For more than four decades, Godfrey Cheshire has been one of America’s most distinctive film critics: a passionate champion of world cinema, an incisive observer of culture, and a writer whose curiosity has carried him from the American South to Cannes, Tehran, Beijing, and beyond. In these expansive conversations with Nicholas Elliott, Cheshire reflects on a life shaped by movies, music, travel, and ideas, tracing his journey from a movie-obsessed boy in North Carolina to one of the most influential voices in film criticism. Alongside the interviews are more than fifty of his finest essays, reviews, and interviews, spanning filmmakers as diverse as John Ford, Wim Wenders, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Ross McElwee, Abbas Kiarostami, David Lynch, Laura Poitras, and many others.
Part memoir, part critical anthology, Cheshire on Film is also the story of a disappearing era: the golden age of alternative journalism, the rise of independent cinema, the discovery of new film cultures around the world, and the transformation of movies in the digital age. Whether writing about Hollywood classics, Iranian masterpieces, rock music, Southern history, or the future of cinema itself, Cheshire brings to every subject a rare combination of intellectual rigor, personal warmth, and adventurous spirit. Rich, wide-ranging, and deeply engaging, this volume is an essential companion for anyone who believes that movies can change the way we see the world—and ourselves.
Godfrey Cheshire is an award-winning film critic whose writings have appeared in the New York Times, Film Comment, Cineaste, Variety and the Village Voice. He has written two books about Iranian cinema, Conversations with Kiarostami and In the Time of Kiarostami, and is the director of Moving Midway, a documentary about his family's North Carolina plantation.
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