Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2025 -

In recent years, scholars have fruitfully explored the dynamic history, sociopolitical and cultural contexts, and aesthetics of international queer film. Now, in Bodies of Water, the British academic Maguire (Univ. of Cambridge, UK) offers a well-researched, clearly organized, and groundbreaking examination of queer aesthetics in selected recent Latin American fiction features and shorts--films whose settings portray queer characters interacting with others in "watery spaces," such as swimming pools, showers, beaches, and rocky shorelines. His multidisciplinary approach draws on "the blue humanities, queer theory, and studies [of] cinematic embodiment and sexuality" (p. 2). Maguire's book is the first to explore, in-depth, queerness and aquatic poetics. His theoretical influences include Water and Dreams (1942) by Gaston Bachelard and Cruising Utopia (CH, Jul'10, 47-6141) by Jose Esteban Munoz. The five principal chapters of Maguire's volume offer close readings of selected films and examine issues such as the "postpornogaphic" poetics of queer pleasure in Argentine Albertina Carri's Las hijas del fuego (2018) and the "queer erotics of boredom" in Argentine Marco Berger's Taekwondo (2016). This beautifully produced volume includes endnotes and an extensive bibliography of works in Spanish, English, and Portuguese.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Graduate students through faculty.

This microscopic examination of moviegoing in New York City at the turn of the 20th century explores theaters and theater practices; moviegoing experiences of African American patrons; censorship records related to the regulation of race and sexuality onscreen; segregation practices; and newspaper reports on movie patrons, theater exhibition patterns, Black theater operators, Black press criticism, and theater maps. Though it revisits some of the earlier literature, Lopez's work is novel, filling the continuing void regarding early moviegoing practices and expanding the little-known history of Black motion picture operators and projectionists, who attempted to unionize as white projectionists did to receive appropriate recognition and adequate pay. Lopez (history, Providence College) maintains that "Black film culture is more expansive than the screen or even the theater itself. [...] Here, filmmakers' responses to legal censorship, journalists' engagement with film criticism, young girls' defiance of familial restrictions when watching a movie, and projectionists' demands for unionization are all part of how Black New Yorkers endeavored to make the city much less hostile to their existence" (p. 6). Reel Freedom is very useful for classroom teaching and exemplifies how scholars who work on rarely examined time periods conduct meticulous research to reconstruct this history.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Undergraduates through faculty.

Warner (Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) has written a groundbreaking, provocative investigation into the uses of suspense in "slow cinema." Suspense studies, he says, have hitherto focused on Hitchcockian manipulation of plot and character. In slow, contemplative cinema, one should also take into consideration structural, generic, perceptual, and--of most interest to Warner--atmospheric suspense. His careful film analyses includes both classic directors like Bresson, Antonioni, Kieslowski, and Akerman and more contemporary artists like Kelly Reichardt, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Weerasethakul Apichatpong, Pedro Costa, Lucrecia Martel, and Jonathan Glazer. Carefully woven into these analyses are the thoughts of most of the major film theorists. The effect of the book on this reader was to acquire a list of new films to watch and, more importantly, a new way of looking at them. Less convincing is Warner's final chapter, which deals entirely with David Lynch's television series Twin Peaks: The Return. Nevertheless, on the whole this book reveals new ways of appreciating film. What more could a film lover ask?Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers through faculty.

An invaluable collection of 18 essays, Toxic Nostalgia on Screen examines the role screen images play in not only perpetuating but also creating an idealized past that caters to a white patriarchal norm, profoundly influencing cultural memory, discourse, and identity. Myriad examples in the text illustrate this influence, ranging from Rosemary's Baby (1968) to Skyfall (2012), demonstrating how mediated images of the past continue to impact the present and, without a counternarrative, create an echo chamber of halcyon days that, for the majority of society, never existed. The text includes examples of counternarratives, like Candyman (2021) and Lovecraft Country (2020), and delves into how these narratives examine trauma in the African American community--a topic excluded in films and television series that focus on idealized representations of the past. In a society currently grappling with a surge of "toxic nostalgia" in the public and political sphere, Bacon's must-read collection provides insight into how mediated images influence and support this often-contentious idealization of the past, deeply impacting how communities view themselves and others.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readership levels.