Beyond Paradise: The Life of Ramon Novarro by André Soares David Melville December 2010 Book Reviews Perhaps the most outrageously beautiful man ever to step in front of a camera, the 1920s and ’30s star Ramon Novarro is remembered today for the ghast...
Bergman, Skolimowski and European Modernism: Ingmar Bergman’s The Silence: Pictures in the Typewriter, Writers on the Screen by Maaret Koskinen Jerzy Skolimowski: The Cinema of a Nonconformist by Ewa Mazierska John Orr October 2010 Book Reviews The cinematic legacy of European modernism is both fascinating and elusive. Not least because the term modernism itself means so many things to so man...
Almodrama and the Aesthetics of Excess: Latin American Melodrama: Passion, Pathos and Entertainment edited by Darlene J. Sadlier All About Almodóvar: A Passion for Cinema edited by Brad Epps and Despina Kakoudaki David Melville October 2010 Book Reviews Pick up the two books and hold one in each hand. Just looking, you can learn a lot. Latin American Melodrama is a slender, grey volume, barely thicker...
Richard Lester by Neil Sinyard David Sanjek October 2010 Book Reviews How do you solve a problem like Richard Lester? Typically, analysts have taken one or another extreme position: either to extol the American-born, lon...
The British “B’’ Film by Stephen Chibnall and Brian McFarlane Geoff Mayer October 2010 Book Reviews This valuable resource book begins in London, in late September 1960, where two films were shooting at Pinewood Studios. One was the notorious 20th Ce...
Conversations with Directors: An Anthology of Interviews from Literature/Film Quarterly edited by Elsie M. Walker and David T. Johnson Gozde Kilic October 2010 Book Reviews In Conversations with Directors, Elsie Walker and David Johnson bring together a collection of 26 interviews with a wide range of directors from vario...
Focus on Eastwood: Clint Eastwood and Issues of American Masculinity by Drucilla Cornell, Aim for the Heart: The Films of Clint Eastwood by Howard Hughes, Clint Eastwood: Evolution of a Filmmaker by John H. Foote Deborah Allison July 2010 Book Reviews Since the mid-1970s, Clint Eastwood’s life and career have provided material for innumerable books, documentaries and magazine articles. While writers...
Encountering Cinema: Casablanca: Movies and Memory by Marc Augé Tony McKibbin July 2010 Book Reviews “Some strange destiny”, John Thompson claims in The Cinema Book, “seems to have determined that the cinema is written about in France with superior pe...
Film Curatorship: Archives, Museums, and the Digital Marketplace edited by Paolo Cherchi Usai, David Francis, Alexander Horwath and Michael Loebenstein Jan-Christopher Horak July 2010 Book Reviews It’s tough being an archivist these days. The digital revolution has shaken the profession to its very foundations. All those hallowed archival values...
Diasporas of Australian Cinema edited by Catherine Simpson, Renata Murawska and Anthony Lambert Jonathan Rayner July 2010 Book Reviews There have always been earnest concerns for the relevance and representativeness of the Australian cinema: over the past few decades since feature pro...
Screen Theorizing Today: A Celebration of Screen’s Fiftieth Anniversary edited by Annette Kuhn Alex Ling July 2010 Book Reviews It is difficult to overstate the impact the British journal Screen has had on the discipline of film and television studies. For the past 50 years, th...
Modular Narratives in Contemporary Cinema by Allan Cameron Matthew Campora July 2010 Book Reviews One of the more interesting developments in the cinema of the past 15 years or so has been the surge of mainstream films with complex narratives. Cons...
How to watch a movie: The Horse Who Drank the Sky: Film Experience Beyond Narrative and Theory by Murray Pomerance John Fidler April 2010 Book Reviews WALDO PEPPER : Do you like movies? MARY BETH : Mmm-hmmm. – The Great Waldo Pepper (George Roy Hill, 1975) … perhaps one must become the films one l...
Phantoms of Liberty: Apichatpong Weerasethakul edited by James Quandt Vera Brunner-Sung April 2010 Book Reviews “I like reading interpretations of my films”, says Apichatpong Weerasethakul. “In Thailand there is mostly film description but not criticism, so I fi...
A Fuller View: The Films of Samuel Fuller: If You Die, I’ll Kill You! by Lisa Dombrowski Adrian Danks April 2010 Book Reviews Lisa Dombrowski’s The Films of Samuel Fuller: If You Die, I’ll Kill You! is an important contribution to the growing scholarship on and broader cultur...
Heer No Evil: Dutch Tilt, Aussie Auteur: The Films of Rolf de Heer by D. Bruno Starrs Jake Wilson April 2010 Book Reviews Over the past two decades, Rolf de Heer has arguably emerged as Australia’s leading active narrative filmmaker: excepting one or two figures working m...
Scorsese Missing In Action: Martin Scorsese’s America by Ellis Cashmore Hollywood Under Siege: Martin Scorsese, the Religious Right, and the Culture Wars by Thomas R. Lindlof Peter Hourigan April 2010 Book Reviews Martin Scorsese must be one of the most omnipresent filmmakers today. As well as an impressive roster of cinema productions, he has made documentaries...
From Bombay to Bollywood and beyond: Global Bollywood: Travels of Hindi Song and Dance edited by Sangita Gopal and Sujata Moorti Alexis Agostino April 2010 Book Reviews The title of this anthology, Global Bollywood: Travels of Hindi Song and Dance, edited by Sangita Gopal and Sujata Moorti, is written on the book’s fr...
Nollywood: The Video Phenomenon in Nigeria edited by Pierre Barrot translated by Lynn Taylor Wheeler Winston Dixon December 2009 Book Reviews This is an essential book on one of the most explosive film movements in recent memory, rivalling the prodigious output of Iranian films in the 1990s;...
Building Bridges: The Cinema of Jean Rouch edited by Joram ten Brink Saër Maty Bâ December 2009 Book Reviews Joram ten Brink’s interest in French Ethnographer-Cinéaste Jean Rouch’s (1918-2004) work “resurfaced” after the latter’s death in Africa. In October 2...
Loop, Print, Fade + Flicker: David Rimmer’s Moving Images by Mike Hoolboom and Alex MacKenzie William C. Wees December 2009 Book Reviews Published in conjunction with a retrospective of David Rimmer’s films and videos at Vancouver’s Pacific Cinémathèque, Loop, Print, Fade + Flicker: Dav...
A Feminine Cinematics: Luce Irigaray, Women and Film by Caroline Bainbridge Maria Walsh December 2009 Book Reviews I was intrigued when I spotted the flyer for A Feminine Cinematics: Luce Irigaray, Women and Film, as I had just been to a talk by Irigaray at the ICA...
The Mouse Machine: Disney and Technology by J.P. Telotte Chris Pallant December 2009 Book Reviews The name Disney signifies different things to different people. For many, Disney animation would have been a source of wonderment as a child; and for ...
The New Face of Political Cinema: Commitment in French Film Since 1995 by Martin O’Shaughnessy Alex Ling December 2009 Book Reviews The relationship of cinema to politics has a rich and chequered history, effectively dictating the form of many of cinema’s most vibrant configuration...
Hidden Talent: The Emergence of Hollywood Agents by Tom Kemper Eric Hoyt December 2009 Book Reviews Most standard histories of the Hollywood motion picture industry date the rise of powerful talent agencies to the 1950s – the decade when the weakened...
Michael Haneke’s Cinema: The Ethic of the Image by Catherine Wheatley Yun-hua Chen December 2009 Book Reviews Michael Haneke, the Austrian director who has crossed national boundaries to make films in France, the US and now in Germany with Das weisse Band (The...
Chris Marker and the Archival Imperative: La Jetée: ciné-roman and Staring Back by Chris Marker and Chris Marker by Sarah Cooper Patrick Friel September 2009 Book Reviews
Displaced Allegories: Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema by Negar Mottahedeh Michelle Langford September 2009 Book Reviews
Vincente Minnelli: The Art of Entertainment edited by Joe McElhaney Peter Hourigan September 2009 Book Reviews
Cities in Transition: The Moving Image and the Modern Metropolis edited by Andrew Webber and Emma Wilson Anna Knight September 2009 Book Reviews
Kaleidoscope of the B-film Director: Edgar G. Ulmer: Detour on Poverty Row edited by Gary D. Rhodes Lance Duerfahrd September 2009 Book Reviews
Lighting Fireworks Indoors: Britton on Film: The Complete Film Criticism of Andrew Britton edited by Barry Keith Grant David Melville September 2009 Book Reviews
Moving Forward, Looking Back: The European Avant-garde and the Invention of Film Culture, 1919-1939 by Malte Hagener Paul Fileri July 2009 Book Reviews Malte Hagener’s Moving Forward, Looking Back: The European Avant-garde and the Invention of Film Culture, 1919-1939 offers a remarkably multifaceted a...
Cinesexuality by Patricia MacCormack Maria Walsh July 2009 Book Reviews Cinesexuality’s thesis is premised on a desire to want cinema as a lover. What this might mean alerts us firstly to the fact that the book is a title ...
Scorsese by Ebert by Roger Ebert Matthew Sorrento July 2009 Book Reviews As the internet age opened up a cosmos’ worth of publication room, film writing grew as if every solar system deserved its own life-form. Many old-tim...