New Books in Film

A glass slipper, a fairy godmother, a transformed pumpkin, lizard footmen and seamstress mice: these familiar images evoke a very particular story, one where hopes and dreams for a new life might come true. Adaptations of Cinderella branch out through history and across the world, from early illustrated books to modern children’s and young adult novels, and contemporary films. Cinderella: A Cultural History (Bodleian Library Publishing, 2026) by Dr. Michelle Anya Anjirbag aims to answer the question, why does Cinderella still inspire so many of us with her story?

Beginning with the literary versions of the tale that were popularized by collectors and writers such as Basile, Perrault and the Brothers Grimm, this book looks back at the folktales that informed them, out to the various countries and cultures that share similar stories, and then forwards to what writers, illustrators, filmmakers and other storytellers continue to do with the Cinderella narrative. Instead of taking a strictly historical approach, it explores the ways heroes, villains, helpers and symbols appear in different interpretations, illustrations and adaptations. It draws connections between the historical and contemporary preoccupations, concerns and hopes that the Cinderella story still addresses in the 21st century, and celebrates our enduring desire for enchantment and transformation.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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If you’re interested in experimental film, there’s a good chance that you’ve read the criticism of Erika Balsom. There’s also a good chance that you’re a fan of her work, since it offers an uncommonly sensitive and insightful account of how contemporary filmmakers are reimagining the world at a moment of crisis and opportunity.

A scholar, writer, and curator, Erika is Reader in Film and Media Studies at King's College London and the author of five books, including TEN SKIES (2021) and After Uniqueness: A History of Film and Video Art in Circulation (2017). Her remarkable body of criticism has been published in venues such as Cinema Scope, New Left Review, 4Columns, and Artforum.

A selection of this criticism has just been published by Columbia University Press as The Edges of Cinema: Essays on Twenty-First Century Film Culture (2026). The book is a rich feast, exploring an idiosyncratic selection of films and a wide range of issues in contemporary film cultures: from the stakes of observation to the effects of digital technologies, from the slowness of “slow cinema” to the renaissance of repertory cinema, and much more beside.

In this episode of New Books in Film, Alix Beeston chats with Erika about The Edges of Cinema's case for the provocations and pleasures of experimental film, as well as the aims and ethos of Erika’s wider critical project. Alix and Erika also discuss their shared fascination with questions of feminist history and their investment in practicing—and championing—inventive, daring writing both in and beyond the academy.

Alix Beeston is Reader in Literature and Visual Culture at Cardiff University. She's the author of In and Out of Sight: Modernist Writing and the Photographic Unseen (Oxford UP, 2018) and the co-editor of the award-winning volume Incomplete: The Feminist Possibilities of the Unfinished Film (University of California Press, 2023).

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You Can See Everything is the new documentary about Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of biotech startup Theranos, who was convicted of fraud and is currently serving a federal prison sentence. Or is it a work of performance art starring Nathan Fielder, the comedian behind Nathan for You, The Rehearsal, and The Curse? It's about truth,  psychology, shame, simulacra, Silicon Valley, and a million other things besides. And we're going to get into it all.

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Orson Welles is a foundational work of Welles criticism. First published by Joseph McBride in the British Film Institute's Cinema One series in 1972 when the author was twenty-four, it now has been extensively revised and updated to reflect the ongoing developments in the work of this great filmmaker. McBride—who, as Martin Scorsese has written, "has a clearer understanding of Welles and his films than almost anyone"—studied Welles at work for more than five years while playing an earnest young film critic and historian in The Other Side of the Wind. Among the new material in this third edition, Orson Welles: Revised and Expanded is McBride's first extended analysis of that film as well as an essay on Welles's acting career and revisions of the other chapters on his adventurous, multifaceted body of work, illuminating and setting the record straight on this often misunderstood director.

Joseph McBride has written or edited twenty-six books, also including two other books on Welles; biographies of Frank Capra, Steven Spielberg, and John Ford; the interview book Hawks on Hawks; critical studies of Ford (with Michael Wilmington), Ernst Lubitsch, Billy Wilder, the Coen Bros., and George Cukor; and I Loved Movies, But... In 2026, Sticking Place Books reprinted his long-lost edited collection Persistence of Vision, with an extensive new introduction. McBride covered the film industry for many years as a reporter and reviewer for Daily Variety. He is an emeritus professor of the School of Cinema at San Francisco State University

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

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If Dog Day Afternoon is Network Jr., then Nicholas Ray’s 1956 Bigger Than Life is The Shining’s little brother. Ed Avery (James Mason), like Jack Torrence, unlocks a part of him that he finds liberating and intoxicating but which his family finds terrifying. There are many similarities, yet there’s an important difference: the ghosts in The Shining bring out something in Jack that was always there, but the cortisone in Bigger Than Life seems to cause Ed to become a sinister version of himself. Does evil lurk within us, ready to escape, or do we invite it into our lives?  

Bumper music by John Deley.

Fans of James Mason will want to read Madeline King Porter’s new biography, James Mason: The Movie Star Hollywood Forgot.

Please subscribe to the show and consider leaving us a rating or review. You can find over three hundred episodes wherever you get your podcasts. Follow the show on Letterboxd and email us any time at [email protected] with requests and recommendations. Check out Dan Moran’s substack, Pages and Frames, where he writes about books and movies, as well as his many film-related author interviews on The New Books Network. Mike Takla is on substack at The Grumbler’s Almanac.

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Todd Berliner's Hollywood Renegade: Elaine May, Mikey and Nicky, and the Making of a Masterpiece (U Texas Press, 2026) examines Elaine May’s Mikey and Nicky with stands out in the history of Hollywood. After a troubled production, massive cost overruns, and lawsuits between May and the studio, the film received scathing reviews and failed at the box office. But the very qualities that initially alienated viewers and reviewers led later generations to regard the film as an overlooked masterpiece.

Written and directed by the period’s only female New Hollywood filmmaker, Mikey and Nicky has not received the attention given to other unconventional films of the 1970s. But May worked for years to give each moment of the movie multiple areas of interest. She made every character, even peripheral ones, nuanced and memorable. And she designed every scene, even minor ones, as a performance event. Her lead actors, Peter Falk and John Cassavetes, thrived under her unorthodox directing style, earning acclaim even from reviewers who hated the movie. Decades in the making—years of scriptwriting, a shoot that spanned ten months, and three years spent editing—Mikey and Nicky shows us what Hollywood cinema can accomplish when talented filmmakers challenge Hollywood’s limited notion of professionalism, rejecting the harsh time pressures of commercial filmmaking in order to get the most out of every scene.

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Karmic Winds: Reflections from “The Smartest Guy in Hollywood” (Rare Bird Books, 2026) is a memoir of power, collapse, and reckoning by Peter M. Hoffman, a Yale-trained lawyer and Hollywood insider who once stood at the center of the independent film boom and later found himself stripped of status, freedom, and certainty. As president of Carolco Pictures, Hoffman helped steer an era-defining slate that included Terminator 2, Basic Instinct, and Rambo, navigating a world of massive egos, creative brilliance, and financial brinkmanship. But ambition has its cost. After the industry turns, legal battles mount, and a federal conviction leads to imprisonment, Hoffman is forced into a confrontation far more exacting than any boardroom negotiation: a reckoning with his own choices, illusions, and moral blind spots. Set partly within the quiet, disorienting confines of Terminal Island federal prison, Karmic Winds traces a journey through humiliation and loss toward clarity and acceptance. Drawing on philosophy, Buddhism, and a lifelong search for meaning, Hoffman examines the nature of justice, the seductions of power, and the invisible forces—personal and systemic—that shape our lives. Neither a tell-all nor a plea for absolution, Karmic Winds is a deeply reflective account of success and failure, told with intellectual rigor and emotional restraint. It is a story of what remains when the titles disappear, the noise falls away, and one is left alone with the self...and the winds that carried them there.

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After the groundbreaking success of his debut film, Boyz N the Hood in 1991, filmmaker John Singleton (1968–2019) gained worldwide acclaim, earned the respect of major film industry figures, and became the topic of both scholarly and popular culture film conversations. He also made history by becoming the youngest—and the first African American—nominee for the Academy Award for Best Director. However, lukewarm reception for his sophomore release, Poetic Justice in 1993, dampened the momentum of his early promise, and critical interest in his subsequent work waned. Once Upon a Time in South Central LA: John Singleton’s Hood Trilogy (UP of Mississippi, 2026) seeks to reframe Singleton’s legacy and reaffirm his significance as a filmmaker.

Author Mark D. Cunningham argues that Singleton’s so-called “hood trilogy”—Boyz N the Hood, Poetic Justice, and Baby Boy (2001)—offers a vital cinematic lens into the lived experiences of young African American men and women. Blending film analysis with literature, music, sociology, and cultural studies, the volume positions Singleton’s work as a critical intersection of African American history, identity, and popular culture. Cunningham explores Singleton’s portrayal of Black masculinity, the social environment of South Central Los Angeles, and the impact of hip-hop culture on gender dynamics. By revisiting Singleton’s early career and the cultural weight of his films, Once Upon a Time in South Central LA reasserts the filmmaker’s place in the cinematic canon and highlights the enduring influence of his work on African American youth and storytelling.

Dr. Mark D. Cunningham is professor and chair of the Department of Radio-Television-Film at Austin Community College. His research focuses on film and television studies, with an emphasis on Black filmmakers, screen adaptations, and representations of race and identity in popular media. His scholarship engages figures such as directors John Singleton, Spike Lee, Barry Jenkins, and rapper/actor Ice-T. His work has appeared in The Atlantic and The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, and he has contributed to numerous edited volumes in film, television, and media studies. You can find Mark on Instagram.

Subscribe, like, follow, and rate Additions to the Archive with Sullivan Summer on Instagram, Substack, and wherever you get your podcasts. And check out Sullivan's Substack for a continued conversation between she and Mark, as they discuss the hood trilogy's impact in the 21st century.

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Pink Auteur, Red Outlaw: Adachi Masao and Japan’s Cinema of Revolution (Awai Books, 2026) is the first-ever English-language book on Adachi Masao. Based on extensive interviews with the director and years of research, this study offers a comprehensive portrait of the filmmaker and his provocative oeuvre – from socially engaged pink films and New Wave cinema to experimental documentary and avant-garde psychodrama. An essential read for those interested in cinema, history, or politics.

Author William Andrews is a Tokyo-based writer and translator originally from Britain. He is the author of The Japanese Red Army: A Short History and Dissenting Japan: A History of Japanese Radicalism and Counterculture, from 1945 to Fukushima. His translations in the visual and performing arts have been widely published.

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Exploring how digital visual effects have changed the representations of the body and identity in action films. When Harrison Ford appeared digitally de-aged in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, audiences witnessed more than a technical feat; they saw how visual effects are reshaping what bodies can be on screen. In Action Bodies: VFX, Identity, and Embodiment in Blockbuster Cinema, Drew Ayers (Eastern Washington University) examines how the contemporary action genre redefines embodiment across human, superhuman, animal, and machine forms. Ayers argues that action films are a crucial site for understanding how popular media both reflect and shape cultural debates about identity, citizenship, disability, and ethics in the era of big data and algorithmic culture. Through case studies including Top Gun: Maverick, The Woman King, The Fast & the Furious franchise, and Avatar: The Way of Water, Ayers explores how VFX-altered bodies carry ideological weight. While the action genre has long leaned conservative in its politics of identity, its digitally mediated bodies also generate unexpected opportunities: glimpses of more inclusive and flexible modes of embodiment. As artificial intelligence and synthetic imagery continue to transform film production, Action Bodies demonstrates why careful attention to action cinema is essential for understanding how contemporary culture imagines and engineers the future of the body.

Drew Ayers is a professor of film at Eastern Washington University. He is the author of Spectacular Posthumanism: The Digital Vernacular of Visual Effects, and his work has been published in animation, Configurations, Convergence, and Film Criticism.

Cory Barker is a faculty member in the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications at Penn State University, where he teaches courses on film, television, and digital culture. Newsletter.

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