Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism

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Another quick post, this time to announce the launch of Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism, a freely-accessible online relaunch of the seminal – but recently dormant – British film journal MOVIE, of whose editorial board I am extraordinarily proud to be a member. I am also very happy that Issue 1 features a piece by me (my first published peer-reviewed article, in fact!) – an essay on the concept of ‘quirky’ in American indie cinema. The journal will be published bi-annually, and will aim to continue MOVIE’s tradition of providing a forum for perceptive analyses of film and television grounded in close textual criticism.

Speaking personally, it is especially pleasing that the journal is being provided in an ‘open access’ format (rather than by paid subscription) since this ensures its availability not only to film scholars and students, but also to the interested general reader. One of MOVIE’s many great strengths – and something that always set it apart from most of its peers – was its commitment to remaining accessible to a non-academic readership even after the development of Film Studies as a discipline. Blogs and free journals now provide the opportunity for the resurrection of a critical terrain that sits somewhere between the poles of academia and journalism – an entirely necessary and desirable space that has for too long been too sparsely populated. It is to be hoped that Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism will be able to play a significant role within this new context, and will once again be valued for promoting a critical practice whose belief in the necessity of detailed textual evidence (not to mention rhetorical elegance) invariably makes it not only nuanced and revealing, but also eminently readable.

With that said – I hope you all enjoy Issue 1!
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