“The Best Film You’ve Never Seen” is an attempt to rewrite film history. In this book, 35 directors champion their favorite overlooked or critically-savaged gems. Director Bill Condon (Twilight: Breaking Dawn) calls these “orphan films,” though I prefer “outcast classics.”

Praise for “The Best Film You’ve Never Seen”:

“How necessary this book is! And how well judged and written! Some of the best films ever made, as Elder proves, are lamentably all but unknown.“
– Roger Ebert, film critic, Chicago Sun-Times
***
“Sometimes it can be more of a pleasure to hear someone discuss a movie with love than it is to see the movie itself. The thoughts and enthusiasms of Richard Linklater, Guy Maddin, John Waters, and others are alone worth the price of admission—and Steve James describing a movie I already love is no less instructive.”
– Jonathan Rosenbaum, film critic and author
***
“I hate Robert K. Elder. While the rest of us struggle to come up with compelling content, he follows The Film That Changed My Life with another must-read for the novice and hard-core cinephile alike. Anyone who is passionate about art must be prepared to abandon the comfort of conventional wisdom to defend the denigrated and the dismissed; Elder and his impressive cast of commentators inspire us to continue battling for our beloved personal treasures.”
– Adam Kempenaar, critic/host, Filmspotting
***

“It’s always fascinating to learn which films filmmakers themselves admire, and even more so to read about movies they regard as underrated or, virtually, lost. Robert K. Elder has managed to coax some absorbing, candid comments from directors as elusive as John Dahl, Steve James, and Alex Proyas. This book offers new slants on old films, and reveals how the filmmakers themselves react to other movies from Europe and the U.S.”
– Peter Cowie, film historian and former Int’l Publishing Director of Variety