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New Books in Film
This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: newbooksnetwork.com Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/…
Episodes
- New Books in Film
Stefania Marghitu, "Teen TV" (Routledge, 2021)
Stefania Marghitu's Teen TV (Routledge, 2021)explores the history of television's relationship to teens as a desired, but elusive audience, and the ways in…
- New Books in Film
Chris Yogerst, "The Warner Brothers" (UP of Kentucky, 2023)
One of the oldest and most recognizable studios in Hollywood, Warner Bros. is considered a juggernaut of the entertainment industry. Since its formation in the…
- New Books in Film
Sabrina Mittermeier, "Fan Phenomena: Disney" (Intellect Books, 2023)
Sabrina Mittermeier's edited volume Fan Phenomena: Disney (Intellect Books, 2023) analyzes the fandom of Disney brands across a variety of media including…
- New Books in Film
The Purple Rose of Cairo
Something film fanatics often say is that a particular director’s work is really “about the movies.” Sometimes that’s true and sometimes it isn’t–but there’s…
- New Books in Film
Dustin Condren, "An Imaginary Cinema: Sergei Eisenstein and the Unrealized Film" (Cornell UP, 2024)
An Imaginary Cinema: Sergei Eisenstein and the Unrealized Film (Cornell UP, 2024) explores the unfinished cinematic projects developed and abandoned by Soviet…
- New Books in Film
Lester D. Friedman, "Citizen Spielberg" (U of Illinois Press, 2022)
Steven Spielberg's extraordinary career redefined Hollywood, but his achievement goes far beyond shattered box office records. Rejecting the view of Spielberg…
- New Books in Film
Christina Lane, "Phantom Lady: Hollywood Producer Joan Harrison, the Forgotten Woman Behind Hitchcock" (Chicago Review Press, 2020)
A platinum beauty with an ugly secret; a tall, dark, and handsome husband with murder in his eyes; starkly lit interiors that may or may not include the…
- New Books in Film
Pluribus Episode 3 Analysis: The Amazonification of Everything
It’s The Pop Culture Professors, and we analyze the third episode of Vince Gilligan’s new series Pluribus. We talk through this episode as a literalization of…
- New Books in Film
In “Pluribus” An America Without Division, But At What Price?
It’s The Pop Culture Professors, and we analyze the first two episodes of Vince Gilligan’s new series Pluribus. The show posits an extraordinary intervention…
- New Books in Film
The Beast
Have you ever felt that you keep making the same mistakes or that you have fallen into a pattern that could be Exhibit A as proof of reincarnation? The Beast…
- New Books in Film
C. Yamini Krishna, "Film City Urbanism in India: Hyderabad, from Princely City to Global City ,1890-2000" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
Film City Urbanism in India: Hyderabad, from Princely City to Global City ,1890-2000 (Cambridge UP, 2025) is about the reciprocal relationship between cinema…
- New Books in Film
Jakub Gortat, "Remembering National Socialism in Austrian Post-war Film" (1945-1955) (Brill, 2025)
Entrenched in the myth of being victim of the Nazi aggression, Austrian elites pursued a politics of memory that symbolically shook off any responsibility for…
- New Books in Film
Kubrick’s Worlds: Power, Paranoia, and the Politics of the Human Condition
In this episode of International Horizons, Interim Director Eli Karetny speaks with film scholar Nathan Abrams about the enduring relevance of Stanley Kubrick…
- New Books in Film
The Trip
My Dinner with Andre (1981) is a film that uses the simple premise of two men sharing a meal as a vehicle for exploration of how we should live our lives. It…
- New Books in Film
Alice Lovejoy, "Tales of Militant Chemistry: The Film Factory in a Century of War" (U California Press, 2025)
The history of film calls to mind unforgettable photographs, famous directors, and the glitz and hustle of the media business. But there is another tale to…
- New Books in Film
Kathryn Robson, "Beyond the Happy Ending: Imagining Happiness in Contemporary French Women's Writing and Film" (Liverpool UP, 2025)
In Kathryn Robson's Beyond the Happy Ending: Imagining Happiness in Contemporary French Women's Writing and Film (Liverpool UP, 2025), happiness (and the…
- New Books in Film
Mia Yinxing Liu, "Literati Lenses: Wenren Landscape in Chinese Cinema of the Mao Era" (U Hawai’i Press, 2019)
Chinese cinema has a long history of engagement with China’s art traditions, and literati (wenren) landscape painting has been an enduring source of…
- New Books in Film
Stevie Suan, "Anime's Identity: Performativity and Form Beyond Japan" (U Minnesota Press, 2021)
A formal approach to anime rethinks globalization and transnationality under neoliberalism Anime has become synonymous with Japanese culture, but its global…
- New Books in Film
Najmeh Moradiyan-Rizi and Shilyh J. Warren eds., "Women and Global Documentary: Practices and Perspectives in the 21st Century" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025)
Women and Global Documentary: Practices and Perspectives in the 21st Century (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025), edited by Najmeh Moradiyan-Rizi and Shilyh J…
- New Books in Film
Petar Mitric, "The Co-production Landscape in Europe: From Eurimages to Netflix" (Springer Nature, 2025)
The Co-production Landscape in Europe: From Eurimages to Netflix (Springer Nature, 2025) explores the evolving landscape of European film and television…
- New Books in Film
William Lempert, "Dreaming Down the Track: Awakenings in Aboriginal Cinema" (U Minnesota Press, 2025)
The product of years of embedded fieldwork within Indigenous film crews in Northwestern Australia, Dreaming Down the Track: Awakenings in Aboriginal Cinema…
- New Books in Film
Miami Vice
Many movies tell us how to watch them. Whether it’s Raiders of the Lost Ark, Casablanca, or Rear Window, movies steer the viewers to certain reactions…
- New Books in Film
Alien: Earth Episode Analysis: Emergence and The Real Monsters
It’s The Pop Culture Professors, and we conclude our analysis of the FX series Alien: Earth with episode 7, “Emergence” and episode 8, “The Real Monsters.”…
- New Books in Film
History Is Made at Night
Every so often, you encounter The Perfect Movie: something with a screenplay, cast, and direction that combine in a way that reminds you of what happens when…
- New Books in Film
Mark Archuleta, "The Reel Thrilling Events of Bank Robber Henry Starr: From Gentleman Bandit to Movie Star and Back Again" (U North Texas Press, 2025)
In 1921 headlines across the country announced the death of Henry Starr, a burgeoning silent film star who was killed while attempting to rob a bank in…
- New Books in Film
Mary Beth Willard, "Why It's Ok to Enjoy the Work of Immoral Artists" (Routledge, 2021)
The #metoo movement has forced many fans to consider what they should do when they learn that a beloved artist has acted immorally. One natural thought is that…
- New Books in Film
Yu Zhang, "Going to the Countryside: The Rural in the Modern Chinese Cultural Imagination, 1915–1965" (U Michigan Press, 2020)
Since the beginning of the twentieth century, modern Chinese intellectuals, reformers, revolutionaries, leftist journalists, and idealistic youth often crossed…
- New Books in Film
Mark Goble, "Downtime: The Twentieth Century in Slow Motion" (Columbia UP, 2025)
Slow motion is everywhere in contemporary film and media, but it wasn't always so ubiquitous. How did slow motion ascend to the dubious honor of becoming our…
- New Books in Film
The Straight Story
Everybody was shocked when, in 1999, David Lynch released a G-rated film with a Norman Rockwell setting that didn’t have a dark underbelly or wild reveal; if…
- New Books in Film
Katherine Fusco, "Hollywood's Others: Love and Limitation in the Star System" (Columbia UP, 2025)
We tend to think about movie stars as either glamorous or relatable. But in the 1920s and 1930s, when the Hollywood star system was taking shape, a number of…
- New Books in Film
Alice Lovejoy, "Tales of Militant Chemistry" (U California Press, 2025)
In Tales of Militant Chemistry (U of California Press, 2025), Alice Lovejoy tells the untold story of film as a chemical cousin to poison gas and nuclear…
- New Books in Film
Patricia Aufderheide, "Kartemquin Films: Documentaries on the Frontlines of Democracy" (U California Press, 2024)
Kartemquin Films: Documentaries on the Frontlines of Democracy (U California Press, 2024) traces how filmmaker-philosophers brought the dream of making…
- New Books in Film
Excalibur
We’ve seen many attempts at transferring Mallory’s Le Morte d’Arthur and its variants onto the screen, but none of them capture the spirit of the original…
- New Books in Film
Thomas Christian Bächle and Jascha Bareis eds., "The Realities of Autonomous Weapons (Bristol UP, 2025)
Autonomous weapons exist in a strange territory between Pentagon procurement contracts and Hollywood blockbusters, between actual military systems and…
- New Books in Film
Prudence Peiffer, "The Slip: The New York City Street That Changed American Art Forever" (Harper, 2023)
For just over a decade, from 1956 to 1967, a collection of dilapidated former sail-making warehouses clustered at the lower tip of Manhattan became the quiet…
- New Books in Film
Alisha Mughal, "It Can’t Rain All the Time: The Crow" (ECW Press, 2025)
Alisha Mughal's It Can’t Rain All the Time: The Crow (ECW Press, 2025) weaves memoir with film criticism in an effort to pin down The Crow’s cultural…
- New Books in Film
Jirí Anger, "Towards a Film Theory from Below: Archival Film and the Aesthetics of the Crack-Up" (Bloomsbury, 2024)
Jiří Anger is a scholar, archivist, and videographic critic devoted, as he says in this interview, to "making weird shapes shine." In this episode of New…
- New Books in Film
Horror and Humanism in "28 Years Later"
We break down the themes and ideas in 28 Years Later, with a particular focus on the politics of this Danny Boyle / Alex Garland sequel to 28 Days Later. We…
- New Books in Film
Meredith McCarroll, "Unwhite: Appalachia, Race, and Film" (U Georgia Press, 2018)
If you mention Appalachia to many people, they may immediately respond with the "Deliverance" dueling banjos theme. Unfortunately, this is an example of how…
- New Books in Film
Liza Black, "Picturing Indians: Native Americans in Film, 1941-1960" (U Nebraska Press, 2020)
Behind the braided wigs, buckskins, and excess bronzer that typified the mid-century "filmic Indian" lies a far richer, deeper history of Indigenous labor…
- New Books in Film
Nezar AlSayyad and Heba Safey Eldeen, "Cinematic Cairo: Egyptian Urban Modernity from Reel to Real" (American U in Cairo Press, 2022)
The relationship between the city and cinema is formidable. The images and sounds of the city found in movies are perhaps the only experience that many people…
- New Books in Film
Bruce Isaacs, "The Art of Pure Cinema: Hitchcock and His Imitators" (Oxford UP, 2020)
The Art of Pure Cinema: Hitchcock and His Imitators (Oxford University Press) is the first book-length study to examine the historical foundations and…
- New Books in Film
Moonstruck
Our episode on Moonstruck (1987) was almost never made: as with Manchester By the Sea, Dan harbored an irrational suspicion against it–but when he finally saw…
- New Books in Film
Richard Scheib, "A Viewing Guide to the Pandemic: Depictions of Plague and Pandemic on Film and TV" (Headpress, 2025)
Richard Scheib's A Viewing Guide to the Pandemic (Headpress, 2025) is a film book like no other. It opens with the author's first-hand account of the Covid-19…
- New Books in Film
Karen Redrobe, "Undead: (Inter)(in)animation, Feminisms, and the Art of War" (Univ of California Press, 2025)
Karen Redrobe's latest book Undead: (Inter)(in)animation, Feminisms, and the Art of War (Univ of California Press, 2025) is a fascinating account of the role…
- New Books in Film
Veronica Litt, "Ugh! As If!: Clueless" (ECW Press, 2025)
Veronica Litt's Ugh As If!: Clueless (ECW Press, 2025) uncovers the complex layers beneath the glossy surface of the 1995 classic film "Clueless." Litt…
- New Books in Film
Elana Levine, "Her Stories: Daytime Soap Opera and US Television History" (Duke UP, 2020)
Since the debut of These Are My Children in 1949, the daytime television soap opera has been foundational to the history of the medium as an economic…
- New Books in Film
Love and Mercy
Love and Mercy A film by Bill Pohlad Love and Mercy (2014) is a film that shows how the sausage is made, in terms of both the music and the man. We get to see…
- New Books in Film
Kevin Guyan, "Rainbow Trap: Queer Lives, Classifications and the Dangers of Inclusion" (Bloomsbury, 2025)
Rainbow Trap: Queer Lives, Classifications and the Dangers of Inclusion (Bloomsbury, 2025) by Dr. Kevin Guyan reveals how the fight for LGBTQ equalities in the…
- New Books in Film
Is Sinners a New Classic of Political Utopianism?
It’s the UConn Popcast, and we analyze the movie Sinners, starring Michael B. Jordan, just released on streaming. We address the political themes of the movie…
- New Books in Film
American Gangster
American Gangster (2007) is Ridley Scott’s homage to The French Connection: it’s got the right cars, clothes, and colors and is based on another true story of…
- New Books in Film
Jeremy Stolow, "Picturing Aura: A Visual Biography" (MIT Press, 2025)
Picturing Aura: A Visual Biography (MIT Press, 2025) by Dr. Jeremy Stolow is the first book of its kind: an extended historical, anthropological, and…
- New Books in Film
Alison Griffiths, "Nomadic Cinema: A Cultural Geography of the Expedition Film" (Columbia UP, 2025)
From In Borneo, the Land of the Head-Hunters to The Epic of Everest to Camping Among the Indians, the early twentieth century was the heyday of expedition…
- New Books in Film
John Trafton, "Movie-Made Los Angeles" (Wayne State UP, 2023)
Los Angeles was a cinematic city long before the rise of Hollywood. By the dawn of the twentieth century, photography, painting, and tourist promotion in…
- New Books in Film
Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning
The eighth installment in one of the most entertaining franchises ever made, The Final Reckoning is Tom Cruise’s Return of the King. Whether it suffers from…
- New Books in Film
Jon L. Pitt, "Botanical Imagination: Rethinking Plants in Modern Japan" (Cornell UP, 2025)
Botanical Imagination: Rethinking Plants in Modern Japan (Cornell University Press, 2025) explores the complicated legacy and enduring lure of plant life in…
- New Books in Film
Heist
Caper movies aren’t like others involving criminals: there’s an aesthetic to a caper that’s as important to the thieves as it is to the viewers. Heist is David…
- New Books in Film
Claire Knight, "Stalin's Final Films: Cinema, Socialist Realism, and Soviet Postwar Reality, 1945-1953" (Cornell UP, 2024)
Stalin's Final Films: Cinema, Socialist Realism, and Soviet Postwar Reality, 1945-1953 (Cornell UP, 2024) explores a neglected period in the history of Soviet…
- New Books in Film
Lori Jo Marso, "Feminism and the Cinema of Experience" (Duke UP, 2024)
Political theorist Lori Marso has been intrigued by filmmaker Chantal Ackerman for many years and has integrated Ackerman’s work into her courses at Union…
- New Books in Film
Kevin Smokler, "Break the Frame: Conversations with Women Filmmakers" (Oxford UP, 2025)
In the twenty-first century alone, women filmmakers have succeeded at directing every size, genre, and style of motion picture. Their movies have won Oscars…