Shots in the Dark

Novelist and critic Jonathan Baumbach was a contributor to Film Culture in the late 1950s, and then was the film critic for the Partisan Review from the 1970s through the early 1980s. His essays touched on a range of interests, including the legacy of French New Wave, the rise of New Hollywood, and the critical reputation of Pauline Kael. Though he was a contemporary of Kael, Andrew Sarris and others in the "Golden Age" of film criticism, Baumbach's writing on cinema has never before been collected in one place. Shots in the Dark will bring this significant body of work together for the first time.

Jonathan Baumbach is the son of a painter and the father of a filmmaker, a photographer, and a film theorist. He has had cameo appearances in several of his son, Noah's films. Shots in the Dark is his seventeenth book and second book of criticism. His novels include A Man to Conjure With, Reruns, Separate Hours and YOU or The Invention of Memory. He is a former two-time chairman of The National Society of Film Critics.

Miriam Bale is an independent film programmer and writer based in New York. She has written for the New York Times, New York Daily News, Film Comment, Cineaste, Filmmaker, The L, Bomb, as well as film websites such as Moving Image Source and Indiewire. Her programming work has been frequently highlighted in the the New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.