Film Directors and Film Aesthetics 

“Dance By Candlelight: Extinguishing the Everyday in Waterloo Bridge,” in Mervyn LeRoy Comes to Town, eds. Murray Pomerance and R. Barton Palmer (Rutgers University Press, 2025).

“Let Me Not Pretend: The Promise of Beauty in To the Wonder,” in Life Above the Clouds: Philosophy and the Films of Terence Malick, ed. Steven DeLay (SUNY Press, 2023).

“Blackboard Jungle: A Cinematic Education,” in ReFocus: The Literary Films of Richard Brooks, ed. R. Barton Palmer and Homer B. Pettey (Edinburgh University Press, 2023).

“We Never Danced: Alan Rudolph’s Welcome to L.A. and Remember My Name,” in The Other Hollywood Renaissance, eds. R. Barton Palmer, Dominic Lennard, and Murray Pomerance (Edinburgh University Press, 2020).

“The Final Girl in the Red Dress: A Way of Moving in the Resident Evil Films,” in Final Girls, Feminism, and Popular Culture, eds. Stacy Rusnak and Katarzyna Paszkiewicz (Palgrave, 2020).

“Toward and Away from the World: Subjectivity After Loss in The Tree of Life,” in Immanent Frames: Postsecular Cinema between Malick and von Trier, eds. John Caruana and Mark Cauchi (SUNY Press, 2018).

“On Beams and Birds: John Huston’s Adaptation of The Maltese Falcon,” in John Huston as Adaptor, eds. Wesley King and Douglas McFarland (SUNY Press, 2017).

“Not Getting It: Flirt as Anti-Puzzle Film,” in The Cinema of Hal Hartley: Flirting with Formalism, ed. Steven Rybin (Wallflower Press, 2016).

“The Figure Who Writes: On the Henry Fool Trilogy,” in The Cinema of Hal Hartley: Flirting with Formalism, ed. Steven Rybin (Wallflower Press, 2016).

“Christian Metz: Dreaming a Language in Cinema,” in Thinking in the Dark: Cinema, Theory, Practice, eds. Murray Pomerance and R. Barton Palmer (Rutgers University Press, 2015).

“Style, Meaning, and Myth in Public Enemies,” in The Philosophy of Michael Mann, eds. Steven Sanders, Aeon Skoble, R. Barton Palmer (University Press of Kentucky, 2014).

“Voicing Meaning: On Terrence Malick’s Characters,” in Terrence Malick: Film and Philosophy, eds. Thomas Deane Tucker and Stuart Kendall (Continuum, 2011).

“The Jellyfish and the Moonlight: Imagining the Family in Wes Anderson’s Films,” in The Films of Wes Anderson: Critical Essays on an Indiewood Icon, ed. Pete Kunze (Palgrave, 2014).

“The Auteur as Teacher: The Pedagogical Aesthetics of We Can’t Go Home Again,” in Lonely Places, Dangerous Ground: Nicholas Ray in American Cinema, eds. Steven Rybin and Will Scheibel (SUNY Press, 2014).

Film Performance 

“Natalie Portman: Smart Star,” in my own edited collection, Stellar Transformations: Movie Stars of the 2010s (Rutgers University Press, 2022), ed. Steven Rybin.

“Warren Beatty’s Howard Hughes Movie: Nostalgic Performance in Rules Don’t Apply,” in Was it Yesterday?: Nostalgia in Contemporary Film and Television, ed. Matthew Leggatt (SUNY Press, 2021).

“Film Performance before and after the Code: Mandalay and Stolen Holiday,” in The Many Cinemas of Michael Curtiz, eds. R. Barton Palmer and Murray Pomerance (University of Texas Press, 2018).

“Irene Dunne in The Awful Truth,” in Close-Up: Great Cinematic Performances, Vol. 1: America, eds. Murray Pomerance and Kyle Stevens (Edinburgh University Press, 2018).

“Loving Performance: Cinephilia, Teaching, and the Stars,” in For the Love of Cinema: Teaching Our Passion In and Out of the Classroom, eds. Rashna Wadia Richards and David T. Johnson (Indiana University Press, 2017).

John Barrymore’s Sparkling Topaze,” in Hamlet Lives in Hollywood: John Barrymore and the Acting Tradition on Screen, eds. Murray Pomerance and Steven Rybin (Edinburgh University Press, 2017).

“The Spielberg Gesture: Performance and Intensified Continuity,” in A Companion to Steven Spielberg, ed. Nigel Morris (Wiley-Blackwell, 2017).

“Joan Bennett, Fritz Lang, and the Frame of Performance,” in A Companion to Fritz Lang, ed. Joe McElhaney (Wiley-Blackwell, 2014)