Series: Short Cuts

From mainstream blockbusters to art house cinema, narrative and narration are the driving forces that organize a film. Yet attempts to explain these forces are often mired in notoriously complex terminology and dense theory. Warren Buckland provides a clear and accessible introduction that explains how narrative and narration work using straightforward language. Narrative and Narration distills the basic components of...

Cinema has always engaged with the experiences, hopes, fears, and anxieties of—and about—adolescents, teenagers, and young people. Teen Movies is a comprehensive and accessible history of the depiction of teenagers in American film, from the silent era to the twenty-first century. Timothy Shary explores the development of teenage roles across eras and industrial cycles, such as the juvenile delinquent pictures...

Audiences around the globe continue to flock to see the latest releases from Marvel and DC studios, making it clear that superhero films resonate with the largest global audience that Hollywood has ever reached. Yet despite dominating theatre screens like never before, the superhero genre remains critically marginalised—ignored at best and more often actively maligned. The Contemporary Superhero Film by...

The course of events is predetermined and cannot be changed. Forces beyond our control—or even our comprehension—shape our fates. Such is the deterministic worldview embedded in a wide swath of contemporary cinema, from arthouse experiments to popular genre films, through both thematic concerns and narrative structures. These films, especially the recent spate of "elevated" science fiction and horror, tap into...