Take One’s Essential Guide to Canadian Film attempts to cover the entire history of Canadian film, from Edison’s 1896 The Kiss through to the year 2000, focusing on such successful films as Maelström and the hip documentary Grass. An effort has been made to include recent developments in Canadian film, but for the most part, the National Film Board reigns supreme.

Admittedly, any guide to Canadian film would be rather thin if the NFB were ignored, but whether or not the Board still creates the same cultural ripple that it once did is debatable. For many new filmmakers the creation of Norman Jewison’s Canadian Film Centre marked a vital development in the maturation of our country’s filmmaking, yet the CFC does not warrant its own entry. The absence of Cinémathèque québécoise and Cinémathèque Ontario are also glaring omissions.

Each of the entries is sound enough, and Take One’s Guide is easily distinguished from others by the more forthright interpretive tone. Most writing on film lies somewhere between overgeneralized impressions and shadowy theorizing, but the alphabetically arranged entries here balance thoughtfulness with precision – without the formal academic tropes found in more theoretical film books. Some of the material is downright funny, especially the bemoaning of the box-office success of the gross-out comedy Porky’s, and an indictment of Canadian film’s tax shelter era of the early 1980s.

Editor Wyndham Wise, who also publishes the Canadian film magazine Take One, has cross-referenced many of the entries, resulting in a thorough introduction to Canada’s film past. The more current movie scene remains underappreciated, but Wise occasionally succeeds in bringing readers into the contemporary film scene, allowing the Guide’s users to feel like connoisseurs of Canadian film.