The Press Gang. Writings on cinema from New York Press, 1991-2011 by Godfrey Cheshire, Matt Zoller Seitz, Armond White

Published by Seven Stories Press, 2020
Perfect bound softcover
First printing
496 pages
8x10 inches

”Literate and reflective, these reviews rival those by more famous critics like Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris.”—Kirkus Reviews

Edited by Jim Colvill of Film Desk Books.
Introduction by Jim Knipfel.

The long-form criticism written by Godfrey Cheshire, Matt Zoller Seitz and Armond White for New York Press included reviews, polemics, interviews, festival reports and features. Week after week all three exhibited a strong passion for both the film culture of the time and what had come before, providing three equally accomplished, yet notably individual, perspectives on cinema. There distinctive tastes and preoccupations were often positioned in direct dialogue with each other in an ongoing critical conversation that frequently saw each writer directly challenging his colleagues in print. In the pieces collected here they tackle no only the the cinema of the 1990s and 2000s as it was released, but also such classic directors as Alfred Hitchcock, David Lean, Stanley Kubrick, Orson Welles, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Robert Bresson, as well as subjects such as the legacy of Star Wars, film noir, early film projection in New York City, the New York Film Critics Circle, Sundance, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the then emerging cinema from Iran and Taiwan.

Read an excerpt from Jim Knipfel’s introduction on Literary Hub