Book Reviews

Steven Ungar’s Critical Mass groups together and examines three-and-a-half decades worth of non-fiction filmmaking in France, making a compelling case...

My concern is with a general movement of reaction and conservative reassurance in the contemporary Hollywood cinema. — Andrew Britton in Blissing O...

I’ve had a quasi-symbiotic relationship to Roman Polanski’s Chinatown ever since I first laid eyes on it in May 1974. It was at a preview screening of...

Film novelisations have been circulating in substantial numbers for well over a century. To say they have been underrepresented in critical studies of...

It could almost be a parlour game to try to talk about Laura Mulvey without mentioning her famous essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, with i...

The Invention of Robert Bresson is a book to take as seriously as its subject demands. Guided by a natural sensitivity to the films – something shared...

In 1987, when his book, which serves as one of the first efforts in English to reassess and appraise the films and legacy of Roberto Rossellini (1987)...

There is a slight retro effect to the triple-barreled title of Nico Baumbach’s book, with the pair of solidi separating-conjoining the terms “cinema”,...

Stanley Kubrick belongs to the category of select filmmakers to have elicited a massive body of critical work as well as gained a cult following among...

In the cinema, the long take is an instrument of multifaceted – sometimes paradoxical – power. In a film like Ladri di Biciclette (Bicycle Thieves, Vi...

With his last book devoted to the formation of the first cinema studios and to the early beginnings of the organisation of Hollywood, Marc Vernet offe...

Whereas the majority of film-philosophy essays incorporating the thinking of Martin Heidegger are limited to reading specific films from one or anothe...

By promising a new approach to a director whose work has been and still is – as the author himself admits – largely discussed by film scholars, the ti...

Thomas Doherty, the author of Show Trial, is professor of American Studies at Brandeis University, Massachusetts, associate editor of Cineaste, as wel...

Although it is full of potential, research on the cultural history of cinema in China has traditionally been a marginal practice. Weihong Bao’s book (...

It is notable that in his first book, Patrick Campos declares the “end of national cinema” – not to signal Philippine cinema’s death, but to revaluate...

The ambition and scope of this project, as indicated by its all-encompassing title, was clearly designed to cover the explosion in critical and concep...

Further Reflections and Omissions In line with my heading “Further Reflection and Omissions”, I want to briefly note and emphasise the problems of th...

In Two Cheers for Hollywood, film historian and critic Joseph McBride is on a mission: to recover the marginalised or unsung reputations of screenwrit...

Noa Steimatsky’s intriguing book The Face on Film oscillates between straightforward history of various cinematic tropes of the face and theoretical t...

“Duvivier is ripe for rediscovery”, declares Ben McCann in the opening to his book on French filmmaker Julien Duvivier and indeed the cineaste is a we...

In the first book-length study of French filmmaker Philippe Grandrieux, Greg Hainge meticulously outlines and details the director’s œuvre, in a study...

For film scholars interested in the narrative settings of cinema examined through a “cultural materialist approach to film history” (p. 4), combined w...

Like many, I was aware of the films of the French director Jean Rollin long before I viewed any of his work. It would have been some time in the mid-1...