Established in late 1999 through the AFI Research Collection School of Applied Communication at the Royal Melbourne Instutute of Technology (RMIT), Senses of Cinema is an online journal devoted to the serious and eclectic discussion of cinema. As an Australian-based journal, it is committed to the regular, wide-ranging analysis and critique of Australian cinema, past and present. The journal is also concerned with ideas about particular films or bodies of work, with the regimes (ideological, economic, and so forth) under which films are produced and viewed, and with the more abstract theoretical and philosophical issues raised by film study.

The journal is open to a range of critical approaches (auteurist, formalist, psychoanalytic, humanist, etc.) and encourages contributors to experiment with different forms of writing (personal memoir, academic essay, journalistic report, poetic evocation, etc). It also seeks to facilitate approaches to cinema that present new possibilities for exploring, experiencing, and imagining the world we live in.