"For well over a century, those who create motion pictures have touched our hearts and souls; they have transported and transformed our minds, intoxicated and entranced our senses. One artist's vision is the single most prominent force behind the scenes: the director. The Essential Directors illuminates the unseen forces behind some of the most notable screen triumphs from the aesthetic peak of silent cinema through the New Hollywood of the 1970s....

"Alfred Hitchcock was fixated on the blond actresses who starred in many of his iconic movies. The lengths he went to in order to showcase--and often manipulate--these women would become the stuff of movie legend. But the women themselves have rarely been at the center of the story, until now. In Hitchcock's Blondes, Laurence Leamer offers an intimate journey into the lives of eight legendary actresses whose stories helped chart the course of the...