Action Cinema Since 2000

This book emphatically confirms the continuing significance of action cinema, particularly as a site of cross-cultural exchange. In its capacious breadth and its intellectual generosity, it captures an astonishing range of issues, offering transnational perspectives on this evolving genre. -- Sharon Willis, University of Rochester, USA
Action Cinema Since 2000 offers a series of solid intellectual punches that together make a convincing case for considering action cinema as a dominant mode of popular film. Comprehensive and compelling, it examines the aesthetics of action in a global context and is certain to be an indispensable volume for anyone interested in contemporary filmmaking. -- Barry Keith Grant, Brock University, Canada
This book offers a superb collection of essays that examines the aesthetics, technologies, and ideologies involved in a diverse series of contemporary films that deploy action as a key mode of expression. Attuned to issues of race, gender, and other identity categories across different world cinemas, as well as to how action cinema itself has been formulated in the 21st century, Holmlund, Purse, Tasker, and their authors provide bracing new insights into films that have powerfully defined today’s global mediascape. -- Barbara Klinger, Provost Professor Emerita, Indiana University, USA
Speeding around the world and across the past two decades, this action-packed collection brings two-fisted scholarship up to date with a hyperkinetic array of hard-hitting insights. Holmlund, Purse and Tasker serve up a baker’s dirty dozen of heavyweight scholars who score knockouts with new research on action movies’ production, performances, technology, aesthetics, politics and ideology, including spectacular rematches with the mode’s muscular sparring partners gender, race and the body. This book packs a punch. -- Mark Gallagher, author of Action Figures: Men, Action Films and Contemporary Adventure Narratives.
Action Cinema Since 2000 is a trail-blazing, fist-pumping, butterfly kick of a book that will change the way action is conceptualized in cinema studies. With a dream team of editors, and a stellar list of contributors, this book diversifies understandings of action in its careful attention to film production, industry developments, socio-political issues, and cinema aesthetics in an ever-evolving global mediascape. Making the case for action cinema as a mode, rather than a genre, Action Cinema Since 2000 reveals its complexity and nuance. -- Tanya Horeck, Anglia Ruskin University, UK