New Cinemas

About New Cinemas

About New Cinemas

New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film is a peer-reviewed film-studies journal published by Intellect, the Bristol-based academic publisher, in the United Kingdom. Its print ISSN is 1474-2756 and its electronic ISSN is 2040-0578. The journal's full title matters: the stored record in this directory carried the short title "New Cinemas", the publisher as a bare number and a focus rendered as a quartile, whereas the journal itself is New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film, a refereed journal devoted — in the aims and scope carried on Intellect's journal platform — "to provide a platform for the study of new forms of cinematic practice and fresh approaches to cinemas hitherto neglected in western scholarship". OpenAlex, resolved through its ISSN endpoint, records the source under the display name "New Cinemas Journal of Contemporary Film", with Intellect as host organisation, the United Kingdom as country, and both ISSNs; its yearly counts begin in 2002, the journal's founding period, and volume numbering visible in citations (volume 3 in 2005, volume 6 in 2008, volume 21 in 2023) is consistent with an annual volume cycle from 2002. SCImago records Intellect Ltd. as publisher, the categories Visual Arts and Performing Arts and Communication, and Scopus coverage of 2012–2018 and 2020–2026.

The journal was founded at a moment when film studies was being remade by three changes at once: digital production was lowering the cost of making films, world cinema was displacing the old Hollywood-and-Europe canon at the centre of the discipline, and a generation of scholars trained in cultural studies was asking questions about festivals, industries, audiences and technologies that textual analysis alone could not answer. New Cinemas was designed for that moment. Its publisher's present statement of its aims says it publishes original research on cinema from around the world — Argentina, South Africa, Iran, Germany and Korea are named as examples — and about a variety of practices, not only the feature-film format; that it particularly welcomes submissions from scholars close to completing a doctorate, early-career researchers and practitioners, especially from outside "Western" spaces; that it welcomes work on film beyond the text, such as festivals, technology and marketing; and that it seeks research and cutting-edge thought in shorter formats than the traditional academic article. That combination — world scope, openness to new practices, and a deliberate welcome to early-career and Global South scholars — remains the journal's identity more than two decades on.

Scope and Subject Coverage

The journal's published articles show its scope in concrete form. National and regional cinemas studied as living contemporary practices are its staple: an article on Los rubios (Albertina Carri, 2003) examined how the film's reflexivity reworked memory of the Argentine dictatorship; an overview of digital feature filmmaking in New Zealand argued that low-cost digital video had produced a body of fiction films contesting the national canon, and drew conclusions for film-funding policy; work on Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Three Monkeys (2008) read stillness, long takes and non-reciprocal sound as the political aesthetics of the New Turkish Cinema; studies of the Hindi popular cinema have examined ageing, masculinity and stardom in the 2023 blockbuster Pathaan from two different angles in the same volume; and articles on El secreto de sus ojos, on Pawel Pawlikowski's Last Resort and on Lars von Trier's Manderlay show the journal treating European and Latin American art cinema with the same seriousness as popular genres. Genre work — horror and science fiction among the areas named in its current call for reviewers — transnational stardom, adaptation, film philosophy and the history of earlier cinema re-read through contemporary questions all sit inside its remit.

Two scope features deserve emphasis because they distinguish the journal from older film journals. The first is its interest in cinema as an institution and an industry, not only as a body of texts: festivals, funding policy, distribution, marketing, technology and production cultures are named in its aims, and its New Zealand digital-cinema article is a model of the kind, moving from aesthetics to funding structures in a single argument. The second is its format flexibility: alongside full research articles it publishes shorter interventions and, as the front matter of its sixth volume shows, a reviews section covering books in film studies, so that a younger scholar with a sharp short piece has a route into the journal that a purely article-based title would not offer. Its DOI prefix, visible in citations such as 10.1386/ncin.9.1.3_1, is Intellect's, and the journal code "ncin" is the one to use when tracing its articles in databases.

Editors, Editorial Board and Peer Review

Intellect's journal page, consulted during preparation, names the journal's editors as Stuart Green, Christopher Homewood and Priyanka Singh, all of the University of Leeds — Green and Homewood appear in the page's reviewer and board calls with Leeds addresses, and Singh is named as an editor in both the board-member and peer-reviewer calls. The editorial board is strikingly international for a journal of its size, and its geography is a fair map of the journal's ambitions: David Archibald (University of Glasgow), Kyle Barrett (University of Waikato, New Zealand), Angela Becher and Lisa Shaw and Claire Taylor (University of Liverpool), Daniel Binns (RMIT University, Australia), Andy Birtwistle (Canterbury Christ Church University), Paul Cooke, Rob Miles and Thea Pitman (University of Leeds), Kirsty Fairclough (Manchester Metropolitan University), Lin Feng (University of Leicester), James Fenwick (Sheffield Hallam University), Lalitha Gopalan (University of Texas at Austin), Qijun Han (Nanjing University of Science and Technology, China), Danielle Hipkins (University of Exeter), Hyangjin Lee (Rikkyo University, Japan), Yves Laberge (University of Ottawa, Canada), Kelly McWilliam (University of Southern Queensland, Australia), Dorota Ostrowska (Birkbeck, University of London), Fernando Pagnoni (University of Buenos Aires, Argentina), Ian Rijsdijk (University of Cape Town, South Africa) and Phillip Warnell (University of Lincoln). A board spanning six continents' worth of film cultures is not decoration here: it is how a journal that publishes on Argentine, Iranian, Korean, Turkish, Indian and New Zealand cinemas equips itself to judge what it receives.

Peer review follows Intellect's house policy as stated on the journal page. All articles undergo initial editorial screening by the journal's editorial team and/or incumbent guest editors; articles then undergo rigorous anonymous peer review by two referees, following Intellect's peer-review instructions; and the editors communicate a decision and revision suggestions to authors on the basis of that feedback, with an appeal route through the main editor. The journal follows the principles of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). At checking time the page carried two live calls that say something useful about the journal's present state: a call for new editorial-board members, particularly scholars based at universities in the Global South, whose members are asked to promote the journal and review at least two submissions a year; and a call for peer reviewers, particularly in Asian cinemas, film theory and philosophy, and horror and science fiction. A journal actively recruiting reviewers in named fields is a journal telling prospective authors where its submission flow is growing.

Metrics and Indexing

SCImago, based on Scopus data, lists New Cinemas with an SJR for 2025 of 0.101, quartile Q4 in its categories, an H-index of 9, and Scopus coverage of 2012–2018 and 2020–2026 — the interrupted coverage pattern that this directory's stored record also carried. OpenAlex tells a fuller story, because its coverage of the journal is not limited to those Scopus years: at checking time its source record (S23845596) held 339 works and 1,096 citations, with an h-index of 17, an i10-index of 33 and a two-year mean citedness of about 0.16, and its topic analysis is dominated, as expected, by cinema history and criticism and cinema and media studies, with ethics and aesthetics, South Asian cinema and culture, and Spanish culture and identity also visible. The gap between the SCImago H-index of 9 and the OpenAlex h-index of 17 is a database-coverage difference, reported here source by source; film-studies citation counts are in any case low by the standards of the sciences, because the field cites books as much as articles and cites over decades rather than years, and a journal whose early volumes are still being cited for their country-cinema overviews benefits from exactly that long tail. No Journal Impact Factor could be verified for this title during preparation, and none is claimed.

The journal's own indexing list, as Intellect publishes it, is long and appropriate to its field: ArticleFirst; the British Humanities Index; China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI); a wide range of EBSCO services including Academic Search Complete, Communication & Mass Media Complete, Communication Source and the Film and Television Literature Index; ERIH PLUS and its predecessor the European Reference Index for the Humanities; the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) and the International Index to Film Periodicals; the MLA International Bibliography; Scilit; Scopus; Summon; and Ulrich's Periodicals Directory. For a film-studies author, the combination that matters most is Scopus plus the MLA International Bibliography plus the FIAF film-periodicals index: it means the journal is visible simultaneously to the general academic evaluation systems and to the discipline's own bibliographies. A DOAJ search by either ISSN during preparation returned no record, which is consistent with the journal's model: it is a subscription journal from a commercial academic publisher, not an open-access title, though contributors receive a free PDF of their work and free access to their issue on publication, as the publisher's page states.

How to Submit

Submissions are made through Intellect's system, reached from the "Submit" route on the journal page, following the journal's Notes for Contributors for format and style; authors who need those notes in a more accessible format can contact the publisher, and Intellect offers its authors a discount arrangement with a commercial English-editing and translation service for those who want language help before submitting. The standing conditions are stated plainly on the page: all submissions should be original work and must not be under consideration by other publications. Contributors receive a free PDF copy of their final work and free access to the full issue on publication, and may buy online subscriptions at a 50% discount and print copies at a 25% discount. Article processing charges are not part of this journal's model as described on its page — no APC is stated there — but authors should confirm current terms on the page itself before submitting, since publisher policies change; anything beyond what the page states is recorded here as not publicly disclosed in the sources consulted.

Fit is the real submission question, and the journal's aims make it answerable. A manuscript belongs here if it studies contemporary cinema — broadly, the cinema of the late twentieth century and the present — with an approach that does not simply repeat existing paradigms: a national cinema re-read, a practice (a festival, a funding scheme, a digital production culture, a star phenomenon) analysed as cinema, a genre or a filmmaker approached from a fresh angle, or a shorter, sharper intervention in a live debate. Work that is purely historical without a contemporary stake, or purely textual where the journal would ask what the text means for cinema now, is a weaker fit. Early-career researchers and scholars working outside the traditional centres of the discipline are explicitly welcomed, which is not boilerplate: the journal's calls for board members from the Global South and its reviewer recruitment in Asian cinemas point the same way as its contents pages, where Leeds-based editing coexists with authorship and subjects from every continent.

The Journal in Its Field

Film studies has always been a field in which a journal's table of contents is an argument about what the discipline is. New Cinemas' contents make a consistent argument: that the centre of contemporary cinema is wherever films are being made in ways that existing criticism has not yet described, and that a journal should follow the films rather than the canon. That is why a single recent volume can hold two different readings of one Hindi blockbuster, why its memorial and review pages sit alongside funding-policy analysis, and why its editors recruit reviewers for horror and science fiction in the same breath as film philosophy. For libraries, the journal fills the gap between the generalist film journals, which can take only a few world-cinema articles a year, and the national-cinema journals, which take only one country; for authors, it is one of the comparatively small number of Scopus-listed, internationally boarded venues whose stated mission is precisely the kind of work — contemporary, global, practice-aware — that those other venues treat as peripheral.

Similar Journals

Readers comparing titles will find the closest neighbours among Intellect's own film list and the wider film-studies field. The Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies and the Journal of Scandinavian Cinema serve single national cinemas in depth, where New Cinemas ranges across all of them; Northern Lights: Film & Media Studies Yearbook, first published in 2002 like this journal, is an annual themed alternative; the Moving Image Review & Art Journal (MIRAJ) covers artists' moving image, a practice at New Cinemas' experimental edge; and journals of world cinema and transnational cinema studies in other publishers' lists compete for the same manuscripts on global art and popular film. Within this directory's records, New Cinemas' own profile — a mid-sized, internationally boarded, Scopus-listed journal with an h-index in the high single figures on Scopus data and the high teens on OpenAlex data — is representative of the serious specialist tier of film studies, below the field's few very large generalist titles and well above the unindexed new journals authors are warned against.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is New Cinemas, and who publishes it? New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film is a peer-reviewed film-studies journal published by Intellect Ltd. in the United Kingdom. Print ISSN 1474-2756, electronic ISSN 2040-0578. OpenAlex records Intellect as its host organisation and its works run from 2002.

What does the journal publish? Original research on contemporary cinema from around the world — national cinemas such as those of Argentina, South Africa, Iran, Germany and Korea are named in its aims — covering not only feature films but festivals, technology, marketing and other practices, in full articles and in shorter formats, plus book reviews.

Who edits it, and how does review work? The editors named on the publisher's page are Stuart Green, Christopher Homewood and Priyanka Singh (University of Leeds), supported by an international editorial board. Articles are screened editorially, then anonymously reviewed by two referees under Intellect's peer-review policy, and the journal follows COPE principles.

What are its metrics? SCImago gives an SJR for 2025 of 0.101, quartile Q4, an H-index of 9 and Scopus coverage of 2012–2018 and 2020–2026. OpenAlex at checking time gave 339 works, 1,096 citations, an h-index of 17 and an i10-index of 33. No Journal Impact Factor could be verified.

Is it open access, and are there charges? It is a subscription journal; a DOAJ search by ISSN returned no record during preparation. The publisher's page states no article processing charge and gives contributors a free PDF and free issue access; confirm current terms on the journal page before submitting.

I am an early-career scholar outside Europe and North America. Is this journal a realistic target? The journal explicitly welcomes submissions from scholars close to completing a doctorate, early-career researchers and practitioners, especially from outside Western spaces, and is actively recruiting editorial-board members in the Global South and reviewers in Asian cinemas — as clear a signal of openness as a journal gives.

Sources and Verification Note

This profile is based on Intellect's official journal page (aims and scope, submission and contributor terms, peer-review policy, COPE adherence, the current calls for board members and reviewers, the editors' and board members' names and affiliations, and the indexing list); on Intellect Discover article records, which confirm both ISSNs, the journal's DOI pattern and the content of recent volumes; on SCImago's record for publisher, categories, coverage, SJR, quartile and H-index; and on OpenAlex source S23845596, resolved through the ISSN endpoint and fetched directly, for works, citations, h-index, i10-index, mean citedness and topics as at checking time. A DOAJ search by ISSN during preparation returned no record and is reported as such. Where a detail could not be verified from a source actually consulted, it has been left out or stated as not publicly disclosed, rather than estimated.