This title provides an incisive analysis of popular American filmmaker, Richard Linklater.

Perhaps the best-known Spanish filmmaker to international audiences, Pedro Almodóvar gained the widespread attention of English-speaking critics and fans with the Oscar-nominated Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown and the celebrated dark comedy Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!. Marvin D'Lugo offers a concise, informed, and insightful commentary on a preeminent force in modern cinema. D'Lugo follows Almodóvar's career chronologically, tracing the director's works and their increasing complexity in terms of theme and the Spanish film tradition. Drawing on a wide range of critical sources, D'Lugo explores Almodóvar's use of melodrama and Hollywood genre film, his self-invention as a filmmaker, and his on-screen sexual politics. D'Lugo also discusses what he calls "geocultural positioning," that is, Almodóvar's paradoxical ability to use his marginal positions—in terms of his class, geographical origin, and identity—to develop an expressive language that is emotionally recognizable by audiences worldwide. Two fascinating interviews with the director round out the volume. An exciting consideration of an arthouse giant, Pedro Almodóvar mixes original interpretations into an analysis sure to reward film students and specialists alike.

Since the release of Do the Right Thing in 1989, Spike Lee has established himself as a cinematic icon. Lee's mostly independent films garner popular audiences while at the same time engaging in substantial political and social commentary. He is arguably the most accomplished African American filmmaker in cinematic history, and his breakthrough paved the way for the success of many other African Americans in film. In this first single-author scholarly examination of Spike Lee's oeuvre, Todd McGowan shows how Lee's films, from She's Gotta Have It through Red Hook Summer, address crucial social issues such as racism, paranoia, and economic exploitation in a formally inventive manner. McGowan argues that Lee uses excess in his films to intervene in issues of philosophy, politics, and art. McGowan contends that it is impossible to watch a Spike Lee film in the way that one watches a typical Hollywood film. By forcing observers to recognize their unconscious enjoyment of violence, paranoia, racism, sexism, and oppression, Lee's films prod spectators to see differently and to confront their own excess. In the process, his films reveal what is at stake in desire, interpersonal relations, work, and artistic creation itself.

Fifty Contemporary Film Directors examines the work of some of today’s most popular and influential cinematic figures. It provides an accessible overview of each director’s contribution to cinema, incorporating a discussion of their career, major works and impact. Revised throughout and with twelve new entries, this second edition is an up-to-date introduction to some of the most prominent film makers of the present day. The directors, from differing backgrounds and working across a range of genres, include: Martin Scorsese Steven Spielberg Sofia Coppola Julie Dash Shane Meadow Michael Moore Peter Jackson Guillermo Del Toro Tim Burton Jackie Chan Ang Lee Pedro Almodóvar. With further reading and a filmography accompanying each entry, this comprehensive guide is indispensable to all those studying contemporary film and will appeal to anyone interested in the key individuals behind modern cinema’s greatest achievements.

This study of Mexican film director Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu explores his role in moving Mexican filmmaking from a traditional nationalist agenda toward a more global focus. In studying the international scope of Iñárritu's influential films Amores Perros, 21 Grams, and Babel, the authors trace common themes such as human suffering and redemption, chance, and accidental encounters. The authors also analyze the director's visual style and his use of multiple characters and a fragmented narrative structure. The book concludes with an interview of Iñárritu that touches on the themes and subject matter of his chief works.

A searing study of an important American writer-director

For a director who has made only four feature films over three decades, Terrence Malick has sustained an extraordinary critical reputation as one of America’s most original and independent filmmakers. In this book, Lloyd Michaels analyzes each of Malick’s four features in depth, emphasizing both repetitive formal techniques such as voiceover and long lens cinematography as well as recurrent themes drawn from the director’s academic training in modern philosophy and American literature. Michaels explores Malick’s synthesis of the romance of mythic American experience and the aesthetics of European art film. He performs close cinematic analysis of paradigmatic moments in Malick’s films: the billboard sequence in Badlands, the opening credits in Days of Heaven, the philosophical colloquies between Witt and Welsh in The Thin Red Line, and the epilogue in The New World. This richly detailed study also includes the only two published interviews with Malick, both in 1975 following the release of his first feature film.