3 Fantastic Online Film Studies Journals

Whether your interest is academic or personal, there are some great film studies journals online, with tons of free content. The three suggested and recommended below are fairly scholarly, yet suited for a broader audience, as they are quite readable and enjoyable.

The Film Journal
"Dedicated to serious film writing"
thefilmjournal.com

Although The Film Journal only produced 13 issues (the last one in 2006) they are all high quality, containing great articles and reviews-all of which are available free online.

Articles include titles such as: Baudrillard in The Matrix: the Hyperreal, Hollywood, and a Case for Misused References, In Amity One Man can make a Difference: Steven Spielberg's Jaws, Driving into the 'Dustless Highway' of Queer Cinema, and Tremble of Truth: Dogme 95, Ideology and the Genealogy of Cinematic Realism.

The site is easily navigable, with a full archive, which can be views issue by issue, or from a list of all articles (267!) Note the different issues have different formats, but organization is present--all link back nicely to the home page.

Images
"A journal of film and popular culture"
imagesjournal.com

Images online film journal is a great repository of film essays and critical reviews. Although the latest articles seem to have been published around 2005, there are many great things to be found. It is very easy to navigate, with categories such as feature articles, reviews, as well a large archive of previous items.

Especially nice is the "in focus" feature. There are many essays, in headings that are very genre oriented: 30 greatest westerns, Italian gothic horror cinema, Stars: Some Historical Reflections on the Paradoxes of Stardom in the American Film Industry, 1910-1960, Ten Shades of Noir: A Review of Film Noir Classics, Cliffhangers: the Golden-Age of Serials, featuring Flash Gordon, Spy Smasher, Tiger Woman, and many others, The Cinema of Alfred Hitchcock, and Sex, Drugs and Exploitation.

Jump Cut
"A Review of Contemporary Media: Looking at media in its social and political context"
ejumpcut.org

Jump Cut takes an outright "explicit political stand as a nonsectarian left, feminist, and anti-imperialist" stand, and the articles therein reflect and critique upon these notions. The issues are archived back to the first issue from 1974. As far as I can tell, all the articles have been made available for free online viewing.

Examples of older articles include: Hollywood's blacklist: The Cold War and the way they were, The Exorcist and radical therapy, Rank and files fantasy in 40s films, and Norma Rae and textile workers on film.

Contemporary articles include titles such as: Latino and the Chicano warrior in the U.S. national body, Babel: Pushing and reaffirming mainstream cinema's boundaries, Cylons in America: Critical Studies in Battlestar Galactica, and Visible "waves": notes on Koreanness, pan-Asianness, and some recent Southeast Asian art films.

Jump Cut is easy to navigate, organized well, searchable, and the articles are all suitable for easy online viewing or printing. Nicely, it is still in production, and not simply a repository of items.