Category Archive for: ‘Issue 39 – Reviews’

Dudley Andrew (ed.) André Bazin’s New Media University of California Press, 2014. ISBN: 9780520283572 US$29.95(pb) 352pp André Bazin plays a central role in the history of film and media studies. Initially praised by modernist filmmakers and proponents of French film criticism of the 1950s, Bazin shortly after became one of the most denounced thinkers in an academic film studies informed …

Dominique Nasta, Contemporary Romanian Cinema: The History of an Unexpected Miracle. London: Wallflower Press, 2013 ISBN: 9780231167451 US$26 (pb) 256pp (Review copy supplied by Wallflower Press) With her latest book Contemporary Romanian Cinema: The History of an Unexpected Miracle, Dominique Nasta joins a circle of prominent thinkers from Yvette Bíró to Dina Iordanova in the serious study of Eastern European …

Mark Glancy, Hollywood and the Americanization of Britain: From the 1920s to the Present London and New York, I.B. Tauris, 2014 ISBN: 978-1-84885-407-9 UK £62.00 (hb) 340pp (Review copy supplied by I.B.Tauris Those who read Mark Glancy’s 1999 study, When Hollywood Loved Britain, will be eager to come to grips with his newest chronicling of how the ‘special relationship’ has …

Scott Balcerzak, Buffoon Men: Classic Hollywood Comedians and Queered Masculinity Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2013. ISBN 978-0-8143-3965-7 US$29.95 (pb) 280pp (Review copy supplied by Wayne State University Press) Scott Balcerzak’s Buffoon Men: Classic Hollywood Comedians and Queered Masculinity continues the tradition of queer scholarship committed to re-reading mainstream cultural texts. As his book title suggests, his study focuses …

Giorgio Bertellini, Italian Silent Cinema: A Reader John Libbey Publishing, 2013 ISBN: 9780-86196-670-7 US$40 (pb) 401pp (Review copy supplied by John Libbey Publishing) Italian Silent Cinema: A Reader, edited by Giorgio Bertellini (Associate Professor at the University of Michigan), is a complex, ample and exhaustive volume, composed of thirty articles by Italian and non-Italian scholars, with around 150 images, three …

Andrew Klevan, Barbara Stanwyck (Film Stars series) London: British Film Institute, 2013 ISBN: 9781844576487 UK £14.99 (pb) 152pp (Review copy supplied by Palgrave MacMillan) Virginia Wilson, The Life and Times of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True 1907-1940 Simon & Schuster, 2013 ISBN: 978-068431688 US$30 (hb) 1056pp (Review copy supplied by Simon & Schuster) In her review of The Life and Times of …

Adrian Martin, Mise en Scène and Film Style: From Classical Hollywood to New Media Art London/New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014 ISBN: 978-1-137-26994-2 US$96 (hb) 256pp (Review copy supplied by Palgrave Macmillan publishing) My contention is at once more modest and more inclusive: that the contemporary workings of dispositifs can offer us a new entrée into rethinking the field of film …

Jeffrey Ruoff (ed.), Coming Soon to a Festival Near You: Programming Film Festivals. St Andrews, Scotland: St Andrews Film Studies, 2012. ISBN: 978-1-908437-02-0 UK£19.99 (pb) 274pp (Review copy supplied by St Andrews Film Studies publishing house) Reduced to their most basic level, film festivals are about programming. Not only encompassing the selection and scheduling of films, the programming of film …

Marc Blake and Sara Bailey, Writing the Horror Movie. New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2013. ISBN 9781441196187 US $18.99 (hb) 272pp (Review copy supplied by Bloomsbury Publishing) The front cover of Writing the Horror Movie reminded this reader of Roy Ward Baker’s horror-comedy The Monster Club (1980). Specifically, I recalled the undead family tree that appeared as a backdrop throughout …