Christina Newland - She Found It at the Movies: Women Writers on Sex, Desire and Cinema

For anyone who thinks sexy feminism is an oxymoron, this collection will lay that hoary assumption to rest. The different entries by a wildly diverse group of women positively shimmer with hormonal palpitations and startle with acute judgments.

Molly Haskell (Film critic, author: From Reverence to Rape: the Treatment of Women in the Movies)

Gives film criticism the vitamin-boost it needed, a female gaze bringing eroticism, sensuality and a new subversive intimacy to the critical act; the book celebrates not just desire but pleasure. Each of these essays is a seduction, leading you astray to the great seduction of the movies themselves.

Peter Bradshaw (Film critic, The Guardian)

A lush, incisive essay collection that brings together a diverse group of voices; an empathetic and potent take on female desire. For anyone interested in the ways women look at the world, these essays offer the female gaze in her most playful and intellectually curious form. The essays probe the multi-faceted nature of female desire, revealing the ways it intersects with race, gender identity, and agethey are celebratory and wrenching in equal measure. Its a timely exploration about womens passions: how theyre formed, how theyre felt, how theyre curtailed. Readers will not only find themselves in these pages but be challenged to consider female desire in more complex ways.

Angelica Jade Bastin (Vulture)

Collapses the space between screen and body and foregrounds the reality of our very complex and always present bodies. While that space has long been dominated by so-called objectivity and clinical analysis, this collection dives into uncharted waters to explore, creating space for discussing desire instead of repressing it.

Kiva Reardon (Toronto International Film Festival)

At its best, a book of fiercely original writing and thinking, not only about cinema, but about ourselves.

Mark Cousins (Writer and filmmaker, The Story of Film)

Celebrates women writers basking in the joy and power of filmsto feel them as much as see them. It is jolting reminder that if you see a certain film at a certain time in your life, it can change your worldview.

Cari Beauchamp (Film historian, author: Without Lying Down and My First Time in Hollywood)

Part confessional, part soapboxthis collection shares and glories in the secret heat of womens cinematic gaze. These tales of sexual awakenings and reorientations explore the appeal of stars as varied as Steve McQueen, Julie Andrews, Jada Pinkett-Smith and Timothe Chalametand assert the agency of the female and nonbinary viewer, the person who is supposed to be looked at, rather than looking. In an era when womens voices and roles in movie making are still squeezed into the margins, this chorus is more than welcome, its essential.

Joanna Scutts (Literary critic, social historian, author: The Extra Woman)

Rich, energising, teeming with theory, wit and feeling on a subject both essential and under-explored in film studies: how female viewers desire is sparked and nourished by a cinema that rarely shares their gaze. A diverse, beautifully integrated ensemble of female critical voices, each one probing the projects core theme from a slightly different angle, covering youthful screen crushes and more mature reckonings with the conflict between cinematic and real-life sexuality. To read this book is to feel intense, intimate recognition of shared swoons, and also to see cinema and its icons through anothers eyes: youll emerge from this wildly entertaining, tactile enquiry with renewed appreciation for the ways in which the camera makes us look, and occasionally winks back at us.

Guy Lodge (Film critic, Variety)