Tsai Ming-liang’s I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone (2006) follows the life of a mattress as it traverses across the busy streets of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. This transient mattress brings together three ...

Published in New Review of Film and Television Studies (Vol. 22, No. 2, 2024)

Published in New Review of Film and Television Studies (Vol. 22, No. 2, 2024)

Published in New Review of Film and Television Studies (Vol. 22, No. 2, 2024)

Published in New Review of Film and Television Studies (Vol. 22, No. 2, 2024)

In the recent boom of 1980s-set television period dramas, the Walkman appears again and again as a symbol of the decade. This article argues that the Walkman (or personal stereo) is not just a one-...

This essay argues that Steven Soderbergh’s 2009–2012 films – The Girlfriend Experience (2009), Haywire (2011) and Magic Mike (2012) – form a loose trilogy depicting the plight of the working class ...

Scenes as vivid in our cinematographic memory as Tara’s views in Gone with the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939), the oppressive sewers in the final sequence of The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949), the vist...

The TV anthology series, which enjoyed significant popularity in the past but has been scarce amidst the dominance of episodic series and serials in the 2000s and early 2010s, seemed to experience ...

Up until the 19th century, the notion ‘medium’ described the natural elements – e.g. earth, water, fire, and air. John Durham Peters’ media philosophy (2015) demonstrates how contemporary technical...

This article investigates Jonathan Glazer’s 2013 film Under the Skin as it pertains to the ‘insectile’ or, in other words, to an entomological imagination. The insectile, I argue, is structured acc...

Published in New Review of Film and Television Studies (Vol. 22, No. 1, 2024)

Published in New Review of Film and Television Studies (Vol. 22, No. 1, 2024)

In this article, I draw on a handful of personal fan collections created in the first decade of the star system to examine how schoolgirls of faith engaged Hollywood cinema as a visual vernacular t...

My Man Godfrey (Gregory La Cava, 1936) begins with a critique of Depression-era public relief efforts but then focuses for the remainder of the film on the attempts of one ‘forgotten man’ to restor...

The affective dimensions of labor and the ways in which gendered representations of affect can be deployed as a justification for limiting women’s participation in the workforce constitute a founda...

This article focuses on Female Convict Scorpion, a Japanese women-in-prison film series (1972–1973), which exemplifies studio-produced exploitation cinema. The series is influenced by the contempor...

Commonly associated with the cinema of Béla Tarr and Gus Van Sant, walking on screen has received relatively little attention from researchers despite the ongoing popularity of wayfaring films and ...

Fighting with My Family (2019) details the rags-to-riches story of British professional wrestler Saraya-Jade Bevis (Florence Pugh), who became the youngest winner of the World Wrestling Entertainme...

This article endeavors to critically examine the popular and enduring trope of the Final Girl and its intersections with race. Coined almost 35 years ago by Carol Clover in the article ‘Her Body, H...

Contemporary European cinema insistently depicts female teenagers in association with non-human animals. This article focuses on a group of films in which the teenage protagonists approach animalit...

The aim of this article is to analyse various excremental motifs and their functions in selected contemporary films. Drawing on concepts such as Julia Kristeva’s abject, Mary Douglas’s taboo and Mi...

Kelly Reichardt pays attention to women’s actions and subjectivities, often when they are alone, but not at the expense of men. It takes seeing her films more than once to understand how intricatel...

This special dossier examines issues in women’s authorship and adaptation in contemporary television. Recently, in the television streaming era, there have been a number of significant television s...

Sharp Objects (2018) has been widely read by journalists and critics as ‘feminist’, and broadly speaking, the miniseries’ feminism has been attributed to its subversion of crime television tropes a...

Through her programmes, including Big Little Lies (2017–2019), The Morning Show (2019–), and Little Fires Everywhere (2020), Reese Witherspoon has been central to the recent rise of women-centric t...

This article argues for an understanding of contemporary women’s television as a twenty-first century iteration of Lauren Berlant’s concept of the ‘intimate public’ of femininity, by analysing how ...

This article considers what Liz Garbus’s television version of Michelle McNamara’s I’ll Be Gone in the Dark (HBO, 2018) reveals about true-crime adaptation in a post #MeToo era, particularly in rel...

This article examines Mike White and Laura Dern’s HBO series Enlightened (2011–13) in relation to questions of segmentarity, motherhood, feminism, reproductive futurism, and neoliberal capitalism. ...

The Marvel TV series Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., which is set in a fictional American intelligence agency, reproduces contemporary media, academic, and governmental discourse surrounding violent radica...

This roundtable took place in summer 2023 and sought to capture current thinking on women’s authorship and adaptation in contemporary television. The roundtable brought together emerging and more e...

Published in New Review of Film and Television Studies (Vol. 22, No. 1, 2024)

Published in New Review of Film and Television Studies (Vol. 22, No. 1, 2024)

Published in New Review of Film and Television Studies (Vol. 22, No. 1, 2024)

This article examines the temporality of recent science fiction films, specifically the ways in which architectural histories are used to imagine and characterise dystopias of the future. Drawing o...

This article engages with differences of experiences generated by transmedia migration of filmic content in artist-filmmaker Albert Serra’s two-channel installation Personalien and feature film Lib...

This article argues that amidst the hype of Parasite fever, it is instructive to revisit Barking Dogs Never Bite (2000) in order to better understand the director’s aesthetic and signatures. Not on...

The peculiar romance portrayed in Phantom Thread (2017) has been subjected to much criticism. While Paul Thomas Anderson’s film patently narrates a love story, the nature of its romance may appear ...

In 1999, The Sopranos (HBO, 1999–2007) was the first-ever nominee from premium or basic cable in the Primetime Emmys’ Outstanding Drama Series category, a slate annually dominated by broadcast dram...

Published in New Review of Film and Television Studies (Vol. 21, No. 4, 2023)

Published in New Review of Film and Television Studies (Vol. 21, No. 4, 2023)

In recent years, television has undergone an artistic and critical reevaluation. This essay aims to add to the study of television aesthetics by examining a form particular to American television: ...

Australia’s George Miller, director of the Mad Max films and others, has an international reputation as a singular creative force. But this reputation overlooks key facts about Miller’s career and ...

In recent years, Stanley Cavell has become one of the canonical reference points for film scholars. In particular, his work on ‘comedies of remarriage’ has become one of the most fertile arenas of ...

Published in New Review of Film and Television Studies (Vol. 21, No. 3, 2023)

Published in New Review of Film and Television Studies (Vol. 21, No. 3, 2023)

This article uses textual and discourse analysis to examine the interpersonal dynamic between Rob and Cherise in High Fidelity (Hulu 2020), two Black female characters at the center of a gender- an...

ABSTRACT This article reads Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank (2009) through Lauren Berlant’s conceptualisation of impasse and the affective rhythms of survival, which Berlant develops in their reflections on the cinema of precarity. This framework, I contend, has the potential to open up new avenues of inquiry within the study of Arnold’s work, usually discussed in relation to either British (social) realist

ABSTRACT This article re-examines Rod Serling’s career as he transitioned from writing live anthology teleplays to his famous series, The Twilight Zone (1959–1964), in service of investigating the changing definitions of authorship as the television industry changed. It does so in order to show that the techniques many critics agree Serling used to subvert corporate sponsors may have been rooted in

Published in New Review of Film and Television Studies (Vol. 21, No. 2, 2023)

ABSTRACT This special issue highlights a range of scholarship on LGBTQ+ film and media, encompassing a variety of subjects from across numerous decades and explored through a diverse range of methodologies. If these articles collectively define ‘queer/trans media now’, it is due to their capaciousness, dexterity, and generative provocation – qualities essential to articulating the value of queer/trans

ABSTRACT This article discusses the ‘Netflix imaginary’ and how it shapes our understanding of queer taste and legibility in contemporary visual culture. While Netflix has promoted itself as a bastion of LGBTQ inclusivity and other forms of ‘diversity’, this article considers the platform not on the basis of celebrated LGBTQ ‘Netflix Originals’ such as Sex Education or Queer Eye but rather on how our

ABSTRACT Several critics have described Xavier Dolan as a gifted yet self-indulgent filmmaker. From the stylish costume design to the carefully composed arrangement of colors and objects within the mise en scène, Dolan’s films would seem to be guilty of an over-investment in the image. This essay interrogates the aesthetic and affective possibilities that the ostensibly intolerable textuality of Dolan’s

ABSTRACT Engaging with ideas of hegemonic masculinity, femininity, homosexuality, and heteronormativity, this article examines the film and television work of Joey Soloway as a means of studying the popularization of feminist and queer theory within contemporary American independent media. By focusing on representations of non-normative genders and sexualities (including sex work, transgender identity

ABSTRACT A complex cinematic history of trans characters precedes contemporary representations of trans people — one of normalizing trans identity through class, gender, and race. In the context of contemporary American cinema, Sean Baker’s Tangerine (2015) demonstrates alternative strategies for representing trans characters and marks a turning point in trans cinema. Tangerine presents a grittier

ABSTRACT This article examines representations of cats across various media in Cat People (Jacques Tourneur, 1942) and its remake (Paul Schrader, 1982). I reorient the scholarship of these films towards issues raised by animal studies: asking what the films’ investigations into animal representations might offer for understanding depictions of women, monsters, and interspecies intimacy across different

ABSTRACT This article presents a study of the creative process of Silverlake Life: The View from Here (Tom Joslin and Peter Friedman, 1993), from the perspective of its authorial multiplicity. Silverlake Life is regarded as one of the main representatives of autobiographical documentary in the 1990s. The specificity of the film is found in the circumstances of the death of the filmmaker-autobiographer

ABSTRACT This article assesses the significance of the Gay Cable Network (GCN), a production company that aired a dozen shows on public access cable television made by and for LGBTQ New Yorkers. Drawing upon archival research and interviews with producers, hosts, and assistants at GCN, I argue that LGBTQ producers experience both transformational opportunities for political engagement as well as precarity