Oliver Stone is a master of in-your-face movie making. In picture after picture - in what the director refers to as "wakeup cinema" - he takes on big, controversial topics and verges on filmic assault of the audience to drive home his point of view.

Stone's artistic warfare, evidenced in such widely seen films as Platoon and JFK, has brought him acclaim as one of the few commercially successful Hollywood directors unafraid to make bold, meaningful films and has brought him criticism as a self-anointed sayer of the truth on whatever subject his eye comes to rest.

His provocative style has triggered an enormous critical response, with interviews, reviews, and commentaries numbering in the thousands - remarkable especially for a filmmaker whose first noteworthy film, Salvador, opened in 1986. In this thoroughgoing assessment of Stone's life and work, Frank Beaver not only uses the rich response to the films to inform his own analysis but makes the case that the director has used it as well.

There is, Beaver suggests, "a telling symbiosis between critical response and ongoing practice in Stone's emergence as a unique director." Beaver explores the way in which criticism has undeniably helped to shape the course of Stone's ideas and filmmaking techniques.