Book Reviews – Senses of Cinema

Rhythm and Light: Poetic Cinema and the Spirit of the Gift in the Films of Pabst, Parajanov, Kubrick, and Ruiz, by Laleen Jayamanne

July 2021

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 John 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...