New Books in Film

We are supposed to get smarter as we get older. Do we? If the meaning of your life had to be found in nine representative days, which days would you choose? Are they the same days that your critics would select? Would you live your life differently if you had to watch yourself years later a big screen? Would you think you were as cool as you do now if you had to see yourself as a cold observer doe...

What is the status of art and culture in a world dominated by apps, algorithms, and influencers? Anna Kornbluh’s newest book Immediacy, Or the Style of Too Late Capitalism (Verso, 2023) analyzes a swath of cultural forms from auto-fiction to Netflix binges and immersive art installations. For Kornbluh, neoliberalism’s economic disintermediation manifests itself in a new dominant cultural style tha...

Why does race matter in film and TV? In Screen Deep: How Film and TV Can Solve Racism and Save the World (Faber and Faber, 2024), Ellen E. Jones, a journalist, broadcaster and the co-host of the BBC’s Screenshot, shows how the storytelling potential offered by screen media shape how we understand ourselves and our societies. The book covers a huge range of genres in film and TV, from superheroes a...

The Graphic User Interface, or GUI, is the adhesive centre of today’s screen entertainment web. From films and television to apps and videogames, it holds together a multitude of media and shapes the way they are accessed, organised, created, consumed, and manipulated. However, it does not do so without leaving viscous traces, and Gooey Media: Screen Entertainment and the Graphic User Interface (E...

Long before internet archives and the anytime, anywhere convenience of streaming, people collected, traded, and shared radio and television content via informal networks that crisscrossed transnational boundaries. Eleanor Patterson’s fascinating cultural history explores the distribution of radio and TV tapes from the 1960s through the 1980s. Looking at bootlegging against the backdrop of mass med...

Magic is misdirection, and Richard Attenborough and William Goldman do a terrific job of misdirecting the audience in this 1978 thriller. Like The King of Comedy and Limelight, the film looks at the desperation of people who want to be recognized; unlike those films, there’s nothing funny about the hero’s struggle. Join us for a conversation about a film so unsettling that even the TV spot (featur...

Part Two of director Denis Villeneuve’s Dune films embeds viewers among the Fremen, the Indigenous inhabitants of the planet Arrakis. The sole source of the valuable drug spice, Arrakis has been colonized and its resources extracted by the Imperium. The Fremen fight to liberate themselves and their planet from Imperial control under the messianic leadership of Paul Atreides. In Frank Herbert’s ori...

Baby Face is the 1933 film that created the archetypal Barbara Stanwyck character and famously laid everything bare before the production code tried to clean up Hollywood. It’s direct and “against interpretation”—but that’s what makes it so compelling. Join Tim and Dan for a conversation about how the film speaks to our current moment regarding agency, exploitation, and climbing the corporate ladd...

With comics franchises getting turned into multi-billion dollar revenue opportunities and consumer technology companies dominating daily headlines — the trappings of “geekdom” have made their way into the global mainstream over the past few days. As part of this trend, Japanese-style anime has also gained immense transnational popularity, arguably becoming part of the “new cool”. It’s against this...

In Comedy Book:: How Comedy Conquered Culture–and the Magic That Makes It Work (FSG, 2023), Jesse David Fox—the country’s most definitive voice in comedy criticism and someone who, in his own words, enjoys comedy “maybe more than anyone on this planet”—tackles everything you need to know about comedy, an art form that has been under-considered throughout its history, even as it has ascended as a c...

Eve Benhamou's book Contemporary Disney Animation: Genre, Gender and Hollywood (Edinburgh UP, 2022) is the first in-depth study of Disney’s latest animated output from the perspective of genre theory. Analysing a decade in Disney’s history (2008-2018), Benhamou examines the multifaceted interactions between animated films, Disney properties such as Pixar and Marvel, and popular genres including th...

It’s easy for some people to laugh at Conan the Barbarian, John Milius’s 1982 film about Robert E. Howard’s most famous creation: it seems like the cinematic equivalent of middle-schoolers playing Dungeons and Dragons. But this is an honest (as in “unpretentious”) film with ideas: the pagan existentialism of Thulsa Doom, the theology of Subatai, and the difference between soldiers and warriors are...

A genuine crowd-pleaser that couldn’t please enough crowds in 1988, Tucker: The Man and His Dream has finally found an audience. Tim defends 80s Coppola and calls out critics who dismissed his post-Godfather II output; Dan talks about the film’s enthusiasm for its subject and how that enthusiasm helps the viewer feel like those who find themselves in any great leader’s orbit. Steve Jobs, Elon Musk...

1980s Bombay was a time when a wave of low-budget, gory horror films made by independent film producers such as the Ramsay Brothers swept the B-movie market. Kartik Nair's book Seeing Things: Spectral Materialities of Bombay Horror (U California Press, 2024) is about the sudden cuts, botched makeup effects, continuity errors, and celluloid damage found in these movies. Kartik Nair reads such "fail...

Screens are ubiquitous today. Yet contemporary screen media eliminate the presence of the screen and diminish the visibility of its boundaries. As the image becomes indistinguishable from the viewer’s surroundings, this unsettling prompts re.examination of how screen boundaries demarcate. Through readings of three media forms – Virtual Reality; holograms; and light projections – The Post-Screen Th...

We all know the rules of the Looney Tunes universe: rabbits can outrun bullets, shots to the face don’t kill, and the laws of gravity don’t always apply. But that universe is still very much like our own, in which we all strive to be like Bugs Bunny, but are really like Daffy Duck. If there’s an aesthetic of frustration, Chuck Jones is its Shakespeare. Join us for a conversation about Rabbit Fire,...

As I may be the target audience for Diseased Cinema: Plagues, Pandemics and Zombies in American Movies (Edinburgh UP, 2023), I really enjoyed interviewing Robert Alpert, Merle Eisenberg, and Lee Mordechai. Their co-authored book explores the politics of American films about disease and zombies. We had a wide-ranging, thoughtful, and funny conversation about pandemics, capitalism, academic collabor...

Being lighthearted and amusing can be a painful business. That’s one of the themes of Limelight, Charlie Chaplin’s 1952 portrait of the artist as an older man. It’s like a combination of The Red Shoes and Death of a Salesman, with elements of The Entertainer and The King of Comedy. Join Mike and Dan for a conversation about the ways in which art and love prove to be antidotes to poisonous despair....

Conversations about gender equity in the workplace accelerated in the 2010s, with debates inside Hollywood specifically pointing to broader systemic problems of employment disparities and exploitative labor practices. Compounded by the devastating #MeToo revelations, these problems led to a wide-scale call for change.  Courtney Brannon Donoghue's book The Value Gap: Female-Driven Films from Pitch...

Dr. Andy Jackson’s The Late and Post-Dictatorship Cinephilia Boom and Art Houses in South Korea (Edinburgh University Press, 2024) examines an unexplored area of South Korean cinema history – the 1985-1997 growth of art film exhibition, consumption, and cinephilia. This moment of heightened interest in art film altered how many Koreans conceptualised cinema and helped pave the way for the critical...

We all know the rules of courtroom dramas. We welcome the confusion we feel during the case and the sense of release upon hearing the jury’s decision: this is true in Witness for the Prosecution, Anatomy of a Murder, and, of course, The Verdict. But what if the feeling of disorientation that we enjoy in the middle of these films was heightened and then examined by the director as a subject on its...

Charles Coutino discusses Ridley Scott's film "Napoleon" with military historian Jeremy Black. Is it accurate? Is it inaccurate? Does it matter? Listen in to the discussion.  Charles Coutinho, PH. D., Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political hist...

In The Archival Afterlives of Philippine Cinema (Duke University Press, 2024), Bliss Cua Lim draws on cultural policy, queer and feminist theory, materialist media studies, and postcolonial historiography to analyze the crisis-ridden history of Philippine film archiving—a history of lost films, limited access, and collapsed archives. Rather than denigrate underfunded Philippine audiovisual archive...

Werner Herzog is a filmmaker with an intuitive sense for showing the right thing at the right time, whether he is offering the story of a maniacal conquistador, Count Dracula, or himself eating his own shoe. Klaus Kinski was, according to many, more monster than man and an actor who resembled the megalomaniacs he portrayed. Together, Herzog and Kinski made five films. Kinski died in 1991; in 1999,...

The 2006 Mel Gibson movie, Apocalypto, takes us into a decadent Maya civilization in the Yucatan on the eve of the Spanish Conquest of Mexico. It could be a commentary on ancient Rome or the present-day US, but, because it is a new world for both the viewer and the forest-dwelling protagonists, we get to see it through ‘new eyes’ and a ‘beginner’s mind.’ It’s a great movie, a cinematic masterpiece...