Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin by William Beard; and Playing with Memories: Essays on Guy Maddin edited by David Church Cerise Howard March 2012 Book Reviews At the time of writing we are but a few weeks out from the 84th Academy Awards. Extraordinarily, the two films most likely to be most showered with Os...
New Zealand Cinema: Interpreting the Past, edited by Alistair Fox, Barry Keith Grant, and Hilary Radner James Bennett March 2012 Book Reviews “he space in which historical and cinematic narratives intersect remains an insufficiently examined but potentially fecund area of study.” (Reid Perki...
Addressing the Political to the Personal: Reframing Bodies: AIDS, Bearing Witness, and the Queer Moving Image by Roger Hallas Joseph S. Valle March 2012 Book Reviews As film scholar Jane Gaines notes in her groundbreaking article “Political Mimesis” (1), documentaries have a reputation for being a catalyst for soci...
The Newest New Wave: New Austrian Film edited by Robert von Dassanowsky and Oliver C. Speck Todd Herzog March 2012 Book Reviews Is there an Austrian National Cinema? The concept of national cinema has always been difficult to pin down. Especially in a country whose domestic ...
The 21st Century Screenplay: A Comprehensive Guide to Writing Tomorrow’s Films by Linda Aronson; Screenwriting: History, Theory and Practice by Steven Maras Matt Hawkins March 2012 Book Reviews The study of screenwriting has become increasingly popular at Australian universities, and a perpetual question for the screenwriting lecturer is what...
Better off Dead: The Evolution of the Zombie as Post-Human edited by Deborah Christie and Sarah Juliet Lauro Mithuraaj Dhusiya March 2012 Book Reviews How often have we longed for well-researched and documented scholarly works on zombie literature and films? And how equally often have we been disappo...
Twentieth Century Prodigal Son: Nicholas Ray – The Glorious Failure of an American Director by Patrick McGilligan Blaine Allan December 2011 Book Reviews In Bigger Than Life (1956) schoolteacher Ed Avery fragments in the broken medicine-cabinet mirror that his wife Lou furiously slams shut when in a pha...
Print the Legend – Raoul Walsh: The True Adventures of Hollywood’s Legendary Director by Marilyn Ann Moss Graham Daseler December 2011 Book Reviews One night, in the autumn of 1929, Raoul Walsh was driving along a desolate highway in the Utah desert, scouting locations for his next movie. Suddenly...
Post-Classical Hollywood: Film Industry, Style and Ideology Since 1945 by Barry Langford Mike Walsh December 2011 Book Reviews The idea that Michael Mann’s films are different from those of Anthony Mann or that Paramount Pictures under Sumner Redstone might share little more t...
Wolf Creek by Sonya Hartnett Mark David Ryan December 2011 Book Reviews Australian screen classics are seminal for a range of reasons: whether it is a particular title’s popularity and impact upon popular culture, its cult...
A Process of Purification: Badiou and Cinema by Alex Ling Tony McKibbin December 2011 Book Reviews A few years back in The Cinema Book, Rob White proposed that one reason why it took so long for Anglo-American academics to absorb Gilles Deleuze was ...
A History of Russian Cinema by Birgit Beumers Thomas Redwood December 2011 Book Reviews To keep one’s words to a minimum whilst also maintaining intellectual authority over a subject is a true skill: to know one’s subject intimately and t...
David Lynch Interviews edited by Richard A. Barney Jay Daniel Thompson December 2011 Book Reviews I have been a David Lynch fan for many years. His cryptic narratives and the sense of dread that pervades his films have always gripped me. As a forme...
Minding Movies: Observations on the Art, Craft, and Business of Filmmaking by David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson Tony McKibbin October 2011 Book Reviews David Bordwell is undeniably one of the great “quantitative” critics in the world, one of those writers who trust strongly in common sense and what is...
Jacques Rivette by Douglas Morrey and Alison Smith Daniel Fairfax October 2011 Book Reviews Jacques Rivette: Phantom of the Cinema could well be an alternative title for this book, the long overdue first English-language monograph on the enig...
Baz Luhrmann by Pam Cook Ben Goldsmith October 2011 Book Reviews Baz Luhrmann’s fifth feature film, an adaptation in 3D of The Great Gatsby, will begin production in Sydney this month. Although the story may be fami...
Encyclopedia of Early Cinema edited by Richard Abel Mike Walsh October 2011 Book Reviews If I had to claim one area of development that signified the importance of cinema studies in the last two decades of the twentieth century, I would ar...
Whose Lives Are They Anyway? The Biopic as Contemporary Film Genre by Dennis Bingham Frank P. Tomasulo October 2011 Book Reviews Dennis Bingham’s recently published volume, Whose Lives Are They Anyway?: The Biopic as Contemporary Film Genre, illustrates the author’s versatility....
Widescreen Worldwide edited by John Belton, Sheldon Hall and Steve Neale Simon Howson October 2011 Book Reviews Film historians have long shown an interest in the economic, technical, and aesthetic aspects of widescreen film formats. When widescreen became popul...
Billy Wilder, Movie-Maker: Critical Essays on the Films edited by Karen McNally Robert von Dassanowsky June 2011 Book Reviews Critical study of the oeuvre of Billy Wilder is still surprisingly scant almost a decade following his death. Rather than cogent analysis that reaches...
The Apartment Plot: Urban Living in American Film and Popular Culture, 1945 to 1975 by Pamela Robertson Wojcik John Fidler June 2011 Book Reviews In Billy Wilder’s hilariously acid The Fortune Cookie (1966), sports cameraman Harry Hinkle (Jack Lemmon) gets clobbered by football star Luther “Boom...
Steven Spielberg: A Biography second edition by Joseph McBride Peter Tonguette June 2011 Book Reviews By 1997, when the first edition of Joseph McBride’s Steven Spielberg: A Biography was published, its author’s previous subjects included Orson Welles,...
Machine-Age Comedy by Michael North Burke Hilsabeck June 2011 Book Reviews Comedy is a notoriously slippery subject. Kant called laughter “an affect that arises if a tense expectation is transformed into nothing” (1), and the...
Darwin’s Screens: Evolutionary Aesthetics, Time and Sexual Display in the Cinema by Barbara Creed Jay Daniel Thompson June 2011 Book Reviews Darwin’s Screens opens with a quote from the man himself: “I was in those days a very great storyteller” (unpaginated). In the following 232 pages, Ba...
The Philosophy of the Western edited by Jennifer L. McMahon and B. Steve Csaki Chris Yogerst June 2011 Book Reviews We all have an idea in our head that pops up whenever we think of the Western. Certain characteristics come to mind, such as horses, six-guns, ten-gal...
Real and Reel: The Education of a Film Obsessive and Critic by Brian McFarlane Daniel Eisenberg June 2011 Book Reviews Self-identified “filmophile” Brian McFarlane opens his “touch of the memoirs” at age ten, reminiscing about reviewing films he had never seen – someth...
The Mystical Gaze of the Cinema: The Films of Peter Weir by Richard Leonard Jay Daniel Thompson March 2011 Book Reviews Peter Weir is one of Australia’s best-known and most prolific directors. In The Mystical Gaze of the Cinema, Richard Leonard explores the theme of mys...
The Problem Body: Projecting Disability on Film edited by Sally Chivers and Nicole Markotić Katie Ellis March 2011 Book Reviews At some point, most discussions of the representation of marginalised groups in cinema (and the media in general) lament the absence of whichever grou...
Akira Kurosawa: Master of Cinema by Peter Cowie Chris Gosling March 2011 Book Reviews “Cinematic beauty,” Akira Kurosawa told Bert Cardullo in 1992, “must be present in a film for that film to be a moving work.” (1) And Kurosawa’s films...
Film Noir: Hard-Boiled Modernity and the Cultures of Globalization by Jennifer Fay and Justus Neiland Tessa Chudy March 2011 Book Reviews The fabulous and fascinatingly contested thing that is film noir is not only alive and kicking, it appears to be undergoing something of a re-evaluati...
Wake in Fright by Tina Kaufman Lindsay Coleman March 2011 Book Reviews In a recent conversation with a friend, the question was raised, “What exactly constitutes an Australian film?”The subject matter in combination with ...
Film, Theory and Philosophy: The Key Thinkers edited by Felicity Colman Daniel Fairfax December 2010 Book Reviews In terms of theoretical scope, the book I currently hold in my hands could hardly be more comprehensive; in terms of ambition, it could hardly be more...
The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience by Jennifer M. Barker Moving Viewers: American Film and the Spectator’s Experience by Carl Plantinga John Fidler December 2010 Book Reviews Towards the end of Pedro Almodóvar’s Broken Embraces (Los abrazos rotos, 2009) – his sad, playful, colour-saturated tribute to his own and so many oth...
Michael Winterbottom by Brian McFarlane and Deane Williams Dean Brandum December 2010 Book Reviews In January 2010, Michael Winterbottom’s The Killer Inside Me premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, the first in several stops on the festival circu...
Re-Imagining Animation: The Changing Face of the Moving Image by Paul Wells and Johnny Hardstaff Chris Carter December 2010 Book Reviews Advances in digital technology have caused a radical shift in moving image culture. This has occurred in both modes of production and sites of exhibit...
Humphrey Jennings by Keith Beattie Adrian Danks December 2010 Book Reviews Keith Beattie’s monograph on the seminal British documentary filmmaker Humphrey Jennings is a significant contribution to the scholarship on this fasc...