New Books in Film

What makes a film a classic? In A Taste of Honey (Bloomsbury, 2023), published as part of the BFI Film Classics series, Melanie Williams, a Professor of Film and Television Studies in the School of Art, Media and American Studies at the University of East Anglia, tells the story of the films production and reception. The book explores the key themes of the film situating ideas of class, gender, ra...

Before South Korea became the democracy and media powerhouse that it is today, it underwent several decades of authoritarian rule during the Cold War from the late 1940s to late 1980s. Amidst this authoritarian period, South Korea’s filmmakers, distributors, and exhibitors nevertheless found ways to push the boundaries of both cinema and politics. This is the topic of Hieyoon Kim’s Celluloid Democ...

Rope (1948) may not be top-shelf Hitchcock, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t interesting and worth repeated viewings. After arguing back at those who find Jimmy Stewart miscast, Mike and Dan talk about how the film stands as another example of Hitchcock using violence to dramatize the sex lives of his characters. Mike lists the ways in which the director resembles the killer, specifically Brandon: a...

The New True Crime: How the Rise of Serialized Storytelling Is Transforming Innocence (NYU Press, 2023) by Dr. Diana Rickard examines how serialized crime shows became an American obsession. TV shows and podcasts like Making a Murderer, Serial, and Atlanta Monster have taken the cultural zeitgeist by storm, and contributed to the release of wrongly imprisoned people—such as Adnan Syed. The popular...

Godzilla emerged from the sea to devastate Tokyo in the now-classic 1954 film, produced by Tōhō Studios and directed by Ishirō Honda, creating a global sensation and launching one of the world’s most successful movie and media franchises. Awakened and transformed by nuclear weapons testing, Godzilla serves as a terrifying metaphor for humanity’s shortsighted destructiveness: this was the intent of...

In 1973, William Friedkin terrorized the world with The Exorcist and then decided to make a film even more grim: a remake of George Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear. This was an audacious move, since the 1953 original was already well-loved and regarded as one of the most suspenseful films of all time. But Friedkin followed his muse and created Sorcerer (1977), which belongs in the pantheon of Great Un...

Bookshop.org is an online book retailer that donates more than 80% of its profits to independent bookstores. Launched in 2020, Bookshop.org has already raised more than $27,000,000. In this interview, Andy Hunter, founder and CEO discusses his journey to creating one of the most revolutionary new organizations in the book world. Bookshop has found a way to retain the convenience of online book sho...

Published earlier this year from Running Press, Kristen Lopez’s But Have You Read the Book?: 52 Literary Gems That Inspired Our Favorite Films looks at almost a hundred years of film adaptations of novels. The book offers a survey of how directors, actors, and screenwriters have transformed the raw material of fiction into works that were sometimes transgressive, sometimes reverential, and always...

The Disney Princesses are a billion-dollar industry, known and loved by children across the globe. In The Disney Princess Phenomenon: A Feminist Analysis (Bristol University Press, 2023) Dr. Robyn Muir provides an exploratory and holistic examination of this worldwide commercial and cultural phenomenon in its key representations: films, merchandising and marketing, and park experiences. Muir highl...

Jake and Elwood sing “Everybody Needs Someone to Love” and everybody loves The Blues Brothers: “You … me … them … everybody!” Join Mike and Dan for a conversation about John Landis’s 1980 film that has become movie comfort-food for people raised on the original SNL and others who have come to the film without any knowledge of John Belushi or Dan Ackroyd’s careers. So many comedy sketches fall flat...

How are women represented in Chinese crime films? In what ways do the representation reflect traditional Chinese values and contemporary Chinese social-cultural norms? How did boys’ love culture emerge in China? What is the role of the Chinese state in queer media production and queer culture in China? In a conversation with Joanne Kuai, PhD candidate at Karlstad University, Sweden, and an affilia...

Digging My Own Grave: The Films of Caveh Zahedi (Factory 25, 2015) is the most comprehensive collection of filmmaker Caveh Zahedi possible with 36 films including: A Little Stiff, I Don’t Hate Las Vegas Anymore, In the Bathtub of the World, Tripping with Caveh, I Am a Sex Addict, and The Sheik and I. Writings by Bill Brown, Arnold Barkus, Greg Watkins, Thomas Logoreci, Alison Bechdel, Amanda Field...

Clouzot’s 1953 thriller may be the ultimate bait and switch, moving from a character study of four desperate men in limbo into one of the most suspenseful films ever made. The Wages of Fear shows us the triumph of human ingenuity much like Robinson Crusoe or Castaway, but it’s also a grim statement about how we all carry our deaths within us: the thing from which we try to flee every morning when...

In A Queer Way of Feeling: Girl Fans and Personal Archives of Early Hollywood (University of California Press, 2023), Diana W. Anselmo queers the earliest development of the "fangirl." Gathering an unexplored archive of fan-made scrapbooks, letters, diaries, and photographs, A Queer Way of Feeling explores how, in the 1910s, girls coming of age in the United States used cinema to forge a foundatio...

Halfway through Casablanca, we learn why Rick Blaine is so cynical, angry, and embittered; we also feel glad at the end when he takes off his armor and begins that beautiful friendship. But how would we respond if we never learned why Rick acted as he does? The answer is that he’d be Dixon Steele, whom Bogart portrays so well in Nicholas Ray’s 1950 thriller In a Lonely Place. Join Mike and Dan for...

Taiwan New Cinema (first wave, 1982–1989; second wave, 1990 onward) has a unique history regarding film festivals, particularly in the way these films are circulated at major European film festivals. It shares a common formalist concern about cinematic modernism with its Western counterparts, departing from previous modes of filmmaking that were preoccupied with nostalgically romanticizing China’s...

Karima K. Jeffrey-Legette's book Speculative Film and Moving Images by or about Black Women and Girls (Lexington Books, 2022) examines depictions of African-descended women and girls in twentieth and twenty-first century filmmaking. Topics include a discursive analysis of stereotypes; roles garnered by Halle Berry, the only Black woman to receive an Oscar for Best Actress in a Leading Role; the pr...

First introduced in the pages of X-Men, Storm is probably the most recognized Black female superhero. She is also one of the most powerful characters in the Marvel Universe, with abilities that allow her to control the weather itself. Yet that power is almost always deployed in the service of White characters, and Storm is rarely treated as an authority figure. Hero Me Not: The Containment of the...

Today’s episode of POSTSCRIPT explores and examines director Greta Gerwig’s film, Barbie. This Warner Brothers’ movie has been in theaters for under a month but has crossed the $1 billion dollar mark during that time, breaking all kinds of box office records and making Gerwig the first solo female director to enter this rarified realm. Barbie is now Warner Brothers’ most successful film, surpassin...

How much will a viewer tolerate? What if you took away all the quick and easy ways in which movies dole out information? What if you made the hero less-than-wholly-admirable and the villain less-than-wholly-terrible? Would audiences still come along for the ride in that brown Le Mans with Popeye Doyle as he tries to catch the sniper who missed him? William Friedkin bet that they would--and won. Jo...

David Humphrey’s The Time of Laughter: Comedy and the Media Cultures of Japan (U Michigan Press, 2023) examines the roles of mediated laughter in the media and cultural history of postwar Japan, with a strong focus on the temporality of laughter. As the book shows, comedy has been central to Japanese entertainment from the age of television to the age of social media, identifying the 1980s as a tr...

“Drifting” seems like a great word to describe many of Robert Altman’s films, especially California Split, his 1974 buddy film with Elliott Gould and George Segal as gamblers whose friendship is strengthened by their losses. But Mike argues that the film has a deep structure—and one based on a Disney film that we’ve all seen a hundred times. Elliott Gould’s special brand of cool, how gambling reli...

From the noted Hollywood biographer comes this celebration of the great American love story—the romance between Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart—capturing its complexity, contradictions, and challenges as never before. In Bogie and Bacall: The Surprising True Story of Hollywood's Greatest Love Affair (Harper, 2023), William Mann offers a deep and comprehensive look at Lauren Bacall, Humphrey Boga...

What is it like to experience emotions without being able to identify their sources? What happens when a person feels intense self-loathing but cannot articulate why—even as his star rises? Join Mike and Dan for an extended conversation about Raging Bull, Martin Scorsese’s 1980 masterpiece and a film that it took the guys three years of podcasting to get the nerve to tackle. Dan explains why Ragin...

Jonathon Fessenden, theologian and editor of Missio Dei, invited me to talk about The Fourth Wise Man, the 1985 film based on the 1895 Henry van Dyke novella, The Other Wise Man. It was a tale I had known as a children’s story, but it was a delight to learn more about it, to watch this movie (a few times), and to share this discussion with Jonathon. Martin Sheen plays Artaban, a Persian astrologer...