They Do Indeed Exist: Knights of Cinema: The Story of the Palestine Film Unit, by Khadijeh Habashneh Henri de Corinth August 2024 Book Reviews “…photography is as important to us as fighting because it disseminates our image to the world.” - Abu Jihad The Palestine Film Unit was a filmma...
White People Have Work to Do: Ellen E. Jones’ Screen Deep: How film and TV Can Solve Racism and Save the World Tara Judah May 2024 Book Reviews In her entertaining and thoroughly engaging whistle-stop tour through 20th century popular film and TV narratives, film critic and journalist Ellen E....
The World of Invisible Films: Shadow Cinema: The Historical and Production Contexts of Unmade Films, edited by James Fenwick, Kieran Foster and David Eldridge Pablo Gonçalo May 2024 Book Reviews “A true history of cinema – once stated Jean-Luc Godard – must include all the histories of the films that were never made” (p. 1). Indeed, this very ...
Frequently Illuminating, but Sometimes Misjudged: Hollywood and the Movies of the Fifties by Foster Hirsch Tom Ryan January 2024 Book Reviews Across its 600-plus pages, Foster Hirsch’s ambitious account of Hollywood and the films made there during the 1950s covers the terrain with comprehens...
Ordinary Lives, Extraordinary Stories: Efrén Cuevas’ Filming History from Below Vladimir Rosas-Salazar January 2024 Book Reviews In recent decades, a burgeoning scholarly attention has turned to how documentaries problematise the private through the reworking of amateur films. B...
Modulating the Rhetorical: The Eloquent Screen, by Gilberto Perez Tony McKibbin January 2024 Book Reviews Gilberto Perez’s The Eloquent Screen has less a thesis than a theme. It doesn’t argue for the importance of rhetoric in film; more it muses over how i...
Facing the Other: Keyvan Manafi’s The Eye of the Cinematograph: Levinas and Realisms of the Body M. Sellers Johnson November 2023 Book Reviews There is often something intangible about the cinematic images we regard onscreen that continually inspires our curiosity, attention, and seemingly en...
A Man of Genius Has Been Seldom Ruined But By Himself: Ethan Warren’s The Cinema of Paul Thomas Anderson Hannah Bonner November 2023 Book Reviews When he was seven, Paul Thomas Anderson wrote in his diary, “I want to be a writer, producer, director, special effects man. I know how to do everythi...
The Rebellious and the Rigorous: The Red Years of Cahiers du cinéma (1968-1973), by Daniel Fairfax Tony McKibbin August 2023 Book Reviews There are so many ways into Daniel Fairfax’s vast and very impressive account of Cahiers du cinéma during the properly tumultuous period between 1968 ...
A Journey through Serge Daney’s Cinema House Emmanuel Bonin August 2023 Book Reviews In a response to The Independent’s obituary of Serge Daney dated June 1992, Louis Skorecki wrote: “He was the only film critic of real value in Franc...
Bloody, Raging Females: Five Books Examine Contemporary Feminist Horror Films Holly Willis May 2023 Book Reviews A few days after the death of 22-year-old Iranian woman Mahsa Amini after her arrest by morality police for being in violation of Iran’s dress code on...
Cinematic Bottom-Feeding: Why It’s OK to Love Bad Movies, by Matthew Strohl Sam Woolfe May 2023 Book Reviews This is a book I didn’t know I needed. But I’m interested in both philosophy and bad movies, so when I found out there was a book making a philosophic...
For a Double-Edged Theory: Christian Metz’ Essais sur la signification au cinéma at 50 Abel Muñoz Hénonin January 2023 Book Reviews The problem we face here is self-evident: how to address an unquestionable classic of film theory yet again? At a first glance, it might seem like ...
Dennis Lim’s Tale of Cinema: A Meta-Monograph Marc Raymond January 2023 Book Reviews The Australian publisher Fireflies Press has created a ten-book series of Decadent Editions, ten takes on a different film from each year of the 2000s...
In search of a Global Filipino Auteur: Sine ni Lav Diaz, edited by Parichay Patra and Micheal Kho Lim Pujita Guha January 2023 Book Reviews “Sine ni Lav Diaz”, roughly translated as “The cinema of Lav Diaz”, appears at the end of every Diaz film, signalling the auteur’s presence, as it wer...
Philosophy for the Blockbuster Audience: Christopher Nolan: Filmmaker and Philosopher, by Robbie B. H. Goh Tom Boniface-Webb October 2022 Book Reviews Bloomsbury Academic chooses for the most recent entry to its Philosophical Filmmakers series, the British/American writer, producer, director, Christo...
Do we need Digital Tarkovsky? Corey P. Cribb October 2022 Book Reviews In Digital Tarkovsky, Vinca Kruk and Daniel van der Velden (who publish, exhibit and campaign collectively under the moniker Metahaven: a self-describ...
Trafic at 30, End of a Film Journal Emmanuel Bonin July 2022 Book Reviews Being a French speaker brings many advantages in this world, but few so dear to my heart as being able to read through any release of Trafic, the cine...
How to Do Things with Camera Movement: The Lure of the Image: Epistemic Fantasies of the Moving Camera, by Daniel Morgan Kyle Barrowman May 2022 Book Reviews To say that a book devoted to analysing camera movement is an exemplary instance of ordinary language philosophy may raise a few eyebrows. Indeed, it ...
The Depths of Empiricism: Werner Herzog: Ecstatic Truth and Other Useless Conquests, by Kristoffer Hegnsvad Tony McKibbin January 2022 Book Reviews A beautifully presented account of Herzog’s work, Kristoffer Hegnsvad’s book finds its purpose in both its design and in its sense of affiliation. Heg...
Hollywood, Reinvented: Shooting Midnight Cowboy: Art, Sex, Loneliness, Liberation, and the Making of a Dark Classic, by Glenn Frankel Elroy Rosenberg January 2022 Book Reviews “It’s my idea,” said Ken Kesey while held in the visitation of a California jail in 1966, “that it’s time to graduate from what has been going on, to ...
Rhythm and Light: Poetic Cinema and the Spirit of the Gift in the Films of Pabst, Parajanov, Kubrick, and Ruiz, by Laleen Jayamanne Steven Shaviro July 2021 Book Reviews Laleen Jayamanne’s beautiful new book, Poetic Cinema and the Spirit of the Gify, enlivens the spirits of its readers every bit as much as the movies i...
West Side Story Redux: West Side Story: The Jets, the Sharks, and the Making of a Classic, by Richard Barrios Adrian Schober July 2021 Book Reviews Later this year will mark the 60th anniversary of the release of West Side Story (Robert Wise & Jerome Robbins, 1961), the landmark American music...
Foraging in a Transforming Mediascape: Cinemas Dark and Slow in Digital India, by Lalitha Gopalan Megan Carrigy July 2021 Book Reviews In Cinemas Dark and Slow in Digital India Lalitha Gopalan brings to life the complexities of contemporary independent feature production in India. She...
Time Machines: After Kubrick: A Filmmaker’s Legacy, edited by Jeremi Szaniawski Joy McEntee May 2021 Book Reviews Interviewed in Jeremi Szaniawski’s After Kubrick: a Filmmaker’s Legacy, Gaspar Noé is asked about his relationship to Stanley Kubrick: I am a dwarf ....
The Politics of Ambiguity: After Authority: Global Art Cinema and Political Transition, by Kalling Heck Jennifer Ruth May 2021 Book Reviews When Mao died in 1976, the Great Proletarian Chinese Cultural Revolution drew to a close and a paralysed film industry began to function again. For a ...
Revising a Concept: Cinema Expanded: Avant-Garde Film in the Age of Intermedia, by Jonathan Walley Holly Willis January 2021 Book Reviews “Expanded cinema” as a term is invitingly grandiose, connoting expansion, breadth, inclusivity, even possibility. Something bigger. Something better. ...
When Everything Seemed Possible: London’s Arts Labs and the 60s Avant-Garde by David Curtis Wheeler Winston Dixon January 2021 Book Reviews In the 1960s, the experimental cinema scene was exploding on a world wide basis. In the era before digital technology, cellphones and email, film was ...
“Memories Are Made of This”: Juliane Lorenz and Lothar Schirmer’s R.W. Fassbinder: Film Stills, 1966-1982 Eric Gudas January 2021 Book Reviews Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who would have turned 75 this past May, used the frames of the movie and television screen to create a pervasive sense of en...
Beneath the Tuxedo Elegance: Cary Grant: The Making of a Hollywood Legend, by Mark Glancy Tom Ryan January 2021 Book Reviews Film stars are like mirages: although we can see them, we know that they’re not really what they appear to be. They play characters born of scripts, b...
Anarchist Cinema: A Dream of Resistance: The Cinema of Kobayashi Masaki by Stephen Prince Karthick Ram Manoharan January 2021 Book Reviews To the rest of the world, Japanese cinema is mostly identified with three big names – Akira Kurosawa, Yasujiro Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi. For Japanese c...
Trade Follows the Film: Cinema and the Wealth of Nations: Media, Capital, and the Liberal World System by Lee Grieveson Daniel Fairfax October 2020 Book Reviews Few recent books in film and media studies can match the ambition Lee Grieveson set himself with Cinema and the Wealth of Nations: Media, Capital, and...
War, Community, and the Cinema: Front Lines of Community: Hollywood Between War and Democracy by Hermann Kappelhof and Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War by Mark Harris Joshua Sperling October 2020 Book Reviews War is a limit-experience for human communities. In the modern era this has often meant nation states, which during periods of total conflict become c...
The Perfect Conditional: Philippe Garrel by Michael Leonard Tony McKibbin October 2020 Book Reviews Philippe Garrel is now in his seventies and has behind him a body of work that looked initially like it might have become no more (and no less) than a...
Creating the Appearance of Being: The Art of American Screen Acting 1960 to Today, by Dan Callahan Tony McKibbin July 2020 Book Reviews There are very good books and articles on actors, about stardom, about performance, on acting and about acting. David Thomson and Pauline Kael have of...
The Restless Spectator: Anxious Cinephilia: Pleasure and Peril at the Movies, by Sarah Keller Joshua Heaps July 2020 Book Reviews In a recent blog post for Columbia University Press – “Anxious Afterthoughts on Anxious Cinephilia” – Sarah Keller provides her latest book with a cas...