Research Guides: Film and Media Studies: Journals / Magazines

Journals and Magazines

Below is a curated list of core academic journals and critical magazines in the broad field of film and media studies. While not comprehensive, this selection highlights some of the most frequently cited and widely read publications in the discipline.

These journals cover topics ranging from film theory and history to television, digital media, and global screen cultures. Some are scholarly and peer-reviewed, while others blend criticism and commentary for a broader readership. Exploring them is a great way to get familiar with key debates, research trends, and the evolving landscape of media studies—whether you're working on a paper or just curious to learn more.

Film and Television Journals

Animation Journal
Animation Journal was the first peer-reviewed scholarly journal devoted to animation history and theory. Its content reflects the diversity of animation's production techniques and national origins.
BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies
BioScope encourages theoretical and empirical research both on located screen practices and wider networks, linkages, and patterns of circulation involving research into the historical, regional, and virtual spaces of screen cultures, including globalized and multi-sited conditions of production and circulation.
Black Camera
An international scholarly film journal, Black Camera constitutes a new platform for the study and documentation of the black cinematic experience in the world.
Camera Obscura
Camera Obscura provides a forum for scholarship and debate on feminism, culture, and media studies. The journal encourages contributions in areas such as the conjunctions of gender, race, class, and sexuality with audiovisual culture; new histories and theories of film, television, video, and digital media; and politically engaged approaches to a range of media practice.
Cinema Journal
Ceased in 2018.
Canadian Journal of Film Studies
The Canadian Journal of Film Studies / Revue canadienne d'études cinématographiques is Canada's leading academic peer-reviewed film journal. They have published bi-annually since launching in 1990.
Film and History
Published in the spring and fall, the journal offers insightful reviews of books and films and a Featured Section of articles that looks closely at one significant topic.
Film Criticism
Film Criticism recently completed its thirty-seventh year of continuous publication, making it the third oldest academic film journal in the United States.
Film International
Film International focuses on longer essays with in-depth-analysis, but it also features interviews, festival reports and an extensive review section on books, special DVD editions and films at the cinema.
Film Journal International
Film Journal International (earlier title: Film Journal) covers exhibition, production, and distribution, reporting both U.S. and international news, with features on industry trends, movie theater design and technology, screen advertising, and other topics.
Film Quarterly
Film Quarterly, a journal devoted to the study of film, television, and visual media, publishes scholarly analyses of international and Hollywood cinema as well as independent film, including documentary and animation. The journal also revisits film classics; examines television and digital and online media; reports from international film festivals; reviews recent academic publications; and on occasion addresses installations, video games, and emergent technologies.
Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media
A peer-reviewed, international journal published bi-annually by Wayne State University.
Journal of Cinema & Media Studies
Journal of Japanese & Korean Cinema
Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema is a double blind peer-reviewed journal devoted to the cinemas of Japan and Korea and the interactions and relations between them. The increasingly transnational status of Japanese and Korean cinema underlines the need to deepen understanding of this ever more globalized film-making region.
Journal of Chinese Cinemas
Journal of Chinese Cinemas is a major refereed academic publication devoted to the study of Chinese film, drawing on the recent world-wide growth of interest in Chinese cinemas.
Journal of Screenwriting
The Journal of Screenwriting is an international double-blind peer-reviewed journal. It is discursive, critical, rigorous and engages with issues in a dynamic and developing field, linking academic theory to screenwriting practice.
The Moving Image: The Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists
The Moving Image deals with crucial issues surrounding the preservation, archiving, and restoration of film, video, and digital moving images. The journal features detailed profiles of moving image collections; interpretive and historical essays about archival materials; articles on archival description, appraisal, and access; behind-the-scenes looks at the techniques used to preserve, restore, and digitize moving images; and theoretical articles on the future of the field.
New Review of Film and Television Studies
Publishes peer-reviewed research on the theory, history, aesthetics, and politics of expressive screen culture.
Studies in French Cinema
Studies in French Cinema is the only journal devoted exclusively to French and francophone cinema, providing scholars, teachers and students from around the world with a consistent quality of academic investigation across the full breadth of the subject. Contributors explore the cultural and technical aspects of French cinema from a wide range of methodological perspectives.
Velvet Light Trap
The Velvet Light Trap is a peer-reviewed academic journal covering film and media studies. It is edited by graduate students at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the University of Texas at Austin. Each issue covers critical, theoretical, and historical topics relating to a particular theme.
Visual Studies
Visual Studies is a major international peer-reviewed journal published on behalf of the International Visual Sociology Association. The journal publishes visually-oriented articles across a range of disciplines, and represents a long-standing commitment to empirical visual research, studies of visual and material culture, the development of visual research methods and the exploration of visual means of communication about social and cultural worlds.

Games Studies Journals

Game Studies
Open access, international journal of computer game research. Focuses on aesthetic, cultural, and communicative aspects of computer games.
Games and Culture
Games and Culture peer-reviewed and published quarterly, is an international journal that promotes innovative theoretical and empirical research about games and culture within interactive media. The journal serves as a premiere outlet for ground-breaking work in the field of game studies and its scope includes the socio-cultural, political, and economic dimensions of gaming from a wide variety of perspectives.
Computer Games Journal
A worldwide, peer-reviewed publication providing knowledgeable, well-written articles from academics and practitioners that are relevant to the games industry. It aims to encourage and promote research into games development and the games industry as a whole. The journal publishes up-to-date research and opinions on current games development and industry issues, and also provides a format for airing ground-breaking dissertations and essays from computing and games students.
Simulation & Gaming
Interdisciplinary in scope, this journal covers both digital and analog forms of play, including simulations, role-playing, and educational games

Film and Media Magazines

Cineaste
America's Leading Magazine on the Art and Politics of the Cinema
Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture
Discourse explores a variety of topics in contemporary cultural studies, theories of media and literature, and the politics of sexuality, including questions of language and psychoanalysis.
Film Comment
Founded in 1962, Film Comment has been the home of independent film journalism for over 50 years, publishing in-depth interviews, critical analysis, and feature coverage of mainstream, art-house, and avant-garde filmmaking from around the world. Today it is a bimonthly print magazine and a website published by Film at Lincoln Center.
Filmmaker
The Magazine of Independent Film

Media & Culture Journals

Celebrity Studies
Celebrity Studies is a peer reviewed journal that focuses on the critical exploration of celebrity, stardom and fame. It seeks to make sense of celebrity by drawing upon a range of (inter)disciplinary approaches, media forms, historical periods and national contexts.
Continuum
Continuum is an academic journal of media and cultural studies. For over two decades it has contributed to the formation of these disciplines by identifying new areas for investigation and developing new agendas for enquiry in the fields. The journal has consistently provided a space for important new voices in media and cultural studies, while also featuring the work of internationally renowned scholars.
Computer Games Journal
A worldwide, peer-reviewed publication providing knowledgeable, well-written articles from academics and practitioners that are relevant to the games industry. It aims to encourage and promote research into games development and the games industry as a whole. The journal publishes up-to-date research and opinions on current games development and industry issues, and also provides a format for airing ground-breaking dissertations and essays from computing and games students.
Feminist Media Studies
Feminist Media Studies provides a transdisciplinary, transnational forum for researchers pursuing feminist approaches to the field of media and communication studies, with attention to the historical, philosophical, cultural, social, political, and economic dimensions and analysis of sites including print and electronic media, film and the arts, and new media technologies.
Games & Culture
Peer-reviewed and published quarterly, is an international journal that promotes innovative theoretical and empirical research about games and culture within interactive media. The journal serves as a premiere outlet for ground-breaking work in the field of game studies and its scope includes the socio-cultural, political, and economic dimensions of gaming from a wide variety of perspectives.
Global Media and China
Global Media and China (GCH) is a peer-reviewed, open access journal, which provides a dedicated, interdisciplinary forum for international research on communication and media with a focus on China.
International Journal of Media & Cultural Politics
International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics is committed to analyzing the politics of communication(s) and cultural processes. It addresses cultural politics in their local, international and global dimensions, recognizing equally the importance of issues defined by their specific cultural geography and those that traverse cultures and nations.
Journal of Media Business Studies
The Journal of Media Business Studies (JOMBS) publishes original scholarly articles that apply business theories to the examination of media and the media industries. JOMBS focuses on the dynamics of media businesses broadly defined. It has a particular interest in the creation, operation, marketing, distribution and consumption of media businesses and their products, including newspapers, magazines, television, music, film, videogames, literature, advertising, digital/social/new media among others.
Journal of Media and Religion
The Journal of Media and Religion is a juried journal publishing original research that addresses how religion as a social and cultural phenomenon broadens understanding of mass communication and society. The journal examines a full range of religious traditions (e.g., Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Eastern religious philosophies, and new/alternative religious movements) and serves as a forum for scholars, media professionals and theologians.
Journal of Religion, Media, and Digital Culture
RMDC publishes original work that contributes to social-scientific discussion of the relationship between religion, media and culture. Studies of any religious tradition, medium or geographical region are welcome.
Journal of Popular Film & Television
The goal of the Journal of Popular Film and Television is to provide a representative cross section of critical-cultural perspectives and to broaden the existing literature to include the “public visions” of popular filmmakers and television showrunners, economic and industrial factors, and an emphasis on the complex role of audiences in the development of film and television as art forms and wide-reaching sociocultural forces.
Journal of Radio & Audio Media (formerly Journal of Radio Studies)
The Journal of Radio & Audio Media is a semiannual publication designed to promote scholarly dialog generated by various disciplinary and methodological points of view. The Journal welcomes interdisciplinary inquiries regarding radio’s contemporary and historical subject matter as well as those audio media that have challenged radio's traditional use.
Media History
Media History is an interdisciplinary journal which welcomes contributions addressing media and society from the fifteenth century to the present. Its perspective is both historical and international. It explores all forms of serial publication in manuscript, print and electronic media and encourages work which crosses the boundaries of politics, culture and communications.
Porn Studies
Porn Studies is the first dedicated, international, peer-reviewed journal to critically explore those cultural products and services designated as pornographic and their cultural, economic, historical, institutional, legal and social contexts.
Sexualization, Media, and Society
Sexualization, Media, & Society (SMS) is a peer-reviewed, open-access interdisciplinary journal that provides a premier resource for diverse scholars and activists interested in critically examining the phenomenon of sexualized media as it affects individuals, relationships, communities, and societies.
Social Media & Society
Social Media + Society is a peer-reviewed, open access journal that focuses on advancing the understanding of social media and its impact on societies past, present and future

Open Access Journals/Magazines

Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media
Alphaville is a fully peer-reviewed online journal. It offers a dynamic international forum open to the discussion of all aspects of film and screen media history, theory and criticism through multiple research methodologies and perspectives. It cultivates inspiring, cutting-edge research, and seeks work that displays a clear engagement with current debates and with methodological issues.
Animation Studies
Animation Studies is the Society for Animation Studies’ peer-reviewed online journal. It publishes the society’s conference proceedings and is open to submissions from SAS members.
Film Matters
Film Matters is North America's first-ever peer-reviewed film publication for undergraduates, on which undergraduates serve as the editorial committee.
Film-Philosophy
Film-Philosophy is an open access peer-reviewed academic journal dedicated to the engagement between film studies and philosophy. The journal is interested in the ways in which films develop and contribute to philosophical discussion.
Flow
Flow is an online journal of television and media studies. Flow’s mission is to provide a space where researchers, teachers, students, and the public can read about and discuss the changing landscape of contemporary media at the speed that media moves.
International Journal of Computer Games Technology
International Journal of Computer Games Technology is a peer-reviewed, Open Access journal that publishes original research and review articles on both the research and development aspects of games technology covering the whole range of entertainment computing and interactive digital media.
In Media Res
Dedicated to experimenting with collaborative, multi-modal forms of online scholarship. Their goal is to promote an online dialogue amongst scholars and the public about contemporary approaches to studying media.
[in]Transition: A Media Commons and Cinema Journal Project
[in]Transition – a collaboration between MediaCommons and the Society for Cinema and Media Studies’ official publication, Journal of Cinema & Media Studies – is the first peer-reviewed academic journal of videographic film and moving image studies, and is fully open access with no fees to publish or read.
Octane Seating - Actors with Disabilities In Film/Hollywood"
A blog that provides in-depth information on disabilities, how they're portrayed in the world of acting, actors who have disabilities in film, and the importance of this type of representation in cinema.
Spectator
The University of Southern California Journal of Film and Television, available online 1997-present.
Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC)
TWC is an international, peer-reviewed journal which publishes articles about transformative works, broadly conceived; articles about media studies; and articles about the fan community.