Locating World Cinema argues for the importance of understanding the local context of a film's creation and the nuances that it conveys to the spectator. It examines the sociocultural contexts intrinsic to cinema from milieus like the USSR/Russia, China, Japan, France, the US, Iran and India. The book analyses the works of some of the more celebrated but, at times, less than fully understood auteurs, such as Kenji Mizoguchi from Japan; Robert Bresson, Jacques Rivette and Éric Rohmer from France; Abbas Kiarostami from Iran; Martin Scorsese from the US; Zhang Yimou from China and Aleksei German from Russia.
Further, it examines how the conditions of exhibition for art house cinema has transformed into the 'global art film' that attempts to bypass the local by addressing international audiences.
The book deals with complex ideas but is lucidly written, making it accessible to film students and lay persons alike.

MK Raghavendra is an Indian film critic. He received the National Award for Best Film Critic in 1997. He has authored three volumes of academic film criticism - Seduced by the Familiar: Narration and Meaning in Indian Popular Cinema (Oxford, 2008), Bipolar Identity: Region, Nation and the Kannada Language Film (Oxford, 2011) and The Politics of Hindi Cinema in the New Millennium: Bollywood and the Anglophone Indian Nation (Oxford, 2014). He has also written two books on cinema for the general reader 50 Indian Film Classics (Collins, 2009) and Director's Cut: 50 Film-makers of the Modern Era (Collins, 2013) and edited an anthology of writing on South-Indian cinema, published by HarperCollins in 2017, Beyond Bollywood: The Cinemas of South India. His book The Oxford Short Introduction to Bollywood was published in 2016. His academic writings have been anthologized in books published by Oxford University Press, SAGE, Routledge, BFI (British Film Institute). He is a member of FIPRESCI and has been on the juries of several international film festivals including East-West: The Golden Arch, 2018 and 2019.