vivien Leigh was the only reason he agreed to play the part of Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice. John Boorman once said that ?watching film is very like dreaming,” and truly, the highly-stylized violence of Point Blank dares its audience to reconsider what they've seen on the screen.

Kenneth Turan is the film critic for the Los Angeles Times and NPR's Morning Edition, as well as the director of the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes. He has been a staff writer for the Washington Post and TV Guide, and served as the Times' book review editor. A graduate of Swarthmore College and Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, he is the co-author of Call Me Anna: The Autobiography of Patty Duke. He teaches film reviewing and non-fiction writing at USC and is on the board of directors of the National Yiddish Book Center. His most recent books include Free for All: Joe Papp, The Public, and the Greatest Theater Story Ever Told and Never Coming To A Theater Near You. Turan lives in Los Angeles, CA.