Arthouse Crime Scenes is the first book to address the relationship between art cinema and crime, contributing to the study of both categories. Case studies are provided of works by celebrated filmmakers including Lucretia Martell, Kleber Mendonça Filho, Bong Joon Ho, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Hirokazu Koreeda, Jia Zhangke, Andrey Zvyagintsez and Lee Chang-dong. How is crime represented in art cinema? And how can this be understood in the context of global sociopolitical and film-industrial trends? Arthouse crime scenes draw on variable combinations of elements associated with art cinema and crime genres. Crime might be shown or lurk only at the edges. It might be left unresolved or unexplained. Crime can be petty and small scale or raise big questions associated with the arthouse sector: political issues, the nature of humanity, truth and knowability. In this book, close textual analysis is combined with focus on social and industrial contexts. A recurring theme is the situation of arthouse crime films within differing manifestations of broader processes of late-modern neoliberal globalization and cultural hybridity. Approaches examined range from the oblique to social realism and other mixtures of crime and arthouse tendencies.

Fans can go behind the yellow police tape in the official companion to TVUs most-watched drama, featuring fifty of the most explosive episodes.

Phillip Lopate fell hard for the movies as an adolescent. As he matured into an acclaimed critic and essayist, his infatuation deepened into a lifelong passion. My Affair with Art House Cinema presents Lopate’s selected essays and reviews from the last quarter century, inviting readers to experience films he found exhilarating, tantalizing, and beguiling—and sometimes disappointing or frustrating—through his keen eyes. In an essayist’s sinuous prose style, Lopate captures the formal mastery, artistic imagination, and emotional intensity of art house essentials like Yasujirō Ozu’s Late Spring, David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, and Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris, as well as works by contemporary filmmakers such as Maren Ade, Hong Sang-soo, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Christian Petzold, Paolo Sorrentino, and Jafar Panahi. Essays explore Chantal Akerman’s rigorous honesty, Ingmar Bergman’s intimacy, Abbas Kiarostami’s playfulness, Kenji Mizoguchi’s visual style, and Frederick Wiseman’s vision of the human condition. Lopate also reflects on the work of fellow critics, including Roger Ebert, Pauline Kael, and Jonathan Rosenbaum. His considered, at times contrarian critiques and celebrations will inspire readers to watch or rewatch these films. Above all, this book showcases Lopate’s passionate advocacy for not only particular films and directors but also the joys and value of a filmgoing culture.

This edited collection focuses on gender and contemporary horror in film, examining how and if representations of gender in horror have changed.

Drawing on documents from archives in St Petersburg and Moscow, the analysis portrays film production "in the round" and shows that the term "censorship" is less appropriate than the description preferred in the Soviet film industry itself, "control," which referred to a no less exigent but far more complex and sophisticated process. The book opens with four framing chapters that examine the overall context in which films were produced. The two opening chapters trace the various crises that beset film production between 1961 and 1970 (Chapter 1) and 1970 and 1985 (Chapter 2). These are followed by a chapter on the working life of the studio and particularly the technical aspects of production (Chapter 3), and a chapter on the studio aesthetic (Chapter 4). The second part of the book comprises close analyses of fifteen films that are particularly typical of the studio's production and which had especial impact within the studio and beyond. .

David Fincher’s Zodiac (2007), written by producer James Vanderbilt and adapted from the true crime works of Robert Graysmith, remains one of the most respected films of the early twenty-first century. As the second film featuring a serial killer (and the first based on fact) by Fincher, Zodiac remains a standout in a varied but stylistically unified career. While connected to this genre, the film also hybridizes the policier genre and the investigative reporter film. And yet, scholarship has largely ignored the film. This collection is the first book-length work of criticism dedicated to the film. Section One focuses on early influences, while the second section analyzes the film’s unique treatment of narrative. The book closes with a section focusing on game theory, data and hegemony, the Zodiac’s treatment in music, and the use of sound in cinema. By offering new avenues and continuing a few established ones, this book will interest scholars of cinema and true crime along with fans and enthusiasts in these areas.

Film Noir is an overview of an often celebrated, but also contested, body of films. It discusses film noir as a cultural phenomenon whose history is more extensive and diverse than American black and white crime thrillers of the forties. An extended Background Chapter situates film noir within its cultural context, describing its origin in German Expressionism, French Poetic Realism and in developments within American genres, the gangster/crime thriller, horror and the Gothic romance and its possible relationship to changes in American society. Five chapters are devoted to ‘classic’ film noir (1940-59): chapters explore its contexts of production and reception, its visual style, and its narrative patterns and themes chapters on character types and star performances elucidate noir’s complex construction of gender with its weak, ambivalent males and predatory femmes fatales and also provide a detailed analysis of three noir auteurs, - Anthony Mann, Robert Siodmak and Fritz Lang Three chapters investigate ‘neo-noir’ and British film noir: chapters trace the complex evolution of ‘neo-noir’ in American cinema, from the modernist critiques of Night Moves and Taxi Driver, to the postmodern hybridity of contemporary noir including Seven, Pulp Fiction and Memento the final chapter surveys the development of British film noir, a significant and virtually unknown cinema, stretching from the thirties to Mike Hodges’ Croupier Films discussed include both little known examples and seminal works such as Double Indemnity, Scarlet Street, Kiss Me Deadly and Touch of Evil. A final section provides a guide to further reading, an extensive bibliography and a list of over 500 films referred to in the text. Lucidly written, Film Noir is an accessible, informative and stimulating introduction that will have a broad appeal to undergraduates, cinéastes, film teachers and researchers.

This book explores the cycle of horror on US television in the decade following the launch of The Walking Dead, considering the horror genre from an industrial perspective. Examining TV horror through rich industrial and textual analysis, this book reveals the strategies and ambitions of cable and network channels, as well as Netflix and Shudder, with regards to horror serialization. Selected case studies; including American Horror Story, The Haunting of Hill House, Creepshow, Ash vs Evil Dead, and Hannibal; explore horror drama and the utilization of genre, cult and classic horror texts, as well as the exploitation of fan practice, in the changing economic landscape of contemporary US television. In the first detailed exploration of graphic horror special effects as a marker of technical excellence, and how these skills are used for the promotion of TV horror drama, Gaynor makes the case that horror has become a cornerstone of US television.

Arthouse Crime Scenes is the first book to address the relationship between art cinema and crime, contributing to the study of both categories. Case studies are provided of works by celebrated filmmakers including Lucretia Martell, Kleber Mendonça Filho, Bong Joon Ho, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Hirokazu Koreeda, Jia Zhangke, Andrey Zvyagintsez and Lee Chang-dong. How is crime represented in art cinema? And how can this be understood in the context of global sociopolitical and film-industrial trends? Arthouse crime scenes draw on variable combinations of elements associated with art cinema and crime genres. Crime might be shown or lurk only at the edges. It might be left unresolved or unexplained. Crime can be petty and small scale or raise big questions associated with the arthouse sector: political issues, the nature of humanity, truth and knowability. In this book, close textual analysis is combined with focus on social and industrial contexts. A recurring theme is the situation of arthouse crime films within differing manifestations of broader processes of late-modern neoliberal globalization and cultural hybridity. Approaches examined range from the oblique to social realism and other mixtures of crime and arthouse tendencies.

The presence of bodies and sex in detective fiction has been a long-term feature of this internationally popular genre. Titillation is at the centre of narratives reliant upon discovery and revelation: motives and criminals are slowly revealed, along with sexualized and violated bodies – from femmes fatales to the corpses of victims. A satisfying, gratifying genre for its readership, the detective novel promises the disruption and subsequent restoration of order in societies tarnished by disillusionment which hope for a better future. This book takes as its focus examples of detective fiction from Cuba and Mexico during or in the aftermath of huge social upheaval (the Special Period and the War on Drugs), analyzing representations of sexualities, bodies, and the genre itself. Through an investigation of novels by Leonardo Padura and Amir Valle of Cuba, and Bef and Rogelio Guedea of Mexico, this work investigates increasingly fluid sexualities and bodies in challenging examples of metaphysical detective fiction, a particularly anxious subgenre which challenges both the structures and limits of the detective novel and the reader’s understanding of true and false and right and wrong, representative of troubling periods of severe social disruption for Cuba and Mexico.