Links
Associations & Organisations
-
Screen Directors Guild of Ireland
“Established in 2000, the Screen Directors Guild of Ireland (SDGI) is the representative body for directors involved in the Irish and international audiovisual industry. These include directors of feature films, fiction, animation documentary, television drama, short films, video art and commericals.”
-
Masters of Cinema
Serious, erudite in the best sense possible. Covers art house DVD releases across all DVD regions. Great for making your mouth water over DVD’s you don’t have but would die for.
-
Fab Press
UK publishing house run and operated by the indefatigable Harvey Fenton. Genre material done with passion, style, and intelligence.
-
Oddity Cinema
As the title suggests, Oddity Cinema is a webzine which tackles the weird and the wonderful in bite-sized morsels of critical commentary, capsule reviews, interviews, trailers, plugs for upcoming releases, etc. What sets it apart from most online review sites is its interactivity, with readers able to add their own comments to reviews. The design is colorful and attractive, yet remains functional and easy to navigate.
-
Fangoria
Website that both promotes and adds material to the long running horror magazine.
View all Associations & Organisations →
Blogs
-
The Artifice
Slick, likeable, readable online journal that covers a wide range of entertainment areas, including Film, TV, animation, Games, Arts, Literature, and Art.
-
Senses of Cinema
Huge, very well supported film journal that is perhaps the best of its kind. Each new issue has enough material to keep you reading for hours.
-
DVD Beaver
A website specializing in DVD quality control. The place to go if deliberating between competing DVD issues of a film. You’‘ll get the technical comparison, complete with bit rate compression, film stills, and commentary.
-
Vertigo
Vertigo is an international film magazine covering the best of independent and experimental film. This is the recently added online version of its hard copy magazine of the same name, which has been documenting global screen culture since 1993.
-
Screening the Past
One of the few refereed online film journals.
By Way of Montreal
-
Ingmar Bergman Face to Face
English version of the award winning Swedish website on Ingmar Bergman, launched on May 22, 2006. An excellent reference site for works by and about Bergman.
-
Panorama-cinema
A Quebec based French language webzine with impeccable taste and an astute critical sense. Their individual film reviews may not be exceptionally long but treat each word as a precious commodity in distilling the necessary elements of the film. The zine has spread out to include interviews, podcasts, and has recently emerged as a publisher, thus far with two books under its wing: their first L’Humanisme D’Après-Guerre Japonaise (Humanism in Post-War Japan) and the second Vies & Morts du Giallo (Lives and Deaths of the Giallo). I have looked at the latter and am impressed with its scope and scholarship. It is an important contribution to the critical literature on the giallo.
-
Digitalarti
Your one-stop online source for everything digital art. Portal to events across Canada and Europe, live performances, lectures, and online journal dedicated to digital art available as a free pdf journal. Latest issue (Mag. No. 5) includes an interesting essay on the permutations of meanings on the internet. What is most important. What people read? How they read? Where the information is saved? How it is transmitted? Where are all these servers served? What is the environmental footprint of these ‘data centers’? You’ll be surprised.
-
Ubuweb
A wholly independent, wonderful resource on the avant-garde, poetry (in all its forms) and, to quote Ubuweb, “outsider arts.” Includes many sounds, music, books, essays, poems, interviews, radio spots, and critical works that have been salvaged from obscurity, or at least made readily available through their website.
-
Film-Philosophy
Film academia meets the web. The most extensive free online archive of book reviews and theoretical essays.
DVD Review Sites
-
Shocks to the System
Excellent blog by writer Jon Towlsen that specializes in horror films that can be considered subversive in their approach to genre norms of style, formal approach, theme or social consciousness. The blog is an extension of a book on the subject of ‘Subversive Cinema’ which is slated for publication from McFarland press in 2013. Chapter descriptions for the book are available on the blog.
-
Who’s Who of Victorian Cinema
Excellent website dedicated to pre-cinema and early cinema. The site is based on a book entitled Who’s Who of Victorian Cinema edited by Stephen Herbert and Luke McKernan, which can be purchased through the website.
-
British Film Institute
Excellent and in-depth site from the venerable British Film Institute. Highlights include the series “BFI Archive Interactive” which includes excellent interactive studies on British cinema. A recent one was Paul Merton on Early British Comedy.
-
The Artifice
Slick, likeable, readable online journal that covers a wide range of entertainment areas, including Film, TV, animation, Games, Arts, Literature, and Art.
-
Intute
Intute is a free UK-based online resource which acts as a massive storage for the every increasing area on reputable online journals/essays in every conceivable area. Its main target are UK students, lecturers and researchers in higher academics, but obviously anyone seeking research in their particular area will benefit from Intute.
Filmmakers
-
Screen Directors Guild of Ireland
“Established in 2000, the Screen Directors Guild of Ireland (SDGI) is the representative body for directors involved in the Irish and international audiovisual industry. These include directors of feature films, fiction, animation documentary, television drama, short films, video art and commericals.”
-
Paracinema
Edited by Christine Makepeace, Paracinema is the online organ of the magazine that is made for, to paraphrase its tagline, “People who love genre movies.” Although many of the back issues (since 2007) are unfortunately sold out, the online presence fills in the space in-between new issues with exclusive editorials, links, festival reports, etc. Taking its name from the term coined by media theorist Jeffrey Sconce (which itself owes a debt to Michael J. Weldon’s ‘psychotronic cinema’), Paracinema prides itself in its writing, which is the right blend of serious, scholarly (without the leaden jargon), well-written, personal, and fun
-
Digitalarti
Your one-stop online source for everything digital art. Portal to events across Canada and Europe, live performances, lectures, and online journal dedicated to digital art available as a free pdf journal. Latest issue (Mag. No. 5) includes an interesting essay on the permutations of meanings on the internet. What is most important. What people read? How they read? Where the information is saved? How it is transmitted? Where are all these servers served? What is the environmental footprint of these ‘data centers’? You’ll be surprised.
-
Senses of Cinema
Huge, very well supported film journal that is perhaps the best of its kind. Each new issue has enough material to keep you reading for hours.
-
Cine Outside
Well organized site that focuses on recent new release reviews but also features longer think pieces on broader cinema related issues.
Journalism and Criticism
-
Screening the Past
One of the few refereed online film journals.
-
Film-Philosophy
Film academia meets the web. The most extensive free online archive of book reviews and theoretical essays.
-
Cineroute
A gateway into the National Film Board of Canada’s vast film collection.
-
The National Film and Sound Archive of Australia
Website for Australian government’s archival mission of preserving its audio-visual history.
-
Infliction Film
Website where you can get information on films made or produced by Mitch Davis, who also programs for Fantasia, and the Cinema du Parc theatre. Great links page.
View all Journalism and Criticism →
Publishers, Labels, and Retailers
-
Montreal Serai
A politically engaged cultural magazine that has a growing online presence (over 2000 subscribers). Montreal Serai rightly prides itself on the ethnic and cultural diversity of its writers and subjects. The webzine covers all the arts, both big and small (from cinema to poetry) with equal dedication.
-
Bright Lights Film Journal
Once a print magazine, now an intelligent journal of film criticism. Equally compelling with popular film and the more esoteric. Manages to nicely blend a scholarly yet readable approach to a variety of subjects ranging in equal measure from the horror genre to experimental cinema.
-
Oddity Cinema
As the title suggests, Oddity Cinema is a webzine which tackles the weird and the wonderful in bite-sized morsels of critical commentary, capsule reviews, interviews, trailers, plugs for upcoming releases, etc. What sets it apart from most online review sites is its interactivity, with readers able to add their own comments to reviews. The design is colorful and attractive, yet remains functional and easy to navigate.
-
Giallo Fever
Keith Brown’s excellent analysis of the Italian giallo. Entries are normally on a singular film, but reference previous entries and are part of a broader aesthetic and stylistic understanding of the giallo (Brown is a PhD student and I imagine his thesis is on the giallo).
-
The Artifice
Slick, likeable, readable online journal that covers a wide range of entertainment areas, including Film, TV, animation, Games, Arts, Literature, and Art.
View all Publishers, Labels, and Retailers →
Theory, History, and Analysis
-
Paracinema
Edited by Christine Makepeace, Paracinema is the online organ of the magazine that is made for, to paraphrase its tagline, “People who love genre movies.” Although many of the back issues (since 2007) are unfortunately sold out, the online presence fills in the space in-between new issues with exclusive editorials, links, festival reports, etc. Taking its name from the term coined by media theorist Jeffrey Sconce (which itself owes a debt to Michael J. Weldon’s ‘psychotronic cinema’), Paracinema prides itself in its writing, which is the right blend of serious, scholarly (without the leaden jargon), well-written, personal, and fun
-
The Glorious and The Grotesque: Horror Cinema of the 70s and 80s
The first of what we hope to be many websites sponsored by Offscreen. This one looks at the social, political, aesthetic and cultural aspects of one of the high points of American horror, the horror films of the 1970s and 1980s. Included are the many contemporary remakes of this by now classic horror films.
-
Cult Epics
Independent DVD label which specializes in esoteric arthouse, erotica, and horror cinema. Their releases are always a labor of love with care, commitment, and excellent supplementary material.
-
Fangoria
Website that both promotes and adds material to the long running horror magazine.
-
European Films.net
Privately run website aimed at promoting European cinema. Covers films that are in-production and recently released across the world. Good source of production credit information with an extensive archive of film reviews.
