You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
A study of Denis Villeneuve’s genre-transcendent film. In Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival (2016), scientists must decipher the language of and peacefully communicate with aliens who have landed on Earth before the world’s military attacks. In this first book-length study of the film, scholar David Roche argues that it is one of the most important films of this century, and the most brilliant science fiction film since Blade Runner. Roche posits Arrival as a blockbuster with artistic ambitions—an argument supported by the film’s several Academy Award nominations—and looks closely at how the film engages with theoretical questions posed by contemporary film studies and philosophy alike....
Astronauts explore an alien spacecraft hurtling toward the sun in this Hugo and Nebula Award–winning novel—“a stone-cold classic” of hard sci-fi (The Guardian). An enormous cylindrical object has entered Earth’s solar system on a collision course with the sun. A team of astronauts are sent to explore the mysterious craft, which the denizens of the solar system name Rama. What they find is astonishing evidence of a civilization far more advanced than ours. They find an interior stretching over fifty kilometers; a forbidding cylindrical sea; mysterious and inaccessible buildings; and strange machine-animal hybrids, or “biots,” that inhabit the ship. But what they don’t find is ...
Critically examines the work of Québécois filmmakers Denis Villeneuve
Impossibly muscular men and voluptuous women parade around in revealing, skintight outfits, and their romantic and sexual entanglements are a key part of the ongoing drama. Such is the state of superhero comics and movies, a genre that has become one of our leading mythologies, conveying influential messages about gender, sexuality, and relationships. Love, Sex, Gender, and Superheroes examines a full range of superhero media, from comics to films to television to merchandising. With a keen eye for the genre’s complex and internally contradictory mythology, comics scholar Jeffrey A. Brown considers its mixed messages. Superhero comics may reinforce sex roles with their litany of phallic mu...
Artificial Generation: Photogenic French Literature and the Prehistory of Cinematic Modernity investigates the intersection of film theory and nineteenth-century literature, arguing that the depth of amalgamation that occurred within literary representation during this era aims to replicate an illusion of life and its sensations, in ways directly related to broader transitions into our modern cinematic age. A key part of this evolution in representation relies on the continual re-emergence of the artificial woman as longstanding expression of masculine artistic subjectivity, which, by the later nineteenth century, becomes a photographic and filmic drive. Moving through the beginning of film ...
For decades, science fiction has compelled us to imagine futures both inspiring and cautionary. Whether it’s a cryptic message encountered by a survey ship, the discovery of alien life in the distant reaches of space, a window into a future Earth, or the adventures of well-meaning AI, science fiction inspires our imagination and delivers a lens through which we can view ourselves and the world around us. At the very heart of the genre is short fiction, the secret lab that has introduced many of the new ideas, techniques, and voices prominent across all other media. In The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume Eight, Hugo and Locus Award-winning editor Neil Clarke provides a comprehensive year-in-review of 2022's short fiction markets and selects thirty-one of its best stories from the wealth of magazines, anthologies, podcasts, and collections that make up the field. In these pages you'll find works by both the new and established authors who are setting the pace for science fiction today and into tomorrow. Start your journey here.
In the last several decades, the number of films featuring female protagonists has increased significantly. Many of these films reflect the vast cultural and sociological changes that have taken place since the early 1960s, highlighting not only a wide spectrum of female characters depicted onscreen, but the creative work of women behind the camera as well. In Reel Women: An International Directory of Contemporary Feature Films about Women, media librarian Jane Sloan has assembled an impressive list of more than 2400 films—from nearly 100 countries—that feature female protagonists. Each entry includes a brief description of the film and cites key artistic personnel, particularly female d...