New Books in Film

Rainbow Trap: Queer Lives, Classifications and the Dangers of Inclusion (Bloomsbury, 2025) by Dr. Kevin Guyan reveals how the fight for LGBTQ equalities in the UK is shaped – and constrained – by the classifications we encounter every day. Looking across six systems – the police and the recording of hate crimes; dating apps and digital desire; outness in the film and television industry; borders and LGBTQ asylum seekers; health and fitness activities; and DEI initiatives in the workplace – Rainbow Trap documents how inclusive interventions – such as new legislation, revamped diversity policies and tech fixes – have attempted to bring historically marginalized communities out of the shadows.Yet, as part of the bargain, LGBTQ people need to locate themselves in an ever-growing list of classifications, categories and labels to 'make sense' to the very systems they are seeking to access. This requirement to be classified catches LGBTQ communities in a rainbow trap. Because when we look beyond the welcoming veneer of inclusive interventions, we uncover sorting processes that determine what LGBTQ lives are valued and what queer futures are possible. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

It’s the UConn Popcast, and we analyze the movie Sinners, starring Michael B. Jordan, just released on streaming. We address the political themes of the movie, focusing on its generic identity as a Southern Gothic, the historical context in which the movie takes place, its engagement with ideas of utopia, community, freedom, and the siren songs that often lead communities down false roads in search of these goals. We appreciate the aesthetic achievement of the movie, which is perhaps Director Ryan Coogler and star Michael B. Jordan's best and most complete work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

American Gangster (2007) is Ridley Scott’s homage to The French Connection: it’s got the right cars, clothes, and colors and is based on another true story of an obsessed cop trying to take down a drug kingpin. The feature (or the bug, depending on how you look at it) is Denzel Washington in the title role. Is an actor so charismatic that everyone talks as if they are on a first-name basis with him actually a liability in a movie that wants to tell a story of a large-scale heroin dealer who, in the movie’s first scene, burns a man alive? Can an actor’s star power ever backfire? John McCarty’s Bullets Over Hollywood (Grand Central Publishing, 2005) traces the gangster film and explores the enduring appeal of the genre. Incredible bumper music by John Deley. 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 X and on Letterboxd–and email us any time at fifteenminutefilm@gmail.com with requests and recommendations. Also check out Dan Moran’s substack, Pages and Frames, where he writes about books and movies, as well as the many film-related interviews on The New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

Picturing Aura: A Visual Biography (MIT Press, 2025) by Dr. Jeremy Stolow is the first book of its kind: an extended historical, anthropological, and philosophical study of modern efforts to visualize the hidden radiant force encompassing the living body known as our aura. This rich, interdisciplinary study by Dr. Stolow chronicles the rise and global spread of modern instruments and techniques of picturing aura, from the late nineteenth century to the present day, exploring how its images are put to work in the diverse realms of psychical research, esotericism, art photography, popular culture, and the New Age alternative medical and spiritual marketplace.At their core, pictures of auras are boundary objects that operate simultaneously in multiple conceptual and practical realms, serving varying goals of making art, healing bodies, and exploring the cosmos. Drawing on extensive archival as well as field research, Stolow reconstructs a global history of this boundary-crossing enterprise through its evolving media technologies, markets, and cultural arenas. It is a story shaped through exchanges among professionals and amateurs, scientists and occultists, countercultural artists and entrepreneurs, metropolitans and hinterland figures. With more than 60 full-color illustrations, Picturing Aura brings to light a remarkable, entangled history of picture-making that challenges settled assumptions about religion, art, and science. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

From In Borneo, the Land of the Head-Hunters to The Epic of Everest to Camping Among the Indians, the early twentieth century was the heyday of expedition filmmaking. As new technologies transformed global transportation and opened new avenues for documentation, and as imperialism and capitalism expanded their reach, Western filmmakers embarked on journeys to places they saw as exotic, seeking to capture both the monumental and the mundane. Their films portrayed far-flung locales, the hardships of travel, and the day-to-day lives of Indigenous people through a deeply colonial lens. Nomadic Cinema: A Cultural Geography of the Expedition Film (Columbia University Press, 2025) by Dr. Alison Griffiths is a groundbreaking history of these films, analyzing them as visual records of colonialism that also offer new possibilities for recognizing Indigenous histories. Dr. Griffiths examines expedition films made in Borneo, Central Asia, Tibet, Polynesia, and the American Southwest, reinterpreting them from decolonial perspectives to provide alternative accounts of exploration. She considers the individuals and institutions—including the American Museum of Natural History—responsible for creating the films, the spectators who sought them out, and the Indigenous intermediaries whose roles white explorers minimized. Ambitious and interdisciplinary, Nomadic Cinema ranges widely, from the roots of expedition films in medieval cartography and travel writing to still-emerging technologies of virtual and augmented reality. Highlighting the material conditions of filmmaking and the environmental footprint left by exploration, this book recovers Indigenous memory and sovereignty from within long-buried sources. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

Los Angeles was a cinematic city long before the rise of Hollywood. By the dawn of the twentieth century, photography, painting, and tourist promotion in Southern California provided early filmmakers with a template for building a myth-making business and envisioning ideal moviegoers. These art forms positioned California as a land of transformative experiences and catapulted the dusty backwater town of Los Angeles to the largest city on the West Coast by 1915. Photography aided the Southern Pacific Railroad Company in opening the region to the rest of the nation. Painters gave traditions that were fading in Europe a new lease on life in the California sun, with signature colors and techniques that would be adopted by L.A. real estate companies, agribusiness, and health retreats. Tourism infused the iconography and signature styles of art with cultural mythology of the state’s colonial past, offering proto-cinematic experiences to those who ventured west. In Movie-Made Los Angeles (Wayne State University Press, 2023), John Trafton explores how Hollywood, an industry based on world-building, was the product of these art forms in the land of sunshine. A more complete story of the American film industry’s ascendency in Los Angeles emerges when one considers how the City of Angels cultivated its self-image through pre-cinema narrative art. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

The eighth installment in one of the most entertaining franchises ever made, The Final Reckoning is Tom Cruise’s Return of the King. Whether it suffers from too much exposition is a matter of taste (and debated by the hosts), but both agree that the movie does what only its star can do: deliver thrills that derive from both the plot and the knowledge that what they are seeing is, in some sense, real. Buster Keaton, Jackie Chan, and Tom Cruise all make themselves as much of a character in the films as the fictional people they are portraying, which puts the viewer in a strange and wonderful place. Tom Cruise has saved the world yet again, and may (as Steven Spielberg told him) have saved the industry. Want to read about the first film in the franchise? Renowned film editor Paul Hersch’s memoir, A Long Time Ago in a Cutting Room Far, Far Away: My Fifty Years Editing Hollywood Hits–Star Wars, Carrie, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Mission: Impossible, and More details his working with Brian DePalma on the first of the eight MI films. Incredible bumper music by John Deley. 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 X and on Letterboxd–and email us any time at fifteenminutefilm@gmail.com with requests and recommendations. Also check out Dan Moran’s substack, Pages and Frames, where he writes about books and movies, as well as the many film-related interviews on The New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

Botanical Imagination: Rethinking Plants in Modern Japan (Cornell University Press, 2025) explores the complicated legacy and enduring lure of plant life in modern Japanese literature and media. Using critical plant studies, Jon L. Pitt examines an unlikely group of writers and filmmakers in modern Japan, finding in their works a desire to "become botanical" in both content and form. For nearly one hundred years, a botanical imagination grew in response to moments of crisis in Japan's modern history. Pitt shows how artists were inspired to seek out botanical knowledge in order to construct new forms of subjectivity and attempt to resist certain forms of state violence. As he follows plants through the tangled histories of imperialism and state control, Pitt also uncovers the ways plants were used in the same violence that drove artists to turn to the botanical as a model of resistance in the first place. Botanical Imagination calls on us to rethink plants as significant but ambivalent actors and to turn to the botanical realm as a site of potentiality. This book is free for download through open access. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

Caper movies aren’t like others involving criminals: there’s an aesthetic to a caper that’s as important to the thieves as it is to the viewers. Heist is David Mamet’s 2001 caper film that stands as his Singin’ in the Rain—an apt comparison, since “caper” meant “to dance” long before it took on its criminal meaning. Join us for an appreciation of one of Gene Hackman’s best yet least-discussed performances and of Mamet’s highly unrealistic dialogue. (Yes, you read that correctly–and we love David Mamet.) David Mamet’s short book On Directing Film is a great companion to Heist. Incredible bumper music by John Deley. Please subscribe to the show and consider leaving us a rating or review. You can find our over three hundred episodes wherever you get your podcasts. Follow the show on X and on Letterboxd–and email us at fifteenminutefilm@gmail.com with requests and recommendations. Also check out Dan Moran’s substack, Pages and Frames, where he writes about books and movies, as well as the many film-related interviews on The New Books Network.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

Stalin's Final Films: Cinema, Socialist Realism, and Soviet Postwar Reality, 1945-1953 (Cornell UP, 2024) explores a neglected period in the history of Soviet cinema, breathing new life into a body of films long considered moribund as the pinnacle of Stalinism. While film censorship reached its apogee in this period and fewer films were made, film attendance also peaked as Soviet audiences voted with their seats and distinguished a clearly popular postwar cinema. Claire Knight examines the tensions between official ideology and audience engagement, and between education and entertainment, inherent in these popular films, as well as the financial considerations that shaped and constrained them. She explores how the Soviet regime used films to address the major challenges faced by the USSR after the Great Patriotic War (World War II), showing how war dramas, spy thrillers, Stalin epics, and rural comedies alike were mobilized to consolidate an official narrative of the war, reestablish Stalinist orthodoxy, and dramatize the rebuilding of socialist society. Yet, Knight also highlights how these same films were used by filmmakers more experimentally, exploring a diverse range of responses to the ideological crisis that lay at the heart of Soviet postwar culture, as a victorious people were denied the fruits of their sacrificial labor. After the war, new heroes were demanded by both the regime and Soviet audiences, and filmmakers sought to provide them, with at times surprising results. Stalin's Final Films mines Soviet cinema as an invaluable resource for understanding the unique character of postwar Stalinism and the cinema of the most repressive era in Soviet history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film