Twelve years ago, Amores Perros erupted in the cinemas across the world and announced the arrival of Mexican film-makers. The film-makers profiled in that book have now come of age and have made a decisive impact on the international cinema scene The last few years Mexican film-makers winning the Best Director Oscars 5 times, and Best Picture 4 times: Alfonso Cuaron with Gravity and Roma. Alejandro Inarritu with Birdman and The RevenantGuillermo del Toro with The Shape of WaterThis revised edition of The Faber Book of Mexican Cinema brings this astounding story up to date, as well as profiling the next generation, waiting in the wings.

Charting production, distribution, censorship, and reception, this book examines Y Tu Mamá También in its presentation as a journey of self-discoveries. Three young adults enjoy a road trip together in search of a legendary beach. Behind their stories are mythologies of youth, a network of ideas in the film that reflects life outside the theaters. The deceptively complex film leaves the characters and its viewers with, instead of oversimplified and hollow answers, provocative questions and existential concerns. Made independently in Mexico, the film crosses over transnational issues, global markets, and mainstream and alternative aesthetics. It transforms road movie and youth film genres and shows a ‘musical, magical’ Mexico to the world. This book synthesizes several approaches in order to extensively examine Y Tu Mamá También. Covering the film’s production history, its distribution and censorship, and larger industrial, political, and cultural contexts, this book analyzes the too-often overlooked aspects of youthful sexuality alongside figurations of maturity, rites of passage, and covenants—made, broken, and remade—that not only inform representations of identity but also complicate the processes of identity formation themselves.

Examining key film texts and genres, and set in a broad historical and theoretical context, this student-friendly study provides a thorough and detailed account of the vital and complex relationship between cinema and national identity in Mexico.

Cavernous, often cold, always dark, with the lingering smell of popcorn in the air: the experience of movie-going is universal. The cinematic experience in Mexico is no less profound, and has evolved in complex ways in recent years. Films like Y Tu Mama Tambien, El Mariachi, Amores Perros, and the work of icons like Guillermo del Toro and Salma Hayek represent much more than resurgent interest in the cinema of Mexico. In Screening Neoliberalism, Ignacio Sanchez Prado explores precisely what happened to Mexico's film industry in recent decades. Far from just a history of the period, Screening Neoliberalism explores four deep transformations in the Mexican film industry: the decline of nationalism, the new focus on middle-class audiences, the redefinition of political cinema, and the impact of globalization. This analysis considers the directors and films that have found international notoriety as well as those that have been instrumental in building a domestic market. Screening Neoliberalism exposes the consequences of a film industry forced to find new audiences in Mexico's middle-class in order to achieve economic and cultural viability.

This is the first academic book dedicated to the filmmaking of the Mexican born directors Guillermo del Toro, Alejandro González Iñárritu, and Alfonso Cuarón. The book examines the career trajectories of the directors and presents a detailed analysis of their most significant films. These include studies on del Toro's Cronos/Chronos, El laberinto del fauno/Pan's Labyrinth, Hellboy II: The Golden Army; Iñárritu's Amores Perros, 21 Grams and Babel; and Cuarón's Sólo con tu pareja/Love in the Time of Hysteria, Y tu mamá también, and Children of Men. All three have worked in diverse industrial contexts, and between them they have made key films that have changed the nature of filmmaking in Mexico, Hollywood blockbusters, US independent films, 'European' art films, and films that defy easy classification. They have had unprecedented international success and have crossed linguistic, national and generic borders, cutting through traditional divisions created by film markets. As a result, this book challenges the ways both markets and critics have created clear-cut distinctions between mainstream commercial and independent art cinema, and the ways they have conceptualised US, Latin American and European cinema as discrete entities. The work of the three directors creates new hybrid formations and makes us rethink ways in which we have understood the auteur label. The main theoretical approaches applied in this book to analyse the directors' working practices and texts centre on new readings of auteurism and transnational film theories. This book will be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students of film studies and Hispanic studies, and general cinema enthusiasts who are interested in the films of the three directors.

Y Tu Mamá También (2001), an intelligent and sensual road movie directed by Alfonso Cuarón and co-written by him and his brother Carlos, is both an acclaimed feature by a director who would go on to win Oscars and a box office success abroad and in its native Mexico, where it was the biggest grossing local film of all time. Its teenage protagonists Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna went on to be major stars of global cinema. Yet on its release the film was vilified by established Mexican critics as a coarse comedy and 'Penthouse fantasy' of youthful lust for an older woman. Paul Julian Smith's lucid study of the film argues that Y Tu Mamá También not only addresses with playful seriousness such major issues as gender, race, class, and space, which are yet more urgent now than they were on its release; but that the film's apparently casual aesthetic masks a sophisticated audiovisual style, one which brings together popular genre film and auteurist experiment. Smith suggests Y Tu Mamá También remains an example for world cinema of how a very local film can connect with a global audience that is ignorant of such niceties. Combining production and distribution history, based on unexplored material held in Mexico City archives, with close textual analysis, Smith makes an argument for Cuarón's film as an enduring masterpiece that hides in plain sight as an ephemeral teen movie.

In the middle of this century’s first decade, “bromance” emerged as a term denoting an emotionally intense bond between straight men. Yet bromance requires an expression of intimacy that always toys with being coded as something other than “straight” male behavior, even as it insists that such intimacy must never be misinterpreted. In Reading the Bromance: Homosocial Relationships in Film and Television, editor Michael DeAngelis has compiled a diverse group of essays that address the rise of this tricky phenomenon and explore the social and cultural functions it serves. Contributors consider selected contemporary film and television texts, as well as the genres that historically inspired them, in order to explore what needs bromance attempts to fulfill in relationships between men—straight or otherwise. Essays analyze films ranging from I Love You, Man to Superbad, Humpday, I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, The Hangover, and the Jackass films, and include studies of representative examples in international cinema such as Y tu mama tambien and classic and contemporary films of the Bollywood genre. The volume also examines the increasingly prevalent appearance of the bromance phenomenon in television narratives, from the “male bonding” rituals of Friends and Seinfeld to more recent manifestations in House, The Wire, and the MTV reality series Bromance. From historical analysis to discourse analysis, sociological analysis, and queer theory, this volume provides a broad range of methodological and theoretical approaches to the phenomenon in the first booklength study of the bromance genre. Film and television scholars as well as readers interested in pop culture and queer studies will enjoy the insights of Reading the Bromance.