American Film’s Disappearing Lesbians
In the 1990s, lesbian characters were repeatedly transformed into "close friends" in film adaptions of LGBTQ-themed books.
The Magic Lantern Shows that Influenced Modern Horror
Eighteenth and early nineteenth century audiences were delighted and horrified by these spectral apparitions conjured in dark rooms.
My Summer of Watching Little Women
What the author learned from her mother, a feminist academic doing a research project on film adaptations of Little Women.
How Rotten Tomatoes Changed the Film Industry
In 2008, a panel of film critics gathered to talk about the future of film reviewing as a profession in the age of the internet.
Netflix Is A Questionable Historian
Brazilian social media is in an uproar about a recent Netflix show that portrays Brazilian political corruption. Can film and TV ever get history right?
Why We Still Love The Twilight Zone
Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone stood out in the "vast wasteland" of television in the early 1960s and still resonates today.
Black Panther and Double-Consciousness
Double identity, present in both Marvel's Black Panther and in the critical race theory of double-consciousness, enables black American viewers to see their two identities played out on screen.
The End of American Film Censorship
The Hays Code, a censorship system that saw movies as "business, pure and simple," kept Hollywood on a short leash... until a 1952 Supreme Court decision declared it unconstitutional.
Murphy Brown, Motherhood, and “Family Values”
Murphy Brown represented a threat to “family values”—a position that inherently placed her on the side of the families of color whose single family structures supposedly threatened the white, middle-class status quo of the 1990s.