Action Cinema Since 2000 addresses an increasingly lively and evolving field of scholarship, probing the definition and testing the potential of action cinema to reframe the mode for the 21st century. Contributors examine a broad range of content, from blockbusters to smaller independent films, originating from China, Korea, India, France, the USA, and Mexico. Ranging from JSA: Joint Security Area (Gondonggeonygbi guyeok) (2000) to Polite Society (2023), they consider the changing modes of action cinema, with streaming assuming global importance and an ever-increasing number of generic blends. They consider under-explored areas of action film, particularly how race, ethnicity, gender, and age figure in narratives and through image and soundtracks. Overall, the book demonstrates how 21st century action cinema engages with and reflects geopolitical, creative, and industrial developments. Contributors argue that it continues to offer fantasies of empowerment and mobility that say much about how power is understood in diverse contexts today.

Action Cinema Since 2000 addresses an increasingly lively and evolving field of scholarship, probing the definition and testing the potential of action cinema to reframe the mode for the 21st century. Contributors examine a broad range of content, from blockbusters to smaller independent films, originating from China, Korea, India, France, the USA, and Mexico. Ranging from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) to Polite Society (2023), they consider the changing modes of action cinema, with streaming assuming global importance and an ever-increasing number of generic blends. They consider under-explored areas of action film, particularly how race, ethnicity, gender, and age figure in narratives and through image and soundtracks. Overall, the book demonstrates how 21st century action cinema engages with and reflects geopolitical, creative, and industrial developments. Arguing that it continues to offer fantasies of empowerment and mobility that say much about how power is understood in diverse contexts today.

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This book is an authoritative account of post-1990s US action cinema.

While films such as Rambo, Thelma and Louise and Basic Instinct have operated as major points of cultural reference in recent years, popular action cinema remains neglected within contemporary film criticism. Spectacular Bodies unravels the complexities and pleasures of a genre often dismissed as `obvious' in both its pleasure and its politics, arguing that these controversial films should be analysed and understood within a cinematic as well as a political context. Yvonne Tasker argues that today's action cinema not only responds to the shifts in gendered, sexual and racial identities which took place during the 1980s, but reflects the influences of other media such as the new video culture. Her detailed discussion of the homoeroticism surrounding the muscleman hero, the symbolic centrality of blackness within the crime narrative, and the changing status of women within the genre, addresses the constitution of these identities through the shifting categories of gender, class, race, sex, sexuality and nation. Spectacular Bodies also examines the ambivalence of supposedly secure categories of popular cinema, questioning the existing terms of film criticism in this area and addressing the complex pleasures of this neglected form.

Gender and Action Films 1980-2000 offers insights into the intertwined concepts of gender and action, and how their portrayal developed in the Action Movie genre during the final two decades of the twentieth century. A necessity for academics, students and lovers of film and media and those interested in gender studies.

From the dazzling choreography of martial arts movies to the gore of the "heroic bloodshed" genre, Hong Kong action films are masterpieces of style and fury, and a prime source of inspiration for Hollywood. Tracing the background of this enticing film genre from the influences of Chinese opera to the mixture of fantasy and fast-paced action of the present day style, this is essential reading for both the intrigued layman and the die-hard Hong Kong fan. Photos, 95 in color.