Film/Literature/Heritage
ed Ginette Vincendeau
(BFI, £13.99)

Bypass the drear review sections and maintain pickiness among the queer readings of Dracula (sex may the chief business of the cinema, but let's deal in it silently in the dark and not afterwards in critspeak), and you find such nifty understandings of the heritage game as Martin Scorsese on the central dinner in The Age of Innocence ("We're going to have to bring out the Crown Derby, aren't we? It's the heavy artillery"), Ben Affleck fetching in tights, and an appreciation by Liz Lochhead of the swordfights in Rob Roy (only, typically, she doesn't credit the incomparable fight master William Hobbs, the Jerome Robbins of martial choreography).

Kubrick's Cinema Odyssey
Michel Chion
(BFI, £14.99)

New, yet as irresistibly 1960s as the boots of the space station's hostesses in Stan's 2001 - there should be a preservation order out on a cineaste who can write "I prefer... to bring the politique of auteurs into a dialectical relationship with the politique of the work". All the fun of reading ineffable French rendered into very effed English, especially when Chion moves on to the director's Eyes Wide Shut: we also particularly cherish Scene A4 in the breakdown of 2001: "Slight noise of carnivorous chewing" (what a specification for the foley artist). Pertinent but underexplored comparison of 2001 with Jacque Tati's Playtime, also 1968.