Christmas 2014: The best books on film

Nothing like a dame: Judi Dench’s charming and self-deprecating anecdotes lead the way

Judi Dench appeared at the Hay Festival to perform excerpts from Shakespearean plays (Getty Images)

The more glamorous the star, the glossier the memoir; Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow (Simon & Schuster, £13.60), by Sophia Loren, is a trawl through her memorabilia that displays very Italian preoccupations: love, mothers, movies, pasta and a jail sentence, but nothing about acting.

Angelica Huston’s second memoir Watch Me (Simon & Schuster, £9.90) is more rigorous. Despite her pivotal position in a Hollywood dynasty she’s drily likeable, ordering joke-shop glasses for the crew after her co-star’s eye falls out.

Behind The Scenes (W&N £9.90, John Blake £5.95), by Judi Dench, may be a photo scrapbook but it’s a delight thanks to the star’s self-deprecating charm. Snapped beside her car, she writes: “I don’t drive it. I just lean against it.” No chronological plod this, but a freefall tumble through a brilliant career: Like Dench herself, treasurable. Young Winstone (Canongate, £9.00), by Ray Winstone, is as much about London as his nascent career. Ray made such an impression in Scum that I still remember his prison number, and he is just as vivid on his formative years, losing his virginity at 14 standing up by the mini-golf, and generally running riot around Mile End. There’ll be another volume, I hope.

Robin Williams: When The Laughter Stops, by Emily Herbert, is a ghoulish cut-and-paste wipe-around that feels like sitting on a cushion still warm from the subject’s body. What I Love About Movies (littlewhitelies.co.uk, £25.00), a volume culled from Little White Lies magazine, is a triumph of design over content. Tarantino gets a cover slot, cheeky considering he delivers a less than revelatory 20-second comment. What are movies? “Life,” says Richard Linklater. “Lunch,” say the Coen brothers. The “Vol No 1” cover tag is a threat that represents the end of film criticism as we know it.

It’s down to Richard Ayoade to take us into the postmodern movie era with Ayoade on Ayoade: A Cinematic Odyssey (Faber & Faber, £10.49), in which the actor/director reviews his career and makes sure you’ll never be able to read a media interview again. Slaps are administered to lazy film critics, smug directors, and inept publicists while surreal flights find Dostoevsky and the Kardashians sharing the same page. For the self-obsessed media-twerp in your life, or perhaps the Little White Lies crew.

Nine elegant volumes of BFI Film Classics provide insightful and complementary sci-fi distillations, the richest being studies on Brazil, by Paul McAuley; The War of the Worlds, by Barry Forshaw; Alien, by Roger Luckhurst; and Quatermass and the Pit, from Kim Newman. Love movies? Get the set (Macmillan, £12.99 each).

Behind the scenes, The Art of Frozen (Chronicle, £16.99) examines the decorative Norwegian roots of Disney’s cash-cow, proving all that research paid off, while The Art of Dreamworks (Abrams, £20.40) has colourful character and landscape designs covering the studio’s output from Antz to their latest, Home. Alien: The Archive (Titan Books, £22.75) is another lush bundle of stills and awestruck prose that suggest it’s time to call a moratorium on the term “ultimate”, while Interstellar: Beyond Time and Space (Titan Books, £22.75) is an informative director-sanctioned overview of the mind-bending epic. It’s a pity these volumes aren’t as innovative in presentation as their subjects.