Cinema speculation - Quentin Tarantino

We all like to watch movies. And most of us, those I know at least, love Quentin Tarantino. Quentin Tarantino the film director, I mean. We've also had plenty of opportunities to enjoy his skills as a screenplay author, as basically all the movies he directed are based on his own scripts.
Few of us might actually know him as a full-fledged writer though. I mean fiction and non-fiction writer. However, he has already published at least two books. One is a novelization of his big hit "Once upon a time in Hollywood", which I haven't read yet. And the other is the subject of this post: a collection of "free-style" movie reviews, which might be better termed as essays.
Tarantino is not only one of the greatest filmmakers of our era, he is also an extremely competent cinephile and a talented and original film critic. First of all he hasn't gone to Hollywood to become a director. He's literally grown up there, and as a consequence he knows the place inside out, including all the changes that have taken place since the end of the 1960s. His mother started taking him to the movies when he was a little kid. Not movies for children or teenagers though: while he a was a primary or junior high school student he had the rare chance to enjoy the actual movies that his mother and her friends liked to watch, which included pretty much everything except straight porn features.
Most of the chapters of the book are very detailed, informed and original dissertations on some important productions of the 1970s (the so called New Hollywood era). The book also includes a couple of autobiographical articles (one is about Hollywood seen through the eyes of a cinema loving kid and the other tells us about a friend of his mother's who used to take him to the theaters all over Los Angeles). In other chapters the author offers a comparison between different generations of directors, a personal homage to his favorite movie critic, and the actual "cinema speculation" mentioned in the title, a very interesting "what if": what would Taxi driver have been like if it had been directed by Brian De Palma rather than Martin Scorsese? (That was a real possibility, as Brian was the first filmmaker to read Paul Shrader's screenplay, before rejecting it and passing it on to Martin.)
His reviews are very honest and straightforward: he never spares praises and criticisms. He offers plenty of expert insights, historical references, brilliant connections and inspiring points of view. No matter whether you have watched the movie he's writing about or not, you'll most likely learn something new about it. And even if you haven't seen it yet and he spoils it, you will want to watch it anyway.
Plus - and this is what thrilled me the most as a reader and literature lover - he writes beautifully! As if, rather than making movies, he hadn't been doing anything else all his life.
I really enjoyed this one. Big thanks to the friend of mine who gave it to me as a gift, you know who you are.