Scholarly, in-depth survey with insightful critiques of a fairly recent film genre.
Technology, good and bad, finds a home in movies.
Murray, a film professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, uses popular American movies to explore “social constructions of power and technology in both the present day and imagined futures.” She begins with Michael Crichton, one of the two “fathers” of the genre, and the director of Westworld (1973), “an iconic intervention into the technothriller.” The adaptation of his biological-threat thriller, The Andromeda Strain (1971), was made at a time of intense social and cultural turbulence; it was also a time when Americans were confronting an “existential dread heralded by new technologies.” The movie, with its strong-willed female scientist, is a seminal work for Murray, and she writes about it in detail. Her research is extensive, but it sometimes makes for a dry overview of the films she covers. Contrasting Crichton and the other “father” of the genre, Tom Clancy, Murray writes that Crichton engaged in uncertainty while Clancy embraced control. Clancy’s stories focused on the tools of war and fetishized advanced technology, as in the movie adaptation of his “iconic Cold War anxiety narrative,” The Hunt for Red October (1990). Murray smartly touches on issues of race and gender, noting that white characters in the novels are replaced by Black actors in some films. Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2014) blends elements of science fiction and technothriller to show that “people are ultimately the problem,” and Blade Runner (1982) and Alien (1979) also “create misanthropic visions of men and their innovations.” Movies that tackle artificial intelligence include everything from Terminator 2 (1991) to Tenet (2020). No one knows what the future of AI holds, but as Murray writes, “Technothrillers can be useful tools for learning to live with the existential uncertainty wrought by our innovations, navigating fear of the uncontrollable, contending with the fallout of techno-optimism, and negotiating our cloying American problems—together.”
Scholarly, in-depth survey with insightful critiques of a fairly recent film genre.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2026
ISBN: 9780262051019
Page Count: 296
Publisher: MIT Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.
A coffee-table book celebrates Michelle Obama’s sense of fashion.
Illustrated with hundreds of full-color photographs, Obama’s chatty latest book begins with some school portraits from the author’s childhood in Chicago and fond memories of back-to-school shopping at Sears, then jumps into the intricacies of clothing oneself as the spouse of a presidential candidate and as the first lady. “People looked forward to the outfits, and once I got their attention, they listened to what I had to say. This is the soft power of fashion,” she says. Obama is grateful and frank about all the help she got along the way, and the volume includes a long section written by her primary wardrobe stylist, Koop—28 years old when she first took the job—and shorter sections by makeup artists and several hair stylists, who worked with wigs and hair extensions as Obama transitioned back to her natural hair, and grew out her bangs, at the end of her husband’s second term. Many of the designers of the author’s gowns, notably Jason Wu, who designed several of her more striking outfits, also contribute appreciative memories. Besides candid and more formal photographs, the volume features many sketches of her gowns by their designers, closeups on details of those gowns, and magazine covers from Better Homes & Gardens to Vogue. The author writes that as a Black woman, “I was under a particularly white-hot glare, constantly appraised for whether my outfits were ‘acceptable’ and ‘appropriate,’ the color of my skin somehow inviting even more judgment than the color of my dresses.” Overall, though, this is generally a canny, upbeat volume, with little in the way of surprising revelations.
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593800706
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
SEEN & HEARD
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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