industry/insider sources
trade press & related sources
various film blogs, online journals, resources
- Audiovisuality – online video essays
- Bright Lights Film Journal
- Cineaste
- David Bordwell and Kristen Thompson, Observations on Film Art
- Film Courage
- Film Studies For Free
- FilmSlate magazine
- Indiewood/Hollywoodn't
- j.j. murphy on independent cinema
- Jump Cut
- Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism
- Open access film studies books available online, list from Film Studies For Free
- Participations: Journal of Audience & Reception Studies
- Raindance resources
- Scope: An Online Journal of Film and TV Studies
- Screening the Past
- Sense of Cinema
- The Chutry Experiment – Chuck Tryon
- Wide Screen
- Zigzigger: On the Audiovisual and Beyond (Michael Z. Newman)
Category Archives: Films
Best of lists
I’ve not done a ‘best of year’ list before but thought I’d have a stab this time – and do it across films, TV literary fiction and nonfiction. These are lists of my favourites/best viewed or read in the past … Continue reading
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Indiewood riding high in Oscar nominations
Whatever assorted rows and debates might accompany this year’s Oscar nominations, they demonstrate again the continued strength of the Indiewood and indie sectors as far as scoring well in these commercially valuable prestige stakes is concerned. The nominees can be … Continue reading
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Hollywood Puzzle Films
This is just a shameless plug for a chapter I have in a new book just out, Hollywood Puzzle Films edited by Warren Buckland (a new AFI Film Reader from Routledge). My chapter is one of several on Inception, in which I explore … Continue reading
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Ibsen’s gun, Llewyn Davis and White House Down
An odd mixture of elements, it might seem, but something I wanted to comment on in passing in Inside Llewyn Davis evolved somewhat after a viewing last night of White House Down. Comparing such films might seem a little spurious, … Continue reading
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The Loneliest Planet: maximising the effect of minimalism
Low-key narrative is one of the most frequent characteristics of indie film, a tendency that sometimes veers towards the minimalist end of the scale in the kind of production in which, by conventional standards, ‘very little happens’. A good example … Continue reading
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Spring Breakers: exploitation/art cinema
Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers offers a fascinating combination of elements of exploitation and art cinema, two key ingredients often found in the mix that constitutes indie film but employed here in a blend that’s somewhat jarring and uncomfortable – but also … Continue reading
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The Sessions and indie ingredients
I liked The Sessions but when you step back at look at it, like so many indie films, it seems comprised of a number of components rather familiar to the territory. First, it offers us something marked as distinctly ‘uncomfortable’, in … Continue reading
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Zero reference to The Colonial Present
Been meaning to post something about Zero Dark Thirty for some time and Oscar-eve seems as good an excuse as any. Even if it’s not an indie film, it has some characteristics of the ‘quality’ or Indiewood end of the spectrum, … Continue reading
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Silver Linings Cop Out?
No great surprise that Silver Linings Playbook was the big winner at the Independent Spirit Awards, just ahead of the Oscars, taking best feature, best director and screenplay for David O. Russell and best actress for Jennifer Lawrence. I liked … Continue reading
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Rachel Lister on indie narrative and the short story
Very interesting piece by Rachel Lister in the new issue of Scope: An Online Journal of Film and Television Studies on links between indie narrative and the short story. In ‘The Feature Film as Short Story: The “Little Disturbances” of Nicole Holofcener’, … Continue reading
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