Book Reviews

Southeast Asian cinemas have been historically marginalised within global screen culture. Wedged between dominant cinemas from the United States, Indi...

There are certain reverent labels attached to great artists that have historically, in use and by association, foregrounded the work of men: the geniu...

In an interview from 1967, filmmaker and writer Marguerite Duras stated, “I don’t think a film is ever capable of replacing the private relationship a...

“What archives of humanity will exist after the end of the world” (p. 1)? This existential enquiry opens Hannah Goodwin’s monograph, Stardust: Cinemat...

Figure, Body, Figurative Invention, Cinema: As a young researcher, theorist, film critic, and associate professor (maître de conférences), Nicole Bren...

Béla Balázs (1884–1949) is known as the great theorist of the cinematic face. For the Hungarian writer and critic, film captured the expressivity and ...

In her entertaining and thoroughly engaging whistle-stop tour through 20th century popular film and TV narratives, film critic and journalist Ellen E....

“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 ...

In recent decades, a burgeoning scholarly attention has turned to how documentaries problematise the private through the reworking of amateur films. B...

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...

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...

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 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...

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...

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...

“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...

In Digital Tarkovsky, Vinca Kruk and Daniel van der Velden (who publish, exhibit and campaign collectively under the moniker Metahaven: a self-describ...

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...

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...

“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 ...

Later this year will mark the 60th anniversary of the release of West Side Story (Robert Wise & Jerome Robbins, 1961), the landmark American music...

In Cinemas Dark and Slow in Digital India Lalitha Gopalan brings to life the complexities of contemporary independent feature production in India. She...

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 ...

“Expanded cinema” as a term is invitingly grandiose, connoting expansion, breadth, inclusivity, even possibility. Something bigger. Something better. ...