Psychological resilience is crucial during prolonged instability, allowing individuals to adapt to change demands, manage intense stress, and maintain mental health. Engagement with horror media and morbid curiosity may be associated with resilience through simulated threat exposure, evidence remains limited in populations experiencing chronic crises. This study aims to examine the associations between horror-related film engagement, trait morbid curiosity, and psychological resilience among Lebanese university students living amid ongoing socio-economic and political instability. A cross-sectional study was conducted among 235 university students in Lebanon using a self-administered online survey. Measures included film genre preferences, the Pandemic Psychological Resilience Scale (PPRS), and the Morbid Curiosity Scale (MCS). Descriptive statistics and Pearson correlation analyses were performed. Participants demonstrated moderate to high psychological resilience (mean = 4.26 ± 0.81) alongside notable emotional distress. Morbid curiosity levels were moderate (mean = 3.42 ± 1.25) and were significantly associated with preferences for darker film genres, particularly crime (r = 0.539), horror (r = 0.524), and psychological thriller (r = 0.507) (p < 0.001). However, no significant association was found between psychological resilience and horror media engagement or morbid curiosity. A weak negative association was observed between preference for alien-invasion films and resilience (r = - 0.177, p = 0.006). While morbid curiosity is strongly linked to engagement with threat-related media, it does not appear to translate into increased psychological resilience in a chronic multi-crisis context. These findings highlight the importance of contextual factors in shaping adaptive psychological mechanisms.

ABSTRACT This essay looks at Douglas Sirk’s film A Time to Love and a Time to Die (1958), an adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s novel Zeit zu leben und Zeit zu sterben (1954), in which the intermedial translation from literature to film comes along with an intercultural connection between the USA and the German-speaking part of Europe in terms of diegesis, biography, reception history, and production history. On the level of production, Sirk and Remarque’s different contributions to the making of the film are examined in light of the various concepts of cinematic authorship. While Sirk hybridized the genres of war film and melodrama, which he also employed in the rest of his oeuvre, Remarque not only wrote the underlying novel, but also contributed to the script and even played an important supporting role himself – a very rare occurrence in the history of cinematic adaptations of literary works.

This article considers the history of Tamil action films from the point of the burgeoning special effects with the advent of digital artifacts in the 21st century. Focusing on Tamil cinema director Pa Ranjith’s Sarpatta Parambarai (2021), the article explores how this “sports action boxing film” resorts to various kinds of digital compositing techniques to mount a Dalit mise en scene set in the 1970s North Chennai during a period of authoritarianism imposed by the nation-state under the guise of “Emergency” in 1975. Far from a narrative of victimization, the film offers a “digitopia” rehearsed through carefully choreographed series of boxing matches, which ties Pa Ranjith’s film to Muhammad Ali and the globally circulating genre of boxing films.

ABSTRACT This paper critically analyses the cultural rise of entertainment company A24 in the 2010s and 2020s. We argue that by being positioned as a fringe contender to Hollywood’s cultural hegemony, A24 acquired a label of alternative prestige that attracted cinephilic audiences and award ceremony voters. We argue that the commodification of taste as its “brand aura” was key in A24’s commercial success and cultural saliency. By distributing or producing genre cinema, working with non-US directors and new indie voices, A24 became the flag bearer of “indie” cinema in the post-“Sundance Miramax era.” A24 was born and bred in the age of social media, and their brand aura draws from and is incorporated into online meme cultures through user-generated material and the many paratexts (digital and analogue) released by the company.

This article uses British drama film No Place for Jennifer (1950) to argue for the evidential value of staged content of real psychotherapeutic places (Institute of Child Psychology) and practices (Margaret Lowenfeld's World Technique). In the absence of 'real' documentary footage, discoveries of recreated therapeutic spaces within largely forgotten genre films can help reconstruct histories of the 'psy' sciences whilst offering insight into the contestations specific sites and practices provoked. Employing Baron's reformulation from 'documentary' to 'archival document', it demonstrates that content extracted from previously disregarded films can fill archival lacunas whilst expanding both 'what can be said' about the past and how it can be said.

Yugoslav films – like those from other socialist countries – entered China through cultural diplomacy during the ‘Seventeen Years’ period (1949–1966), reflecting shared ideological commitments. Drawing on archival sources, exhibition records, and genre analysis, the study reconstructs the historical trajectory of Yugoslav films in China and examines how Walter Defends Sarajevo achieved exceptional resonance upon its public release in 1977. It further analyzes patterns of reception and the socio-political conditions of the film’s success, and demonstrates how its spy-action template – together with its star persona and urban modernity – reshaped the spy film genre in China.

The use of movies in second language (L2) learning has gained increasing attention as a dynamic, authentic, and engaging instructional approach. This study investigates the impact of film-based learning on listening comprehension, vocabulary acquisition, and cultural understanding among intermediate-level English learners. Sixty participants were divided into an experimental group, which watched English-language films with subtitles accompanied by structured pre- and post-viewing activities, and a control group, which followed a traditional textbook-based curriculum. Pre- and post-tests measured improvements across the three skill areas. Results indicated that the experimental group demonstrated significant gains in listening comprehension (18.2% increase), vocabulary acquisition (22.2% increase), and cultural understanding (15.3% increase), while the control group showed minimal improvements. These findings suggest that films provide rich audiovisual input, authentic dialogues, and culturally relevant contexts that enhance language learning beyond conventional methods. Furthermore, movie-based learning increased learner motivation and engagement, promoting a more immersive and interactive educational experience. This study highlights the pedagogical value of integrating films into L2 curricula and emphasizes the importance of structured guidance, careful film selection, and supplementary exercises to maximize learning outcomes. Future research should explore long-term retention and the effects of different film genres and subtitle strategies on language acquisition.

Over the last 30 years, the diversity of male representation in heist films has exploded, encompassing racial diversity, class distinctions, and the binary choice of being a willing participant or coerced in their respective heists. However, women’s representation in heist films remains limited, with a growing gap in representation, especially for Black women within these narratives. Currently, scholars have not yet adequately theorized or engaged with the significance of Black women's representations in the heist film genre. To address this literature gap, this paper critically analyzes representation in heist films that center on Black women like Jackie Brown (Tarantino 1997) and Widows (McQueen 2018). Two major theoretical perspectives inform this filmic analysis. The first is Julian Hanich’s critical study of heist film conventions. Hanich examines key themes of the heist genre, including freedom, social mobility, and spatial access, along with exclusion. Employing Hanich’s scholarship as a framework, my paper reveals that Black women characters transform thematic meanings of the heist film as Hanich’s scholarship starts and ends with male-centric narratives. The second is Katherine McKittrick’s work on Black women and social geography. Considering the geographic nature of the heist film, McKittrick’s study of Black women’s geography—which she defines as the interplay of domination and concealment underscored by the social production of space— illuminates Hanich’s thematic examination of the genre. By using both Hanich’s and McKittrick’s framework, this article focuses on how heist films that center Black women operate as filmic examples of Black women’s geography as these characters transgress the most social boundaries like racialize doubt, get shown more of their characterization to better identify with them, and have an innate knowledge of their social geography by utilizing public space.

Introduction: Disaster films are a popular form of entertainment. Large-scale pandemics, climate-related disasters, technological and man-made disasters, and comets on intersecting paths with Earth are popular topics in this film genre. But what roles do (or can) disaster films play in an all-of-society approach to disaster risk reduction (DRR)? Methods: Disaster films were chosen through a systematic search on Rotten Tomatoes, IMDb, and ChatGPT. After screening 111 trailers, 32 films were obtained from streaming networks and online purchases. The inclusion criteria for screening the films included a focus on realistic disasters, examples of resilience and vulnerability, and representation of high-risk populations. A team of reviewers screened the trailers and conducted content and thematic analysis for each included film. Results: Preliminary analysis highlighted how disaster films can support an all-of-society approach to disaster preparedness, response, and recovery through examples of resilience, information to enhance awareness, and modeling attitudes and actions underpinned by social justice. Mis/disinformation, confusing messaging, and industry-specific language are important considerations for population health and accurate risk communication through film. Conclusion: Disaster films represent unique opportunities for public education to promote resilience and enhance DRR. This presentation will highlight how disaster entertainment can be integrated into an all-of-society approach to support DRR, emphasizing important considerations for disaster risk messaging and inclusive practice.

This study assesses whether the mainstreaming hypothesis, derived from cultivation frameworks developed during the mass audience era, remains operative in a digital media environment characterized by fragmenting media and cultural taste publics. In particular, we consider evolving conceptions of mainstreaming that stimulated our research questions and hypotheses in four surveys conducted from 2015 to 2024. We broaden our view of media to see if entertainment content—especially film genres—can provide common ground in attracting people with little else in common. Results suggest that such “cultural mainstreaming” may occur by providing common gratifications and impact global indictors of our lives—happiness, community attachment, feelings about our quality of life, and perceived cosmopoliteness. But the results are limited to a general adult population, not the younger students studied. The findings apply only to the general adult population and not to the younger student sample examined. Overall, the results indicate that the cultivation effect is relatively weak; the small number of significant relationships observed does not appear to exceed what might be expected by chance. Taken together, these findings suggest that mainstreaming and media influence operate as more complex processes in the digital era.

According to film scholar Laura Rascaroli, the essay film genre holds the potential to explore framing, mobility and self-reflection, offering new critical insights in a variety of fields (Rascaroli 2017). From the field of architecture, Penelope Haralambidou suggests that the architectural essay film, a subgenre of the essay film, is helpful to think about the historical and social aspects of architecture and spatial thinking (Haralambidou 2015). The Window and I (2015) is a filmic exploration of three sets of windows, an essayistic self-portrait that explores framing, mobility and self-reflection as a critical spatial practice, following the practice and work of architectural theorist Jane Rendell (2006), coining the term fenestral essay film.

The study examines how the discourse of an era relates to wider systems of power and how it is intersected through the narrative genre of film. The key concern of the paper is the examination of forces within and through which people conduct and participate in the construction of power relations. American film maker John Sayles explores the intricate web of power dynamics in his films, revealing how social, economic, and cultural factors construct individual and collective experiences. This paper attempts to read how the institutional power structures such as corporations, governments, and the military, maintain control and exploit marginalized communities in the select films. The study also looks into how the characters are portrayed, navigating hierarchies, challenging dominant narratives, and resisting oppressive systems.

This article aims to investigate accounts of the now-demolished Kowloon Walled City (1898–1994) through a Marxist retrospective, approaching the phenomenon of statelessness as represented in its posthumous digitised life through films, video games and other forms of immersive or interactive media, tracing a lineage of postcoloniality through a critique of hauntology and affect. Tracing the question of Walled City’s history within debates of statelessness, the article intends to prescribe a dialectical and spatial reading of capitalist neglect, juridic-political abandonment within the aesthetics of gaming, genre film and contemporary exhibitions on site and in greater Hong Kong. It provides a critical retrospective on Derrida’s anti-Marxist approach to hauntology and the condition of postmodern capitalist malaise as per Spectres of Marx. Furthermore, it asserts that digitised reconstructions of the historic Walled City remain in the popular ‘dystopian’ oeuvre through its repeated intimate re-exploration, re-screenings of popular periodic genre films, and the persisting nature of interrogating, macabre curiosity on the part of the consumer class. Derrida’s hauntology, while an evocative means for literary, textual or visual analysis, ultimately risks crucial detachment from material and historical contradictions, spiritualising class antagonisms as something of a stand-in for more concrete, structurally-informed Marxist critique, which asserts that the driving force of history is not the ghostly or spectral but, rather, a fetish.

The article is devoted to a comprehensive analysis of Stanislav Govorukhin's film "The Voroshilov Sharpshooter" (1999). Considering the director's work in the context of the dramatic evolution of Russian society at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries, the author highlights the key role of this film in the process of national-cultural self-determination in the post-Soviet era. The study examines the phenomenon of institutional collapse in the 1990s, which gave rise to a state of anomie and a vacuum of values. Based on a detailed analysis of the narrative structure, the semiotics of the characters, and the visual decisions of the film, the model of identity proposed by Stanislav Govorukhin is reconstructed. The figure of the main character, played by Mikhail Ulyanov, occupies a central place in the analysis, interpreted as a carrier of the sacred code of the Great Victory and the archaic ethos of honor, entering into an irreconcilable conflict with the new cynical order of the "others." Special attention is paid to the analysis of the intertextual function of the film's title, the semiotics of weapons, and the spatial opposition of "us versus them." The author considers the act of self-justice as a political-philosophical gesture of claiming sovereignty in conditions where the state has renounced its protective functions, as well as a mechanism for consolidating the community of "us" around ritualized violence, which in this configuration acquires a quasi-sacred character and the function of restoring a violated norm. The central argument of the article is that the conceptual simplicity and binary nature of the artistic world of "The Voroshilov Sharpshooter" form the foundation on which the film builds its therapeutic function and gains the status of a manifesto in mass consciousness. It is concluded that "The Voroshilov Sharpshooter" represents not just genre cinema but a profound social diagnosis of the era and a key text for understanding the processes of forming the cultural code of Russia in a pivotal historical period.

The article analyzes contemporary body horror cinema from 2014 to 2025 as a medium of gnostic knowledge. The subject of the study is the aesthetics of bodily otherness and transgression as mechanisms for the formation of female subjectivity. The research corpus comprises nine films organized into three thematic clusters: motherhood and bodily boundaries (The Babadook, Ich seh Ich seh, Prevenge), the doppelg&amp;#228;nger and the dissolution of identity (Raw, Titane, The Substance), and simulation and nomos (Border, The Ugly Stepsister, Gretel &amp; Hansel). The study examines how the visual and narrative strategies of contemporary body horror translate bodily transgression into an affect of recognition — the unveiling of the social order's falsity — how the shift from the "victim-body" to the "knowledge-bearing body" is accomplished, and what new modalities of female action emerge in the transition from the Final Girl of classic slasher cinema to the post-Final Girl of contemporary body horror. The study employs a triaxial methodology synthesizing gnostic hermeneutics as its central analytical framework with psychoanalytic theory (Lacan, Kristeva, &amp;#381;i&amp;#382;ek) and feminist horror theory (Creed, Clover, Williams). The scientific novelty lies in the first systematic application of gnostic hermeneutics to the analysis of body horror. The study proposes a model of the "gnostic body" that describes the structural relations between body, knowledge, and subjectivity in contemporary genre cinema. Three states of female gnosis are identified — refusal, authorship, and bodily pleroma — alongside a fourth position: false gnosis, defined as recognition that fails to produce liberation. The concept of the post-Final Girl is introduced to describe a heroine whose agency is grounded not in overcoming an external threat but in integrating bodily otherness. The study demonstrates that body horror occupies a liminal position between postmodernist and metamodernist modes: it deconstructs nomos while simultaneously proposing alternative mythologemes — pleroma, Sophia, gnostic awakening — as a horizon rather than nostalgia. The findings situate body horror within the broader context of gnostic visual culture in the twenty-first century and extend Barbara Creed's concept of the monstrous-feminine as applied to contemporary genre cinema.

Comedy films engage with social reality through humorous narration.Their characters not only embody historical experience and reflect social structures, but also perform important functions of emotional regulation and psychological consolation during viewing.According to data from Maoyan, the total box office of the Chinese film market reached RMB 42.502 billion in 2024, with comedy films contributing nearly RMB 20 billion, indicating that comedic characters play a crucial role in achieving commercial success.Despite this prominence, systematic reviews of research on comedy film characters remain limited.To address this gap, this study draws on core Chinese-language scholarship indexed in CNKI Peking University Core Journals and CSSCI from 1996 to 2025.An initial keyword-based search identified 213 publications, of which 163 high-quality articles were retained after applying inclusion criteria.Using CiteSpace for bibliometric analysis, the study identifies core authors (e.g., Chen Xuguang and Rao Shuguang), core institutions (Beijing Film Academy and Film Art), and leading journals in the field (such as Film Literature and Contemporary Film).Further analysis reveals three developmental stages in comedy film character research, with an overall shift from micro-level examinations of individual characters' external comedic traits toward macro-level critiques situated within industrial and social contexts.By correlating these findings with top-grossing comedy films and their leading characters from the same periods, the study delineates three phases of character representation in mainland Chinese comedy films: Diverse Professional Survival Portrayals (1996Portrayals ( -2007)), Elite-Grassroots Binary Narratives (2008-2016), and Deep Exploration of Social Issues (2017-2025).Overall, grounded in systematic data-driven methods, this study demonstrates a three-stage evolutionary trajectory in comedy film character research, characterized by a focus on renowned actors or directors, genre films, and production companies, and social issues.The findings indicate an increasing tendency toward diversity and realism in the construction of comedic characters, providing quantitative evidence and theoretical reference for future academic research and creative practice.

With the advancement of the internet, online film reviews have emerged as a significant platform for audiences to share their viewing experiences. This study, leveraging short review data from Douban movies, proposes a film genre prediction method that integrates text sentiment analysis and high-frequency word matching. By scraping short reviews from Douban's Top 250 films and utilizing Python's jieba package for word segmentation, high-frequency terms were extracted and matched with genres using a constructed sentiment dictionary. Experimental results demonstrate that this approach effectively identifies mainstream genres such as drama and romance, though its performance in detecting niche genres requires further enhancement. The key innovation lies in directly extracting genre-related features from audience reviews and improving keyword recognition accuracy through sentiment analysis. While the method proves effective to a certain extent in predicting film genres, there remains room for improvement in both accuracy and generalizability. This study not only introduces a novel technical framework for film genre analysis but also provides empirical insights into the relationship between audience genre preferences and emotional responses. Future research could explore the integration of deep learning models to further enhance the precision and robustness of genre prediction.

This article examines the evolution of disclaimer statements in Hollywood films from 1930 to 2018, with particular focus on the historical film, tracing their use as both specialised legal precautions and routine paratextual elements. Through an analysis of 386 films, using both random and purposive sampling methods, the study traces the emergence of disclaimer statements in 1936, following a lawsuit against Rasputin and the Empress (1932), and their subsequent spread across a wide range of film genres. The article reveals that while disclaimers were initially developed to address the specific legal risks entailed by historical representation, they quickly became more common in works of fiction than in historical films. Disclaimer statements in historical films have risen in use since the 1990s, but in many cases they lay claim to authenticity while also asserting their status as fiction. This contradiction reveals broader tensions in how Hollywood producers manage the boundary between fact and fiction. The article argues that disclaimer statements function not merely as legal instruments but as cultural artefacts. As such, they illuminate changing attitudes towards historical representation and reflect fundamental shifts in how the American film industry has negotiated the tension between creative expression, audience expectation and legal liability.

During the last two decades, the growth in popularity of so-called ‘wild’ or open-water swimming has coincided with, and been promoted via, the parallel emergence of user-generated content platforms such as YouTube and Vimeo. Parallel developments in accessible and more portable digital filmmaking technologies have both enabled this emergence and encouraged new aesthetic possibilities for representing these activities. While some academic attention has focused on the potential for the ‘first-person’ perspective of the GoPro to represent distinctive forms of ‘embodied’ and ‘immersive’ swimming experience, less attention has been given to the various other means employed by such films, which in most cases relate to more ‘classical’ techniques of film – and sound editing. Adopting an approach rooted in film-textual analysis methods, and with a focus on several non-fiction films – including Waterlog (2018), Waterlog: A Swimmer’s Journey from City to Sea (2019), Lido (1995) and The Ponds (2019) – this article looks to establish a ‘poetics’ of what in effect constitutes a new genre of film, arguing for a more varied set of filmic approaches in terms of conveying swimming’s subjective and embodied states.

This study takes patriarchal film works as the core analysis framework, and compares the presentation of three different film forms of documentaries, feature films and animations in gender issues, and focuses on how the image of women and its power structure is constructed through different narrative strategies and aesthetic mechanisms. As a documentary, One Child Nation reveals how national policies penetrate into the family and individual levels through oral history and real images, has a long-term and systematic impact on women's reproductive rights, physical autonomy and emotional experience, and presents the specific operation of the patriarchal structure at the level of system. Raise the Red Lantern takes the closed family space as the core of the narrative. Through the ritualized daily order, hierarchy and the competitive relationship between women, it meticulously shows the psychological process of women being disciplined, internalized and self-consumed in the patriarchal family system. It emphasizes that patriarchy does not only rely on violence to maintain, but also through symbols, rules and emotional control are continued. And Mulan, as an animated work for popular culture, forms tension between traditional gender norms and modern "empowerment" narratives. Although the female image in the film gains action by crossing gender boundaries into the male-dominated public domain, its subject sex is still closely bound to obedience, sacrifice and loyalty to the family and country, reflecting the compromise and limitations of the animation genre when challenging the patriarchal structure. The study further pointed out that the film is not only a tool to reproduce male gaze and patriarchal ideology. It also has the potential to reflect, question and even loosen the gender power structure. Whether the gender narrative can move towards a richer, rigorous and critical direction in the future depends on the diversity of the creative subject. And the real participation of different genders, cultures and social experiences in film production.