Film Industry Archives - Public Seminar

Film

Good Versions of the Right Film

2025’s summer blockbusters are, like those before them, oversized ploys for maximum profit. They’re still not big enough for Hollywood.

November 5, 2025 • by Amelia Nonemacher

At any point this summer, you could take refuge from the heat in one of the nation’s chain movie theaters and enjoy a good old summer blockbuster. Whether you chose to watch the “most authentic” racing movie ever made (F1); a heroic tale of human kindness triumphing over tech moguls-turned-arms-dealers ...

Film & Performing Arts

Netflix Revives the Genre of the “Blaxploitation” Film to Attract Black Subscribers

They Cloned Tyrone tries to turn the colonization of Black Americans into a LOL comedy

December 18, 2023 • by Zenzelé Soa-Clarke

As a genre, Blaxploitation films were often morally ambiguous: though made for and by Black filmmakers and audiences, and sometimes depicting a kind of dead-end domestic colonialism, the films often normalized misogynistic treatment of Black women and uncritical ideals of Black capitalism....

Netflix Revives the Genre of the “Blaxploitation” Film to Attract Black Subscribers

Multi Media

The Controversy over “Cuties”

Past Present Podcast, Episode 247

September 23, 2020 • by Nicole Hemmer, Natalia Mehlman Petrzela and Neil J. Young

Here are some links and references mentioned during this week’s show: Cuties, a French independent film released in the United States has inspired opposition. Niki referred to the connection between the critics’ fear of perversion and the current furor over pedophilia among some on the Right, discussed in Rolling Stone. In our ...

Feature

How Disney has Turned the Film Industry Into a Small World, After All

Does the beloved children’s entertainer have an antitrust problem?

August 12, 2019 • by Jake Pitre

In July 2019, Buzzfeed News ran an article with the headline, “Disney Won. Now What?” It’s a worthwhile question in the aftermath of the company’s purchase of 20th Century Fox from Richard Murdoch. The purchase of Fox is the largest in a long line of high-profile acquisitions by Disney that ...