When the lights go down and the film starts to roll, we give ourselves over to the magic of movies. But as George Toles observes, what we experience in this house of light may strike closer to home than we imagine.

In eleven essays, Toles combines aesthetic inquiry with a psychology of spectatorship to illuminate the dialogue between sentiment and irony that unfolds in every good movie. Reflecting a literary critic's and professional screenwriter's ongoing love affair with cinema, each essay plunges the reader into the experience of one or more films, inviting us to ponder the nature and implications of that experience. Toles considers a wide variety of film experience, from Frank Capra to the Coen brothers to Alfred Hitchcock.

However escapist a trip to the movies might be, says Toles, there is no escaping some version of "home" in every film experience. Toles examines important homes?from the cottage in Random Harvest to the foreboding Bates house in Psycho?to suggest that the house of film is a frame we long to enter in the spirit of homecoming but one that we cannot possess any more securely than the lost home of our beginnings. As film study marks a return to art-centered criticism, A House Made of Light breaks new ground in its assessment of the creation?and enjoyment?of movies.

George Toles is a Distinguished Professor of Film and Literature at the University of Manitoba.

He is the author of A House Made of Light: Essays on the Art of Film, Paul Thomas Anderson, and the forthcoming Curtains of Light: Essays on the Metaphysics of Theatrical Space on Film. He has been posting mini-narratives called Status Updates on Facebook every day since 2009. Two collections of these updates, with accompanying illustrations by artist collaborators, will be published in the next year.

George has written or co-written the screenplays for numerous feature films made by Canadian director, Guy Maddin. These include Archangel, Careful, Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, The Saddest Music in the World, Brand Upon the Brain, My Winnipeg, and Keyhole. He also wrote the story and original screenplay for Canada's first stop-motion animated feature film, Edison and Leo.

George Toles' profile page

"George Toles is one of the most gifted film critics in the English language, and his screenplays for director Guy Maddin have resulted in truly impressive motion pictures. It's a great pleasure to have his brilliant essays in a single volume. These are classic statements about the art of film, and they deserve the widest possible audience."?James Naremore, Indiana University

"George Toles is simply one of the best critics of film working today; he is also one of the best writers who have ever been drawn to reflect on film. His thinking is fully informed and completely original -a rarity in film scholarship."?Marian Keane, University of Colorado at Boulder