Time Out Film Guide 2011 (a book)

Edited by John Pym. Nineteenth Edition 2011. Revised and Expanded. London: Ebury Publishing, 2010. 1336 pages, 19.000 films reviewed over the last 42 years by Time Out critics, more than 350 additional reviews, stop-press coverage of the 2010 Cannes film festival

Time Out Film Guide is my favourite annual film guide for many reasons. The approach is genuinely global, with attention to many national cinemas. There are some 300 top contributors, experts of the capsule review format, some of them already dead. The book covers both the mainstream and the unconventional traditions of the cinema.

Tom Charity and Sarah Thorowgood have compiled a list of a hundred online link recommendations for the book in categories such as:
- favourites - there are five: IMDb, The Daily, Senses of Cinema, Dvd Beaver, and Time Out, itself
- breaking movie news
- streaming and downloading
- film-makers in their own write
- the critics
- critics blogging
- film magazines online for fans
- film magazines online for cinephiles
- online cinephilia
- academia online
- film discussion forums
- newspapers
- dvd
- screenplays
- institutions and resources

The tiny corpus size of the typography borders on the unreadable (at least for a 55 year old reader: I need to change to more powerful reading glasses if I consult this while watching a dvd in the dark), but the editors have managed to pack an enormous amount of information and evaluation within a single volume. I keep the latest edition at the office, and the previous ones at home and at the summer house.