Book Reviews

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

How does a history of cinema begin? Perhaps with cinema, one can say something along the lines of: “In the beginning was darkness.” But what kind of d...

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

In the fall of 2017, I was approached by a colleague at the public liberal arts college where I teach film studies and production. My colleague, a pol...

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...

The sustained critical success of auteur directors like Michael Haneke and Lars von Trier, the emergence in the 1990s and 2000s of the “new extremism”...

Most academic literature on cinema uses familiar framing mechanisms such as author studies, national cinema or genre lenses. A less typical organising...

Cinéma Militant is academic and film historian Paul Douglas Grant’s admirable attempt to recover and reconsider the long-overlooked cadre of hard-left...

  From 2011 until 2015, I taught a course entitled “Documentary Production” at a small liberal arts college north of Chicago. Rather than basing the ...

“Cinema is the art of ghosts, the battle of phantoms. That’s what I think cinema is about, when it’s not boring. It’s the art of allowing ghosts to co...

In 1918 Australian born actor, writer, producer and director J.P. (Jack) McGowan joined Universal, starting a collaboration that lasted nearly fou...

Should a space alien come down to Earth and ask for guidance on the state of film and media studies, I could hardly think of better advice for this in...

Abbas Kiarostami would seem to make films that suggest philosophical enquiry. But, in his fine book, Matthew Abbott makes clear that the philosophical...

Jack Sargeant’s latest book Flesh and Excess: On Underground Film is, as he says in the introduction to the volume, a return to, or re-articulation of...

Richard Martin’s The Architecture of David Lynch arrived just ahead of the director’s return to television. The reviews of Season 3 of Twin Peaks (201...

“The fact that I consider myself a film critic first and a feminist second means that I feel an obligation to the wholeness and complexity of film his...

Ben Tyrer’s Out of the Past: Lacan and Film Noir forms a “Borromean Knot” of Lacanian film theory, Freudian psychoanalysis, and film noir, which makes...

Outside of France, Jean-Louis Comolli is principally known in the film studies world for his stint as the editor of Cahiers du cinéma in the years 196...

Edited by Murray Pomerance and R. Barton Palmer, Thinking in the Dark: Cinema, Theory, Practice comprises a series of reflections by an impressive sel...

The merits of Saige Walton’s Cinema’s Baroque Flesh: Film, Phenomenology and the Art of Entanglement lie in the parallels between baroque thinking and...

If Mad Dog Morgan (Philippe Mora, 1976) is one of the grubbiest films of the first phase of Australia’s post-1970 feature film revival, it also stands...

In the context of incessant war and war-rhetoric, state-sanctioned torture, refugee crises, fear of terrorism, and increasing animosity toward immigra...

Much of Jean-Luc Godard’s most innovative intriguing work occurred after his period of militant Marxism in the late 1960s. Although far fewer of his “...

In this volume, adapted from his PhD dissertation defended at Monash University in 2014, Dan Edwards introduces the reader to Chinese independent docu...