By David Greven. Moving beyond caricature and never trying to goose the audience, Looking consistently offered quiet, introspective scenes like these that took character development and interaction further while maintaining a consistent style. For these reasons, the series remains a resonant touchstone that entices repeat viewings.” The English director Andrew […]
In the Weeds: The Divided City and Its New Cinemas, 1920-1980
A Book Review by John Talbird. Instead of throwing a heaping helping of film titles at us, substituting lists and anecdote for real analysis, each chapter takes a deep dive into one specific movie, contextualizing the film with the real-world effects of white flight, government abandonment of urban locales, urban […]
Horror Film Ascendant
By Gary D. Rhodes. 2026 is the watershed year of the bloodshed film. The sleep of reason has produced monsters, worlds of gods and monsters, new and old, now lauded by all except the most unreasonable amongst us.” To face evil and survive, or, for that matter, to face evil […]
She Didn’t Do It: A High School Teacher’s Thoughts on Kristoffer Borgli’s The Drama
By Thomas M. Puhr. As someone with no direct experience with such atrocities, I can only imagine how painful it would be for a survivor to walk into a screening and not know what they’re in for….” I’d been teaching for five or six years when I experienced my first—and, […]
Reclaiming Cinema History: Alexandra Heller-Nicholas on 1000 Women in Horror (Shudder)
By Ellie Dean. We have very clear socially constructed, stereotypical ideas of what girlhood means, what femme adolescence means, what motherhood means, etcetera, and horror works so well as a forum to explore and deconstruct these cliches because it defamiliarizes them, makes them strange, and at its best transgresses and […]
A Clarifying Distance: Michael Haneke’s Code Unknown, Global Art Cinema, and the European Union
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 […]