ABSTRACT This article examines Yorgos Lanthimos’ 2015 film The Lobster in relation to debates about intimate politics in contemporary queer scholarship and queer cinema studies. Rather than reading the film as a satire on compulsory coupling, this article teases out the film’s depiction of both normative and antinormative practices as parallel forms of sexual citizenship. Examining the relationship

ABSTRACT A number of independent science fiction films released since the Great Recession feature relatively unexceptional protagonists in dystopian scenarios, thereby shifting the conventional focus of the genre from heroic action to small-scale personal and domestic dramas. This article argues that by juxtaposing issues of broader environmental degradation with more intimate private narratives of

ABSTRACT Historically, cinematic spectacles of acquired impairment have expended much energy negotiating the gender trouble that disability provokes in male bodies, typically infusing narratives of rehabilitation with fantasies of gender reconstruction. These gender crises arise because hegemonic expectations about masculine identity as synonymous with autonomy and dominance conflict with the normative

(2021). That joke isn’t funny anymore: a critical exploration of Joker: Introduction. New Review of Film and Television Studies: Vol. 19, That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore: A Critical Exploration of Joker, pp. 1-6.

ABSTRACT The relationship between Batman and the Joker is usually presented as one of opposites: good vs. evil, justice vs. crime, order vs. chaos. Batman has been described as a fictional agent of hegemony, enforcing societal rules and preserving norms, and this role as a defender of the status quo is never more obvious than when he is battling the Joker’s lethal form of anarchy. The recent Joker

ABSTRACT The city mysteries were a nineteenth-century bestselling transnational literary phenomenon that combined radical politics and sensational fiction, adapting historical events along with devices from already existing popular narratives. Born as answers to the new megalopolis, these mysteries were supposed to work as calls to political action by exposing the vices, crimes, and corruption of the

ABSTRACT Dancing on the thin edge between tragedy and comedy from the very first tear that rolls down Arthur Fleck’s face into the painted creases of his clown smile, Joker revels in ambivalence. In fact, it exceeds its diegetic bounds to stage a clash between two kinds of masculinity: the conformist masculinity of director Todd Phillips, known for the alcohol-fuelled bonding and casual misogyny of

ABSTRACT This paper explores the relationship of history and comedy in Joker (2019) through a comedy theory of broken thingness and queer theory of failure – investigating the interplay of the film’s use of comic timing and signifiers of historical time in its diegesis. I argue that Joker uses its black humour to probe a disjointed affective relationship to masculine dressage, and the repeating crises

ABSTRACT Joker is a polarising popular cultural phenomenon. Reviews of the film range from rave acclaim to outraged dismissal. As a barometer of a western conjuncture in which binaristic division, ‘toxic’ culture, and the demise of liberal freedom are dominant, Joker articulates experiences of anxiety, evoking a zeitgeist inflected by the paranoid-schizoid mentality. Joker challenges viewers to reflect

ABSTRACT Joker critically and consciously explores the condition of modern loneliness and in so doing complexifies its representation. It does this through its representation of city spaces, social deprivation, political corruption, family breakdown, and mental illness. Together these elements interact so that the film becomes a canvass for the causes and consequences of loneliness and for the lonely

ABSTRACT Like the Martin Scorsese films to which it is indebted – The King of Comedy (1982), Taxi Driver (1976) and Raging Bull (1980) – Joker (Phillips 2019) dramatises male identity as crisis-ridden and a matter of performance and emulation. Arguing for Joker as being concerned not just with masculinity but also whiteness, this discussion focuses on the role of music, dance, and ideologies of entertainment

ABSTRACT Though ostensibly about the emergence of the infamous Batman villain, Joker eschews traditional comic book tropes and fantasy, instead grounding Joker’s story in a recognizable realistic world devoid of superpowers or heroes. The film’s sound design, and in particular its constant barrage of ambient noise, is a crucial component of this portrayal. It serves both to create the decaying city

ABSTRACT This essay contrasts components of the reception of Joker: the media panic which accompanied its release, the muted reception following its theatrical and home-viewing releases, and its anxious reception contexts. These processes showcase how Joker’s reception became ‘normalized’, neutered and made to fit into categories of mediated debate dictated by standards of public discourse from which

(2021). The superhero symbol: media, culture & politics. New Review of Film and Television Studies: Vol. 19, That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore: A Critical Exploration of Joker, pp. 112-114.

(2021). Troubling masculinities: terror, gender, and monstrous others in American film post-9/11. New Review of Film and Television Studies: Vol. 19, That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore: A Critical Exploration of Joker, pp. 115-118.

(2021). Mental disorders in popular film: how Hollywood uses, shames, and obscures mental diversity. New Review of Film and Television Studies: Vol. 19, That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore: A Critical Exploration of Joker, pp. 118-122.

(2021). Correction. New Review of Film and Television Studies: Vol. 19, That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore: A Critical Exploration of Joker, pp. I-I.

ABSTRACT In this essay, we propose that American sci-fi blockbuster Pacific Rim (Guillermo del Toro, USA, 2013) can be read as an example of chthulucinema. Chthulucinema is a posthumanist cinema that is primarily occupied with notions of the anthropocene and what in Staying With the Trouble, Donna J. Haraway would term the chthulucene– an era in which humans no longer exist as such, and instead either

ABSTRACT This article explores representations of same-sex intimacy in contemporary gay cinema by focusing on two films, Weekend (2011) and Paris 05:59: Théo & Hugo (2016). Both films spatialise intimacy, which is reflected in a formal appeal to monogamous and promiscuous optics. What interests us here is how the relational politics of monogamy/promiscuity can be considered as stylistic and ideological

ABSTRACT This article argues that Comedy Central’s Nathan For You enacts a sophisticated critique of reality television and offers a different way of capturing ‘reality’ on the small screen. By exaggerating the format’s countless constraints, Nathan for You discovers a way to create real and moving drama from reality television conventions. Using examples taken from across the series, the article argues

ABSTRACT Henri-George Clouzot’s The Mystery of Picasso (1956) and Lars von Trier’s and Jørgen Leth’s The Five Obstructions (2003) are celebrated experimental documentaries on the creative process in the visual arts and cinema made (or co-made) by renowned narrative film auteurs. Ludic exercises in on-and off-screen cinematic co-creation, together they foreground creativity and its constraints; artistic

ABSTRACT This article examines the late Korean American stand-up comedian Johnny Yune’s television career at NBC. Yune made his comedy debut on The Tonight Show starring Johnny Carson in 1978 and charmed the nation’s most beloved talk show host of that era. As a result, NBC signed Yune as the lead in three pilots over the next two years but his career on network television abruptly ended in 1980. Some

The police genre may be one of the oldest and most important genres on television. Seeing how its focus is on a government institution, it fulfils different functions within conservative and more l...

ABSTRACT The film Silent Running (1972) transforms the popular environmental figuration of Spaceship Earth into a science fiction narrative. The film is set on the Valley Forge, a spaceship that contains within biodomes the last of certain Earth ecosystems. By creating a literal equivalent to the metaphor of the earth as spaceship, Silent Running allows for a reading of the trope that exposes contradictions

ABSTRACT Monsters (Gareth Edwards, 2010) illustrates the collusion in contemporary visual culture between the digital and the cosmopolitan. Starting from a pivotal moment in the film in which the wonders of the borderlands are presented through an uncanny mixture of documentary-like reality and digital effects, this article explores such collusion through a combination of digital and cosmopolitan theory

ABSTRACT Ecological sabotage, or monkeywrenching, involves the destruction of property and infrastructure to defend nature from industrial development. Its emblematic tactic is tree spiking, where a ceramic spike is hammered into old-growth trees in order to disable logging equipment. This essay considers monkeywrenching to be as much an aesthetic practice as an activist one, and it examines films

ABSTRACT This essay contextualizes the horror video game Until Dawn (Supermassive Games, 2015) within the broader history of the ‘interactive movie,’ a genre of storytelling video games with prerecorded video sequences that reached its cultural peak in the mid- to late 1990s. Critics have questioned whether these products truly count as games because of the relative passivity of non-interactive watching

ABSTRACT Jennifer Lawrence emerged as a major star of American cinema following the collapse of the economy in 2008. This article will argue that her image in the initial phase of her fame (2010–16) is reflective of mainstream culture’s response to the crisis of neoliberalism and the endemic economic insecurity it has precipitated. Rising to prominence in the Great Recession through indie hit Winter’s

Nico Baumbach’s book examines an ongoing and variegated conversation in cinema studies with roots in Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni’s 1969 editorial statement in Cahiers du cinema, ‘Cinema/Ide...

In some academic circles, as well as in the broader public sphere, it is still news to many that the production and circulation of films often comes at a severe cost to the environment. As was reve...

ABSTRACT Tamil film songs allow filmmakers a site beyond the regular narrative structure of their films to interrogate the cultural aspects of Tamil society. From the early 1970s, Tamil film songs began to address morality in gendered ways that provided relevant and contemporary cultural meanings for audiences. By the 1990s, these songs were established, opening up discussions around sexual promiscuity

Martha P. Nochimson has written a lively and fascinating book about some famous ‘founding titans’ of U.S. television authorship, one that answers and raises important matters concerning the status ...

Everyone knows that LGBT representations on television have played a critical role in changing hearts and minds on issues such as marriage equality; it is a truth universally acknowledged. As perva...

ABSTRACT In the documentary Occupy Love (2012), the filmmaker proposes social movements can be love stories. Taking the filmmaker’s claim seriously, this article questions whether social documentaries can be understood as love stories and, if so, how different formations of love in documentary shape the communities they produce. Looking at three key examples, Triumph of the Will (1935), Roger & Me

ABSTRACT Victor Erice’s contemplative documentary ‘Dream of Light’ (1992) begins with a straightforward and unnarrated account of a realist painter, Antonio López, embarking upon a new painting of a quince tree growing outside his home in Madrid. Before long, however, the film digresses along various paths surrounding the painter, branching out from its core subject and exhaling into the lives and

ABSTRACT This analysis of the style of Ingmar Bergman’s films uses methods of treating film style that were first proposed and put into practice over 40 years ago by the author. Since then they have been applied to a very large number and range of films, and the results of these investigations published in books and in the New Review of Film and Television Studies. The basic technique of analysis used

ABSTRACT In this paper, I examine contemporary observational filmmaking and its efforts to reconfigure the themes and style of direct cinema for a present-day actuality. I begin by revisiting the earliest works of American direct cinema, but I resituate their overriding preoccupation with self-realizing figures (musicians, actors, politicians) as a determined investigation of labour and workers. These

ABSTRACT The current representative wave of romantic female friendships (Girls, Broad City, Insecure) in the United States owes a great deal to the web series. The online platform bypasses conventions of the romantic comedy, which prioritize heterosexual romance over female relationships. This article seeks to bring two geographies (United States and India) into conversation with one another via a

ABSTRACT This paper discusses the Singaporean web series People Like Us (Leon Cheo, 2016) as a text with characteristics of a romantic comedy that also challenges many generic conventions. In terms of production and distribution, the web series format enables content that might otherwise encounter funding or censorship challenges. With respect to content, People Like Us has two important distinctions

ABSTRACT Captivated by the vagaries of romance, American silent cinema was smitten from the outset with the narrative possibilities of not only attraction but the gamut of ensuing legal entanglements. Divorce and near-divorce comedies appeared in cinema as early as the turn of the century, contrary to their prevailing historicization. Moreover, focusing on the catalysts, processes, emotional turbulence

ABSTRACT While cinematic narratives are often evaluated and enjoyed in terms of their ability to captivate through suspense and revelation, in this essay, I mount a defense of narrative predictability. I take the genre of romantic comedy, arguably the most critically derided for its formulaic nature, as a case study, arguing that not only are there virtues to predictability but that the negative values

ABSTRACT This special issue assesses a range of works, from U.S. silent cinema to transnational web series, that configure romance in politically and representationally radical ways. In resisting the genre’s romanticizing tendencies, while also defying its perception as escapist “chick flicks,” these works subvert rom-com fantasy and formula and reflect critically on the realities and complexities

I knew Thomas Elsaesser for 32 years and, like so many other people, I thought my close association with him would continue for decades to come. With the mere mention of his name, vivid memories come to mind – of intense discussions in MA seminars, or sitting at his kitchen table in his home in Amsterdam drinking tea, or listening to one of his many keynote speeches, or going with him to the Film Museum

ABSTRACT Hong Sang-soo’s films are famous for their persistent exploration of failed personal relationships. Hong’s obsessive passion for baring the truth about men and women in contemporary South Korea drives his experiments in narration, minimalist aesthetic, and improvisational style. Hong’s films are the antidote to syrupy date films; stripped of romance, even the occasional meet-cute scenes quickly

ABSTRACT This article surveys developments in the French romantic comedy of the 2010s from a cultural studies perspective. Specifically, it considers how the particularities identifiable in the French genre following its emergence in the 1990s and consolidation by the end of the 2000s have evolved during the next decade. It argues that the most striking new trend comprises a more domestically circumscribed

ABSTRACT The Israeli television drama Fauda (Arabic for ‘chaos’) has attracted wide and unprecedented interest in Israel and worldwide. It is an action series about Israeli undercover soldiers (mista’arvim) operating in the occupied territories that charts new ground by revealing the human dimensions of the men and women who grease the war machine in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In contrast to

ABSTRACT This article examines Thamizh Padam (‘Tamil Film’, dir. C. S. Amudhan), a 2010 spoof of the Tamil cinema of south India. While Thamizh Padam mocked near every aspect of mainstream Tamil cinema, its main target was the industry’s ‘mass heroes’, those larger-than-life stars whose image blurs onscreen and offscreen. While recalling Bazin’s discussion of the ontological identity of the photographic

ABSTRACT This essay explores domestic labor, gender, and time in Domietta Torlasco’s video essay ‘Philosophy in the Kitchen.’ A digital archive of European art cinema’s panoply of images of domestic labor, Torlasco’s video essay presents iconic images of women engaged in housework, which despite their utter familiarity have failed to elicit a broader discussion about the nature of the labor they portray

ABSTRACT This article examines depictions of ‘deep play’ – play with outcomes substantial enough to affect life outside the game – and ‘dark play’ – play that is non-consensual – in contemporary cinema, and their relationship to the ideological trappings of late capitalism. The article analyses numerous films with such themes and notes a clear commonality in their depiction of hyper-capitalist societies

wrote about heterotopias in his brilliant essay, ‘Of Other Spaces,’ concerning the difference between homogenous and heterogenous infrastructure. However, Foucault’s account of power dealt with top-down administration, spatial regimes, and physical barriers. As Galloway notes, today’s ‘virtualization’ is more akin to what Deleuze calls ‘any-space-whatever’ [espace quelconque], as this accounts for

ABSTRACT This chapter examines ways in which filmmaking becomes a self-referential theme in Argentine films in the neoliberal era. Three films will be referred to: Adolfo Aristarain’s Martín (hache) from 1997; Daniel Burak’s Bar El Chino from 2003, and Alejo Flah’s Sexo fácil, películas tristes from 2014. These films all depict the making of international film co-productions primarily between Argentina

ABSTRACT This essay considers Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited (2007) in the context of, and ultimately as an expression of, neoliberalism, the late capitalist ideology defined by a belief in free trade, private property rights, and the homo economicus to the extent that the entirety of our everyday life is financialized. The essay is interested specifically in detailing the formal manner in which

ABSTRACT This essay identifies a trend present since 2013 in Hollywood, exemplified by Gone Girl (2014), Foxcatcher (2014), Whiplash (2014), Birdman (2014), Nightcrawler (2014), and I, Tonya (2017). Amongst the various things these films have in common, I give special attention to how each features a protagonist engaged in competitive performance, and also in an abusive relationship. This coupling

ABSTRACT City Island (De Felita, 2009) and Shortbus (Mitchell, 2006), independent films produced around the 2008 economic crisis, characterize their titular New York locations as ‘off-the-grid,’ exclusive bastions of authentic individual and communal life exempted from the norms and pressures of neoliberal urban culture. At the same time, however, they extend this status to New York City as a whole

ABSTRACT Widely associated with upward mobility, celebrity is typically used to affirm the possibilities for transcendence in economically polarized capitalist societies. Relationships between celebrity and social mobility are less utopian and more complex, with celebrity effectively masking limited opportunities for advancement in a world of automation, austerity, nepotism and globalization. Representing

ABSTRACT In the thriller Get Out (2017), director Jordan Peele depicts the reality of people of color in wealthy, white-dominated spaces in ‘post-racial’ America after the election of Obama. In a post-racial society, colorblindness is represented in cinema by increasing the number of black films, directors, writers, etc. This essay argues that the logic of colorblind ideology masks the centrality of

ABSTRACT This article explores the ways in which dystopian cinema that emerged in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008 provided pointed critique of two aspects of neoliberalism’s economic and social policies: the deliberate imposition of precariousness across the working population which neutralizes dissent and forestalls collective opposition, and spatial segregation of rich and poor that

Clara Bradbury-Rance’s book Lesbian Cinema after Queer Theory addresses a deceptively simple question with broad implications: can there be a lesbian cinema after queer theory’s critique of politic...

ABSTRACT This essay reassesses the deregulation of the American television industry and the rise of identitarian premium cable channels in the context of a new screen presence that has, since the early-2000s, advanced more provocative representations of sexual non-normativity than those found on network programming. This figure, the ambivalent queer of post-network TV, is a libidinous and morally suspect

ABSTRACT This article searches empirical support for the elimination of close-ups and fast cutting in early American CinemaScope films (1953–1959). While these transformations were commented upon extensively when the new anamorphic widescreen process arrived, this study claims that Hollywood in fact bent the technology to fit its existing production methods and stylistic norms. Adopting a historical-analytical