It’s the UConn Popcast, and Ex Machina, Alex Garland’s 2014 sci fi movie, is a provocative examination of what an updated Turing test for a super-capable AI might look like, if the designer of the test was a megalomaniacal tech-mogul / genius. The movie, starring Oscar Isaac, Domhnall Gleeson, and Alicia Vikander, is a rich and often confounding text, which seems to posit a horrifying possibility: what if the real alignment problem is teaching AI the worst of humanity’s manipulative and instrumental traits?

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Interactive Cinema: The Ambiguous Ethics of Media Participation (University of Minnesota Press, 2024) engages with a multitude of unconventional approaches throughout the history of motion pictures to offer insight into a range of largely ephemeral and site-specific projects that consciously assimilate viewers into their production. Through an exploration of radically inventive approaches to the medium, many of which emerged out of socio-political crises and periods of historical transition, Interactive Cinema works to by considering it in both technological and phenomenological terms.

Author Marina Hassapopoulou is Assistant Professor in the Department of Cinema Studies, at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. She is also the interim director of NYU’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation program. She is the founder of open-source and collaborative initiatives including: Interactive Media Archive, ExpressiveAI.net, and Weird Wave Archive.

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Ways of Remembering: Law, Cinema and Collective Memory in the New India (Cambridge UP, 2024) tells a story about the relationship between secular law and religious violence by studying the memorialisation of the 2002 Gujarat pogrom--postcolonial India's most litigated and mediatized event of anti-Muslim mass violence. By reading judgments and films on the pogrom through a novel interpretive framework, the book argues that the shared narrative of law and cinema engenders ways of remembering the pogrom in which the rationality of secular law offers a resolution to the irrationality of religious violence. In the public's collective memory, the force of this rationality simultaneously condemns and normalises violence against Muslims while exonerating secular law from its role in enabling the pogrom, thus keeping the violent (legal) order against India's Muslim citizens intact. The book contends that in foregrounding law's aesthetic dimensions we see the discursive ways in which secular law organizes violence and presents itself as the panacea for that very violence.

About the Author: Oishik Sircar is a Senior Lecturer at the Melbourne Law School. He was previously the Professor of Law at Jindal Global Law School. His work maps the relationship between law, violence and aesthetics with a particular focus on contemporary India. Along with Ways of Remembering: Law, Cinema and Collective Violence in the New India (CUP 2024), he is the author of Violent Modernities: Cultural Lives of Law in the New India (OUP 2021) and the co-director of the award-winning documentary film We Are Foot Soldiers (PSBT 2010).

Priyam Sinha recently graduated with a PhD from the National University of Singapore and has been awarded the Alexander Von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellowship, starting 2025. She has interdisciplinary academic interests that lie at the intersection of film studies, critical new media industry studies, disability studies, affect studies, gender studies, and cultural studies. She can be reached at https://twitter.com/PriyamSinha

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Detroit has an essential relationship to genre in American literature and popular culture. The contemporary formations of the suburban sitcom, the post-apocalyptic genre, the sci-fi dystopia, crime fiction, the superhero genre, and contemporary horror would not exist in the way they do today without the aesthetic material and racial history of Detroit. When DC Comics wanted to compete with Marvel and market “socially relevant” comics, especially ones dealing with issues of race, they swapped Gotham and Metropolis for Detroit. What about vampires concerned with de-industrialization, heritage conservation, and impending water wars? Must be Detroit. A story about a half-man, half-robot wrestling with what it means to be human by fighting crime? Improbably, Detroit has two. Author Vincent Haddad’s The Detroit Genre: Race, Dispossession, and Resilience in American Literature and Film, 1967-2023 (Lever Press, 2024) provides the first comprehensive literary and cultural investigation of the representations of Detroit in popular and literary culture.

The book first establishes the concept of the “Detroit genre” that emerged in late 1960s and traces the tropes of this white-centric narrative genre in popular culture, touching on key texts including Blue Collar, Robocop, The Crow, It Follows, and Barbarian. The second part shows how Black writers, including Alice Randall, adrienne maree brown, Stephen Mack Jones, and Angela Flournoy, reclaimed and revised the Detroit genre by un-fixing Detroit narratives of dispossession, criminality, and industrial and social failure through formal experimentations on genre itself.

Where Detroit has typically been painted in the news as one of three things—the center of the automotive industry; crime-ridden and in ruins; or as a “blank canvas” with limitless potential of entrepreneurship—Vincent Haddad shows that the Detroit genre in literature and film can be far more powerful than news media in narrating Black dispossession as a pragmatic, even liberal consensus. The texts studied here condition forgetfulness about Detroit’s history or expose it to a full reckoning, direct attention toward or away from the city’s agents of injustice, fetishize resilience or model resistance, and foreclose or imagine a future of Black liberation. Appealing to scholars of popular literature, media, race, and American studies, The Detroit Genre is an accessible and engaging study of the city’s influence on a wide array of genres in pop culture.

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Just as horror films are filled with characters who never seem quite enough afraid, crime films are filled with protagonists who, at the end of the movie, never seem quite enough affected by what they have seen or unleashed. Not here. Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat (1953) follows the attempts of one cop, Steve Bannion (Glenn Ford), to clean up his department and city’s corruption. He does, but at a terrible cost. Join us for an appreciation of a noir that offers a world of moral black and white and a man who refuses to pretend there are shades of grey–until he finds himself with his hands around someone’s neck.

Fans of Fritz Lang will enjoy this collection of interviews with the director.

Follow us on X and Letterboxd–and let us know what you’d like us to watch! Incredible bumper music is usually by John Deley; this week, it’s from the Inside Llewyn Davis soundtrack. Also check out Dan’s new Substack site, Pages and Frames, for an essay about this film and more writing about books and films.

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Beverly Hills Noir: Crime, Sin, & Scandal in 90210 (Post Hill Press, 2024) explores the city’s true crime history, delving deep inside cases that made headlines, scandals that engulfed Hollywood legends, and more strange-but-true tales that could only happen in the 90210. Beverly Hills Noir chronicles an assortment of jaw-dropping true crime stories spanning the legendary city’s history, each with oh-so-90210 twists—including a high-profile murder mystery in the city’s most extravagant mansion, the daring exploits of a handsome cat burglar with movie star looks, a toxic Tinseltown love triangle that ended in gunplay, a brazen Rodeo Drive jewelry store holdup with tragically stunning finale, an Oscar nominated actress on shoplifting spree and more—complete with major roles and countless cameos by Hollywood idols and cultural icons. A gripping, century-long tour of the glamorous city’s shadowy underbelly through crimes and misdemeanors as over-the-top as the city itself, Beverly Hills Noir collects the kinds of stories you’d expect to be swapped if James Ellroy and Dominick Dunne had met Jackie Collins and Ryan Murphy for cocktails at the Polo Lounge. It’s Sunset Boulevard and Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood turned sordid, face-down-in-the-pool reality.

Scott Huver has covered the inner workings of Beverly Hills, the entertainment industry, and the Los Angeles-area elite for three decades.

Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network.

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From the acclaimed author of American Comics comes a sweeping and entertaining narrative that details the rise and enduring grip of horror in American literature, and, ultimately, culture—from the taut, terrifying stories of Edgar Allan Poe to the grisly, lingering films of Jordan Peele

America is held captive by horror stories. They flicker on the screen of a darkened movie theater and are shared around the campfire. They blare out in tabloid true-crime headlines, and in the worried voices of local news anchors. They are consumed, virally, on the phones in our pockets. Like the victims in any slasher movie worth its salt, we can’t escape the thrall of scary stories.

In American Scary: A History of Horror, from Salem to Stephen King and Beyond (Algonquin Books, 2024), noted cultural historian and Columbia professor Jeremy Dauber takes the reader to the startling origins of horror in the United States. Dauber draws a captivating through line that ties historical influences ranging from the Salem witch trials and enslaved-person narratives directly to the body of work we more closely associate with horror today: the weird tales of H. P. Lovecraft, the lingering fiction of Shirley Jackson, the disquieting films of Alfred Hitchcock, the up-all-night stories of Stephen King, and the gripping critiques of Jordan Peele.

With the dexterous weave of insight and style that have made him one of America’s leading historians of popular culture, Dauber makes the haunting case that horror reveals the true depths of the American mind.

Jeremy Dauber is a professor of Jewish Literature and American Studies at Columbia University. His books include Jewish Comedy and The Worlds of Sholem Aleichem, both finalists for the National Jewish Book Award, American Comics: A History, and Mel Brooks: Disobedient Jew. He lives in New York City.

Daniel Moran earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers and articles on G. K. Chesterton and John Ford, he teaches research and writing at Rutgers and co-hosts the podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics, found here on the New Books Network and on X. You can also find his writing about books and films on Pages and Frames.

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The director of classic films such as Sylvia Scarlett, The Philadelphia Story, Gaslight, Adam's Rib, A Star Is Born, and My Fair Lady, George Cukor is widely admired but often misunderstood. Reductively stereotyped in his time as a "woman's director"-a thinly veiled, disparaging code for "gay"-he brilliantly directed a wide range of iconic actors and actresses, including Cary Grant, Greta Garbo, Spencer Tracy, Joan Crawford, Marilyn Monroe, and Maggie Smith. As Katharine Hepburn, the star of ten Cukor films, told the director, "All the people in your pictures are as goddamned good as they can possibly be, and that's your stamp."

In this groundbreaking, lavishly illustrated critical study, Joseph McBride provides insightful and revealing essayistic portraits of Cukor's actors in their most memorable roles. The queer filmmaker gravitated to socially adventurous, subversively rule-breaking, audacious dreamers who are often sexually transgressive and gender fluid in ways that seem strikingly modern today. McBride shows that Cukor's seemingly self-effacing body of work is characterized by a discreet way of channeling his feelings through his actors. He expertly cajoled actors, usually gently but sometimes with bracing harshness, to delve deeply into emotional areas they tended to keep safely hidden. Cukor's wry wit, his keen sense of psychological and social observation, his charm and irony, and his toughness and resilience kept him active for more than five decades in Hollywood. George Cukor's People: Acting for a Master Director (Columbia UP, 2024) gives him the in-depth, multifaceted examination his rich achievement deserves.

Joseph McBride is a film historian and a professor in the School of Cinema at San Francisco State University. He is the author of biographies of Frank Capra, John Ford, and Steven Spielberg; three books on Orson Welles; and critical studies of Ernst Lubitsch, Billy Wilder, and the Coen Brothers. He acted for Welles in The Other Side of the Wind and has won a Writers Guild of America award.

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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Victoria Sturtevant's It’s All in the Delivery: Pregnancy in American Film and Television Comedy (University of Texas Press, 2024) is about how changing depictions of pregnancy in comedy from the start of the twentieth century to the present show an evolution in attitudes toward women’s reproductive roles and rights.

Some of the most groundbreaking moments in American film and TV comedy have centered on pregnancy, from Lucille Ball’s real-life pregnancy on I Love Lucy, to the abortion plot on Maude; Murphy Brown’s controversial single motherhood; Arnold Schwarzenegger’s pregnancy in Junior; or the third-trimester stand-up special Ali Wong: Baby Cobra.

In the first book-length study of pregnancy in popular comedy, Victoria Sturtevant examines the slow evolution of pregnancy tropes during the years of the Production Code; the sexual revolution and changing norms around nonmarital pregnancy in the 1960s and ‘70s; and the emphasis on biological clocks, infertility, adoption, and abortion from the 1980s to now.

Across this history, popular media have offered polite evasions and sentimentality instead of real candor about the physical and social complexities of pregnancy. But comedy has often led the way in puncturing these clichés, pointing an irreverent and satiric lens at the messy and sometimes absurd work of gestation. Ultimately, Sturtevant argues that comedy can reveal the distortions and lies that treat pregnancy as simple and natural “women’s work,” misrepresentations that rest at the heart of contemporary attacks on reproductive rights in the US.

Peter C. Kunze is an assistant professor of communication at Tulane University.

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'All art is propaganda,' wrote George Orwell, 'but not all propaganda is art.' Moving from World War I to the 'War on Terror' and beyond, The Story of British Propaganda Film (Bloomsbury, 2024) shows how the emergence of film as a global media phenomenon reshaped practices of propaganda, while new practices of propaganda in turn reshaped the use of the moving image. It explores classic examples of cinematic propaganda such as The Battle of the Somme (1916), Listen to Britain (1942) and Animal Farm (1954) alongside little-known newsreels, 'telemagazines' and digital media initiatives, in the process challenging our understanding of propaganda itself, and its many diverse manifestations.

Richly illustrated with unique material from the BFI National Archive, the book shows how central propaganda is to the development of British film, and how it has filtered our understanding of modern British history, from narratives of decolonisation to the celebration of pop culture and the meanings of the postwar consensus. In a contemporary moment so preoccupied with misinformation, malinformation and disinformation, Dr. Scott Anthony explains why the response to the ubiquity of the propaganda film has often turned out to be the production of ever more propaganda.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new 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.

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