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Introduction What if a group of slaves murdered their overlords and returned home to find themselves targeted by a bounty hunter? What if the slaves were really bioengineered beings seeking [...]

IN THE EXTENSIVE BODY OF SCHOLARSHIP devoted to George Romero's groundbreaking film Night of the Living Dead (1968), rarely has anyone asked an obvious question: who is Duane Jones? (1) [...]

Prelude: Mickey Mouse and the Fight for Pop-Cultural Agency (1) IN 1971, DAN O'NEILL, an out-of-work cartoonist formerly in the employ of the San Francisco Chronicie, gathered an assortment of [...]

JOHN CAWELTI'S INFLUENTIAL ESSAY 'Chinatown and Generic Transformation in Recent American Films,' published in 1979, ignited considerable scholarly attention and debate on the issue of genre blending in cinema. Significantly, [...]

Introduction: Reverse Motion and Temporal Plasticity (1) ONSCREEN, WORKERS JERKED THEIR PICKS unnaturally away from bits of stone that slid upward, miraculously fusing onto a flattened edifice. Meanwhile, a thickening [...]

No they were not inhuman. Well, you know that was the worst of it--this suspicion of their not being inhuman. --Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (36) An enemy had to [...]

EDGAR WRIGHT'S BABY DRIVER (2017) is a film filled with heightened visual splendor. In it, the titular character progresses through a three-act structure that utilizes familiar narrative tropes from various [...]

The Wailing as a Zombie Film THE WAILING, OR GOKSUNG IN THE ORIGINAL KOREAN TITLE, Na Hong-jin's third feature-length film, released in 2016, was instantly recognized by viewers and critics [...]

HAL ASHBY MADE FILMS THAT SUCCEEDED with both critics and audiences in the 1970s (Cook 110). His films often dealt with the major political issues of the time--for instance, American [...]

Introduction THE RENEWED CINEMATIC INTEREST IN MOUNTAINS reveals not only the transformative virtue of mountains as mediators of new experiences, ranging from rituals of spiritual purification to consumerist tourist culture, [...]

It's not like you set out to do a certain type of thing; the ideas tell you what it's going to be, and by the time you realize what that [...]

I always felt that picture [They All Laughed] would never really work until everyone in the picture was dead, and then it would sort of become neutral again. --Peter Bogdanovich [...]

Such an examination of failures confronts us with the problem of fidelity: how to redeem the emancipatory potential of these failures through avoiding the twin trap of nostalgic attachment to [...]

In telling of her star-crossed romance with the Byronic Edward Rochester, the narrator of Charlotte Bronte's 1847 novel Jane Eyre must reveal Rochester's shameful secret: his insane wife, Bertha Mason, [...]

He wanted complete immersion, whatever that means. Then he realized what it means. He wanted the film to move even more slowly, requiring deeper involvement of eye and mind, always [...]

The title of P. T. Anderson's There Will Be Blood serves as a promise, which is fulfilled in the final scene when Daniel Plainview bludgeons Eli Sunday to death with [...]

F. Scott Fitzgerald's short story 'The Curious Case of Benjamin Button' (1922) is told by an anonymous first-person narrator who recounts the life of Benjamin Button from his birth in [...]

At first, there seems to be a deliberate cohesion between Jhumpa Lahiri's novel The Namesake and Mira Nair's subsequent film adaptation of it by the same name. Nair included Lahiri [...]

Among both silent films and film adaptations, the 1912 film The Cry of the Children is unique, as it is a rare instance of a lyric poem--Elizabeth Barrett Browning's 'The [...]

Two Animators and the Problem of Animation WHEN HAYAO MIYAZAKI'S SPIRITED AWAY reached American theaters in 2002, children by and large were enthralled, but some of us adults were confused. [...]

David Fincher's 1999 adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk's 1995 novel Fight Club provides a spectacular solution, in several senses of that term, to the challenge of depicting the narrator's split self. [...]

Ousmane Sembene's 1966 film, La Noire de ... , is generally considered to be the first feature-length African film. It is also a work of self-adaptation, a cinematic re-writing of [...]

Stanley Kubrick's Lolita (1962) has long been considered something of a critical failure. The issue of film censorship is relevant to this. How, after'all, could Kubrick bring a tale about [...]

Early in Coriolanus (2011), the titular character and his enemy Aufidius clash in a bombed-out building. The confrontation oscillates between knife jabs and tight embraces that at once invoke both [...]

Pedro Almodovar's 1999 film All About My Mother, a parodic and sentimental homage to Joseph L. Mankiewicz's 1950 classic All About Eve, revolves around the various ways the role of [...]

In late 1982 Derek Jarman, already recognized as a film director, painter, and set designer, extended the field of his creativity yet further by writing an autobiographical memoir. It was [...]

By uses of tempo and rhythm, and by the large-scale integration of single effects, [city symphonies] capture the eye and impress the mind in the same way a military parade [...]

Orson Welles's Macbeth (1948) holds a peculiar place in both film history and the canon of Shakespearean films. Critics skewered it during its initial release, insistently comparing it to Laurence [...]

Shakespeare's Hamlet is a text replete with surveillance; nearly every character plays the roles of watcher and watched at some point in the play. To cite a partial list of [...]