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The Cinema of Powell and Pressburger by Nathalie Morris and Claire Smith (eds.) (2023)

English director Michael Powell and screenwriter Emeric Pressburger, a Hungarian refugee who came to England in the 1930s, as a team turned out to be visionaries of British film, who created breathtaking cinematic masterpieces. Those often would include elements from fairy-tales, surreal environments, dark and dangerous settings, as well as enchanting Technicolor dreams, sometimes in […]

White Lens on Brown Skin: The Sexualization of the Polynesian in American Film by Matthew Locey (202...

South seas fiction and later cinema as a genre, that pictures Pacific Islanders and their land, really took off as early as 1898 when the Hawaiian islands were annexed by the United States. Forerunners of the many films that would cover Polynesian culture were the magical and powerful reports of European sailors when they were […]

Blockheads, Beagles, and Sweet Babboos: New Perspectives on Charles M. Schulz’s Peanuts by Michelle

The fame and the legend of the Peanuts started on October 2, 1950, and the newspaper comic strip became a success almost immediately: at its peak, it ran in more than 2,600 newspapers simultaneously and made Charlie Brown, Snoopy and Lucy household names. 1952 saw the first edition of the Peanuts in paperback editions, where […]

Marvel Comics Library. Silver Surfer. Vol.1. 1968–1970 by Stan Lee, John Buscema, Douglas Wolk (2023

Marvel invented many great and impressive superheroes. Some were allowed their own comic book series; some ran for years or even decades. Compared to other Marvel characters and exclusive series, the Silver Surfer, main actor of the XXL title at hand, archived legendary status after a very short (comic book) lifetime. He was around for […]

The Soundies: A History and Catalog of Jukebox Film Shorts of the 1940s by Mark Cantor (2023)

The small-screen world of the short musical film, a form of media presentation usually associated with coin-operated cinematic machines of the 1940s and later decades, keeps fascinating historians, media researchers, music experts and sociologists. Even if nowadays media, video clips, music in all variations and formats, and modes of presentation are easily available on a […]

The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe by Nicholas Carnes and Lilly J. Goren (eds.) (2022)

Marvel Comics, or rather, Marvel Entertainment as the corporation now has expanded into various companies responsible for diverse media enterprises, started out as one of many American comic book publishers. The many story arcs, story backgrounds, locations, family trees and so forth developed originally by Marvel‘s artists are by now complicated and span hundreds of […]

Hollywood Screwball Comedy 1934-1945: Sex, Love, and Democratic Ideals by Grégoire Halbout (2023)

With the possible exception of the Western movie and Film Noir, the American screwball comedy, that hilarious, often chaotic and highly witty style of making excellent and funny entertainment, probably is the third best liked or popular genre associated with movies made in 1940s US. It Happened One Night (Frank Capra, 1934) is very likely […]