I would have liked to do more research in the history of film and in film theory, but alas, there wasn't time. In the end, I had to fall back mainly on the thousands of hours I've spent at the movies. First film I ever saw: The Incredible Journey, 1959. Most recent: Toy Story, last weekend. What a long strange trip its been...
Roland Barthes, Mythologies (Editions du Seuil 1957), is a hoot. I never thought semiotics would be fun to read, but any discipline that allows you to analyze wrestling and laundry can't be all bad.
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (MIT Press 1995). Half the time, McLuhan is raving incoherently, and the other half he's throwing off brilliant insights about the nature of media. The medium really is the message, as I think I show in Why Hollywood Can't Tell a Sexual Violence Story.
Michael Medved, Hollywood vs. America (Harper Perennial 1992). Medved, a film critic and PBS commentator, took 200 pages to talk me out of liking this book. He starts by lambasting Hollywood's hypocrisy. Suddenly, he gets carried away and is ranting about Born on the Fourth of July because its unpatriotic, while unthinkingly listing Of Mice and Men with the 1939 movies of uplift and positive values. Please!
Not a lot out there on film theory, but scads on films.
There is a Film Studies page at a UK site that contains excellent resources on media in general.
Other interesting sites I found are the Cinema Sites page, Bright Lights Film Journal, and CinemaSpace.