Action movie stars ranging from Jackie Chan to lesser-known stunt women and men like Zoe Bell and Chad Stahelski stun their audiences with virtuosic martial arts displays, physical prowess, and complex fight sequences.
In Discorrelated Images Shane Denson examines how computer-generated digital images displace and transform the traditional spatial and temporal relationships that viewers had with conventional analog forms of cinema.
In Revisiting Women's Cinema, Lingzhen Wang ponders the roots of contemporary feminist stagnation and the limits of both commercial mainstream and elite minor cultures by turning to socialist women filmmakers in modern China.
Ben-Hur (1959), Jaws (1975), Avatar (2009), Wonder Woman (2017): the blockbuster movie has held a dominant position in American popular culture for decades.
In Reattachment Theory Lee Wallace argues that homosexuality-far from being the threat to "e;traditional"e; marriage that same-sex marriage opponents have asserted-is so integral to its reimagining that all marriage is gay marriage.
Despite China's recent emergence as a major global economic and geopolitical power, its association with counterfeit goods and intellectual property piracy has led many in the West to dismiss its urbanization and globalization as suspect or inauthentic.
In Japonisme and the Birth of Cinema, Daisuke Miyao explores the influence of Japanese art on the development of early cinematic visual style, particularly the actualite films made by the Lumiere brothers between 1895 and 1905.
In Paris in the Dark Eric Smoodin takes readers on a journey through the streets, cinemas, and theaters of Paris to sketch a comprehensive picture of French film culture during the 1930s and 1940s.
In Fidel between the Lines Laura-Zoe Humphreys traces the changing dynamics of criticism and censorship in late socialist Cuba through a focus on cinema.
From IKEA assembly guides and "e;hands and pans"e; cooking videos on social media to Mister Rogers's classic factory tours, representations of the step-by-step fabrication of objects and food are ubiquitous in popular media.
Although overlooked by most narratives of American cinema history, films made for purposes outside of theatrical entertainment dominated twentieth-century motion picture production.
In Where Histories Reside Priya Jaikumar examines eight decades of films shot on location in India to show how attending to filmed space reveals alternative timelines and histories of cinema.
Many contemporary television series from Modern Family to How to Get Away with Murder open an episode or season with a conflict and then go back in time to show how that conflict came to be.
In Shimmering Images Eliza Steinbock traces how cinema offers alternative ways to understand gender transitions through a specific aesthetics of change.
In this quintessential work of queer theory, Jack Halberstam takes aim at the protected status of male masculinity and shows that female masculinity has offered a distinct alternative to it for well over two centuries.
From the antics of Flavor Flav on Flavor of Love to the brazen behavior of the women on Love & Hip Hop, so-called negative images of African Americans are a recurrent mainstay of contemporary American media representations.
A roaring getaway car of guilty pleasures (The New York Times Book Review), Glen Weldons The Caped Crusade is a fascinating, critically acclaimed chronicle of the rises and falls of one of the worlds most iconic superheroes and the fans who love himnow with a new afterword.
This is a comprehensive journey through the long career of auteur Hollywood filmmaker Walter Hill, director of The Driver, The Warriors, Southern Comfort, 48 Hrs.
Among professional storytellers whose works have been adapted for cinematic dramatization, mid-19th century English novelist Charles Dickens stands in a class of his own.
The samurai films of legendary Japanese director Akira Kurosawa are set in the past, but they tell us much about the present, as do his crime stories, romances, military films, medical dramas and art films.
Although Americans are no longer compelled to learn Greek and Latin, classical ideals remain embedded in American law and politics, philosophy, oratory, history and especially popular culture.
This book studies a grouping of films set in New York City between 1965 and 1995, reflecting a town besieged by rampant criminality, social distress and physical decay.
American classic films noir, beginning with 1941's The Maltese Falcon and ending with 1950's Sunset Boulevard, and the neo-noir films made from the 1970s onward, share certain thematic aspects, stylistic qualities, and cultural contexts.
Individual reviews of 90+ films created and released before 1941 are included here in the first title-by-title reference guide to the forerunners of film noir.
Often considered the lowest depth to which cinema can plummet, the rape-revenge film is broadly dismissed as fundamentally exploitative and sensational, catering only to a demented, regressive demographic.
This book uses a black/white interracial lens to examine the lives and careers of eight prominent American-born actresses from the silent age through the studio era, New Hollywood, and into the present century: Josephine Baker, Nina Mae McKinney, Fredi Washington, Lena Horne, Dorothy Dandridge, Lonette McKee, Jennifer Beals and Halle Berry.
