Joan Collins’ scrapbook and killer quotes: the best cinema books for Christmas

Passion for Life is described as the ‘ultimate illustrated guide to the technicolour life of a British icon’ (Getty)

In Rosebud Sleds And Horses’ Heads (Intellect, £9.95) Scott Jordan Harris explores film’s most evocative objects. The text is pithy, but the items feel random. You could argue that 2001’s totem is the gleaming red eye of HAL 9000 rather than the Monolith, or that Marty McFly’s DeLorean, or even his pants, are more key to Back To The Future than his hoverboard.

Philip Ziegler’s Olivier (MacLehose Press, £25) is as elegant and robust as the man himself. Sir Laurence took delight in professionalism, fired people with grace, charmed co-stars with ferocity, and scaled Shakespeare to a height that Kenneth Branagh, who cruelly mimicked him in My Week With Marilyn, could never manage. Superbly insightful.

Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations (Simon & Schuster, £20) were transcribed late at night with the film hack Peter Evans. They’re bitchy, bawdy, slangily Runyonesque, and arrive too late to shock, but still entertain. For effortless class and graceful, grounded writing try Anjelica Huston’s A Story Lately Told (Simon & Schuster, £16.99); you can’t help liking her. Joan Collins: Passion For Life (Constable, £25) digs beneath the glitter to the sequins, being a scrapbook of cheesecake, sequins, husbands, sequins and boyfriends. Did I mention sequins? Collins lists the things she loves, from Art Deco furniture to ormolu credenzas. Fabulous.

Mark Kermode’s populist Hatchet Job (Picador, £16.99) avoids the trainspotty airlessness of film criticism by pulling focus on the reviewers. It’s myopic and scattershot, but charmingly lost in wonder to the possibilities of the future that may exclude him.

In Moments That Made The Movies (Thames and Hudson, £24.95) David Thomson finally has fun. The stills are luminous and there are left-field surprises with Infamous, the other Truman Capote film, turning up, and the critically dismissed Burn Before Reading. My heart sank when I saw old warhorses like Citizen Kane and Casablanca dragged out again but even here, the prose is unexpectedly bracing.

You have to love Offbeat, Julian Upton’s perverse guide to British cinema’s strangest films (Headpress, £15.99) because it disinters Peter Cushing’s ghastly low-point Corruption and lists The Impersonator, in which (spoiler alert) the killer is a pantomime dame. Behind You! Gothic; The Dark Heart of Film (BFI, £15) is a compendium of fine prose and photography that’s better than the season it accompanied, thanks to erudite contributions from Anne Billson, Kim Newman and Stephen Volk.

Joe Moran exposes our love/hate relationship with British television in the splendid Armchair Nation (Profile Books, £16.99), studding a scholarly overview with nostalgic recollections. Noel Coward moaned that TV was “a hideous and horrid invention”. Illustrating the plunge from early highbrow content is the story of two Covent Garden porters overheard arguing about Caravaggio.

George Tiffin’s All The Best Lines (Head of Zeus, £20) is exactly that; a hefty cut-and-paste quote-book that’s just right for Christmas. The Wes Anderson Collection (Abrams, £21.99) draws back the curtain on the gloriously oddball director, but why aren’t there cut-outs and pop-ups? The in-depth interviews make explicit Anderson’s Hal Ashby influence and will send you back to the films.

I was surprised to find myself in Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities (Titan Books, £39.95). The fantasy director’s notebooks and acquisitions included one of my own novels. Now I know why it didn’t get made. A stunningly realized volume with a pleasing Eastern European vibe, only missing the monsters from Pacific Rim.

Everyone knows that DC’s movies are square and Marvel’s are cool, so The Marvel Encyclopedia (Dorling Kindersley, £30) is an essential purchase for the lycra-loving man-child in your family. How else will they ever remember the names of all the X-Men?