Flickers by Gilbert Adair

My favorite book on film is Flickers by the recently deceased English critic and novelist Gilbert Adair. It was published in 1995 to commemorate the centenary of cinema. It consists of 100 movie stills, 1 per year from 1895 to 1994, each accompanied by a short essay about the specific film, but more often branching off into considerations of the director, the genre, or cinema as a whole. What immediately attracted me to this book when I saw it on the shelf of the University Co-op bookstore in Austin, Texas, were the profuse illustrations (often a deficiency of books about film), then the fact that some of my personal favorites (Lawrence of...