By James Morrison. My films are meant as polemical statements against the American ‘barrel-down’ cinema and its dis-empowerment of the spectator. They are an appeal for a cinema of insistent questions instead of false (because too quick) answers, for clarifying distance instead of violating closeness, for provocation and dialogue instead […]
Signs of the End Times – Saluting the Blood of Heroes: Behind the Apocalyptic Film
By Andrew Kolarik. Danny Stewart’s Saluting the Blood of Heroes: Behind the Apocalyptic Film could not be more timely. The opening sections of the book, which dive into the background of the apocalyptic film, are rather alarming in the way that they highlight the many colourful ways in which humanity […]
Into the Ill-Fated Future: from Build My Gallows High to Out of the Past
By Jeremy Carr. If there is a lesson to be learned from noir stories, be they in print or filmed, it is that the past never stays in the past for long, and the inevitably ill-fated future closes in faster than expected. This formula has been the underlying core of […]
The Modern Movie Palace: How the Multiplex Came to Be
By Gary D. Rhodes. Multi-theatre construction is the latest thing.” – Mel Lebewitz, Northwest Cinema Corporation, 1972 Build them and they will come.” – Jeff Forman, Buena Vista Pictures, 1996 In 1970, a film magazine pointedly asked readers, “Whatever happened to the singles?” The question wasn’t about dollar bills or […]
Free from Authoritarian Force: Radical Children’s Film and Television
A Book Review Essay by André Seewood. Unique and vital contribution to children’s screen studies….” Children’s Screen Studies is a discipline that is growing exponentially every day. As scholars all over the globe turn their attention to the child on screen and the media created for children it becomes increasingly clear […]
The Secret History: Introduction to Hollywood Haunts the World
By Robert Guffey. When one is most concerned with telling an entertaining story rather than fashioning a persuasive speech or an opaque legal document that will resist the scrutiny of a battery of attorneys, one tends to relax and let one’s guard down. And the truth, often by accident, will […]
Fake It So Real: Essayistic Self–Portraiture in Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal (2022– )
By James Slaymaker. The Rehearsal embodies the three core characteristics of the essay film as outlined by Rascaroli: it is a hybrid form, crossing genre boundaries and destabilising the line between ‘fiction’ and ‘non–fiction’; it is highly self–reflexive, constantly encouraging the viewer to consider the construction of its own images […]
Replicating Neoliberal Reform: Failed Mothers in John Singleton’s Boyz N the Hood (1991) and Baby Boy (2001)
By Indya J. Jackson. Ultimately [through the depiction of failed mothers] Singleton replicates the anti-Black, anti-poor, and misogynistic rhetoric of neoliberal reformists by embedding a definite preference for fathers and the heteropatriarchal family structure within his films.” After Boyz N the Hood (1991) launched John Singleton into rarefied air, he […]
Object Incidents and the Wilderness of Speech in Howard Hawks’s Ball of Fire (1941)
By George Toles. Expressive objects abound in the world of Ball of Fire. What makes an object cinematically expressive? Let us begin by thinking about a door [which] becomes more charged with significance if we are led to assume that the room behind it contains an armed criminal or a […]
Satirizing Horror and Spellbinding the Social Contract: Weapons (2025)
By David Ryan. As a follow-up to Zach Cregger’s horror drama Barbarian (2022), Weapons explores the recursive relationship between personal antagonisms and the erosion of civic trust, staging what Robin Wood identifies as horror’s central tension—the destabilization of the social order….” With Weapons (2025), writer-director Zach Cregger leans on the […]