Who exactly are the Guardians of the Galaxy? Why are the Infinity Stones so important? What's the best order to watch the films in? And are Iron Man and Captain America friends or enemies? If you've ever mixed up the different ?Thor ?movies, or you get confused by which Avengers villain is which, fear not! ?Marvel Studios: All Your Questions Answered? is the book for you - whether you want to take your very first steps into this pop-culture colossus, you have friends who are die-hard Marvel fans and seem to speak in another language, or you just want to have all of the questions answered that you've been dying to ask.

Featuring a sneak peek of the highly anticipated ?Marvel Studios' Avengers: Infinity War?, this friendly companion untangles plots and characters, film by film. Even if you've never seen a Marvel Studios movie, it's hard to miss that the Marvel Cinematic Universe is a really big deal. 10 years' worth of movies, all linked together into a vast, unique and compelling storyline. If you want to find out more but aren't sure where to start, this entertaining, illustrated book breaks down everything in a straightforward and fun way!

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In the last twenty years or so, numerous mainstream movies have drawn from the ideas and images of ancient thought to address the collapse of appearance and reality. These films have consistently featured the Gnostic currents that emerged from Plato: not only Gnosticism itself but also Cabbala and alchemy. Despite important differences, these traditions have provided filmmakers with ready-made ruminations on the relationship between surface and depth as well as with engaging plot lines and striking scenes. In films like "The Matrix" (1999) and "The Truman Show" (1998), Gnostic myths have offered speculations on the real as well as conspiracy theories. The Cabbalistic motif of golem-making has provided such movies as "A.I." (2001) and "Blade Runner" (1982) with mediations on the human and with parables of machines yearning for life. Pictures like "Dead Man" (1996) and "Altered States" (1980) have drawn on alchemical symbols to explore the possibilities of transmutation and to feature stories of the dead rising to life. Recent commercial Gnostic films are meditations on the conundrums of the post-modern age and the timeless soul. These pictures constitute archetypal sites for sacred contemplation. They create spaces akin to the caves of Eleusis or Lascaux, chambers where habits are annihilated and the ego is shattered. Maybe this spiritual attraction is the secret reason behind the recent abundance of Gnostic films. If so, then the dream factory is betraying its purpose. It is negating its deceptions and sales in the name of a bewildering reality that cannot be found. "Secret Cinema" explores these possibilities through engaging in three related activities. One, the book establishes the theoretical foundations and implications of the genre of Gnostic cinema. It develops these theoretical elements in the contexts of Gnosticism and the esoteric traditions emerging from it, Cabbala and alchemy. Two, in undertaking this work, Wilson considers several collateral issues. The book discusses the functions of genre, the relationships between cinema and psychology, the connections between the moving image and sacred power, the role of the cinematographic apparatus, and the romance of film. Three, the book is a broad meditation on the seductions of cinema. It is attuned to material attractions of the movies, those gorgeous lights and lurid shadows, but also the film's spiritual invitations, the gaps between the pictures, the empty spaces at the heart of life.

Although female communication networks abound in many contexts and have received a good measure of critical scrutiny, no study has addressed their unique significance within narrative culture writ large. Filling this conspicuous gap, Ned Schantz presents a lively exploration of the phenomenon, resituating novelistic culture as central even as he ranges across media and the myriad technologies that attend them.
Charting the emergence of female networks via the most prominent modes of communication--gossip, letters, and phones--Schantz brings his study to life with unconventional interpretations of classic British novels and popular Hollywood films spanning multiple genres and time periods. With incisive readings of Clarissa, Emma, and Evelina, Schantz shows how gossip both draws sympathy and is repressed by dominant male culture in a recurrent pattern of avowal and disavowal. The epistolary novel added a rhythm to communication that was generative of fantasy, which in turn informed "telephonic film," a development depicted in analyses of movies such as Sorry, Wrong Number; Vertigo; Terminator; and You've Got Mail. Schantz highlights the way the telephone works as a structuring device, not merely a prop, one that shapes the plot and suggests provocative formal implications.
While this study traverses an uncanny realm of lost messages and false suitors, telepathy and artificial intelligence, locked rooms and time-traveling stalkers, these occult concerns only confirm the importance of female communication at its most basic level. Illuminating and accessible--Gossip, Letters, Phones reveals female networks as one of narrative's most supple and persistent elements in literature andcinema.

Catherine Russell demystifies the canon of great Japanese cinema, treating it with fewer auteurist and Orientalist assumptions than many other scholars and critics. Catherine Russell's highly accessible book approaches Japanese cinema as an industry closely modeled on Hollywood, focusing on the classical period - those years in which the studio system dominated all film production in Japan, from roughly 1930 to 1960. Respectful and thoroughly informed about the aesthetics and critical values of the Japanese canon, Russell is also critical of some of its ideological tendencies, and her analyses provide new insights on class and gender dynamics. Russell demonstrates how Japanese classical cinema has had enormous influence on other Asian cinemas, especially in TV broadcast form, and she highlights the importance of the accounting for the industrial production context when discussing these films. Including studies of landmark films by Ozu, Kurosawa and other directors, this book provides a perfect introduction to a crucial and often misunderstood Japanese cultural output. With a critical approach that highlights the "everydayness" of Japanese studio-era cinema, Catherine Russell demystifies the canon of great Japanese cinema, treating it with fewer auteurist and Orientalist assumptions than many other scholars and critics.

This is a sweeping study of world cinema, illustrating how its creative peaks stem from the urge to reveal otherwise hidden political and social dimensions of reality. "World Cinema and the Ethics of Realism" is a highly original study. It breaks away from the binary divisions which underpin most of film theory, and challenges traditional views of cinematic realism, drawing instead on the filmmaker's commitment to truth and to film's material bond with the real. Nagib conducts comparative case studies drawn from a wide range of realist trends, including the Japanese New Wave, the nouvelle vague, the Cinema Novo, the New German Cinema, the Inuit Indigenous Cinema, the Taiwan New Cinema and the New Brazilian Cinema. She reveals that these creative peaks are animated by the desire to reveal concealed or unknown political, social, psychological or mystical dimensions of reality - as observed in the various cycles of new waves and new cinemas across film history and geography. "World Cinema and the Ethics of Realism" is groundbreaking scholarship that surveys and defines World Cinema not as the opposite of Hollywood, but in positive terms; and draws upon the work of Badiou and Ranciere to take film theory in a bold new direction.

Once heralded and defined by the likes of Francois Truffaut and Andrew Sarris as a romantic figure of aesthetic individualism, the auteur is reinvestigated here through a novel approach. Bringing established as well as emergent figures of world art cinema to the fore, The Global Auteur shows how politics and philosophy are present in the works of these important filmmakers. They can be still seen leading a fight that their glorious predecessors seemed to have abandoned in the face of global capitalism and the market economy. Yet, as the contributors show, a new world calls for a new cinema, and thus for new auteurs. Covering a range of global auteurs such as Lars von Trier, Lav Diaz, Lee Chang-dong and Abderrahmane Sissako, The Global Auteur provides a much-needed reassessment of the film auteur for the global age.

The child has existed in cinema since the Lumiere Brothers filmed their babies having messy meals in Lyons, but it is only quite recently that scholars have paid serious attention to her/his presence on screen. Scholarly discussion is now of the highest quality and of interest to anyone concerned not only with the extent to which adult cultural conversations invoke the figure of the child, but also to those interested in exploring how film cultures can shift questions of agency and experience in relation to subjectivity. Childhood and Nation in World Cinema recognizes that the range of films and scholarship is now sufficiently extensive to invoke the world cinema mantra of pluri-vocal and pluri-central attention and interpretation. At the same time, the importance of the child in figuring ideas of nationhood is an undiminished tic in adult cultural and social consciousness. Either the child on film provokes claims on the nation or the nation claims the child. Given the waning star of national film studies, and the widely held and serious concerns over the status of the nation as a meaningful cultural unit, the point here is not to assume some extraordinary pre-social geopolitical empathy of child and political entity. Rather, the present collection observes how and why and whether the cinematic child is indeed aligned to concepts of modern nationhood, to concerns of the State, and to geo-political organizational themes and precepts.

How phony and real were defined and undermined in late twentieth-century literature and film? The epithet 'phony' was omnipresent during the postwar period in the United States. It was an easy appellation for individuals who appeared cynically to conform to codes of behavior for social approbation or advancement. Yet Holly Golightly 'isn't a phony because she's a real phony', says her agent in Breakfast at Tiffany's. In exploring this remark, Abigail Cheever examines the ways in which social influence was thought to deform individuals in mid century American culture. How could a person both be and not be herself at the same time? The answer lies in the period's complicated attitude toward social influence. If being real means that one's performative self is in line with one's authentic self, to be a real phony is to lack an authentic self as a point of reference - to lack a self that is independent of the social world. According to Cheever, Holly Golightly 'is like a phony in that her beliefs are perfectly in accordance with social norms, but she is real insofar as those beliefs are all she has'. ""Real Phonies"" begins in the postwar period to examine the twinned phenomena of phoniness and authenticity across the second half of the twentieth century - from adolescents like Holly Golightly and Holden Caulfield to sports agents like Jerry Maguire. Countering the critical assumption that, with the emergence of postmodernity, the ideal of 'authentic self' disappeared, Cheever argues that concern with the authenticity of persons proliferated throughout the past half-century despite a significant ambiguity over what that self might look like. Cheever's analysis is structured around five key kinds of characters: adolescents, the insane, serial killers, and the figures of the assimilated Jew and the 'company man'. In particular, she finds a preoccupation in these works not so much with faked conformity but with the frightening notion of real uniformity - the notion that Holly, and others like her, could each genuinely be the same as everyone else.

Science Fiction Film develops a historical and cultural approach to the genre that moves beyond close readings of iconography and formal conventions. It explores how this increasingly influential genre has been constructed from disparate elements into a hybrid genre. Science Fiction Film goes beyond a textual exploration of these films to place them within a larger network of influences that includes studio politics and promotional discourses. The book also challenges the perceived limits of the genre - it includes a wide range of films, from canonical SF, such as Le voyage dans la lune, Star Wars and Blade Runner, to films that stretch and reshape the definition of the genre. This expansion of generic focus offers an innovative approach for students and fans of science fiction alike.

The main corpus of film adaptation thus far has focused on films based on canonical literature. From Film Adaptation to Post-Celluloid Adaptation" takes the next logical step by discussing the emerging modes of film adaptation from older media to new, mainly focusing on the computer-generated reconstructions of popular narratives and characters along with other forms of convergence such as the Internet. While 'New Media' is a broad concept, the book will concentrate on the ways digital technology is being used in the encoding of films and discuss the ways this shift can be debated from a theoretical perspective.

Though the discussion is framed through the 'new media' lens, the work will not exclude a broader understanding of New Media which refers to video games, official websites and interactivity so as to examine how the visual style of contemporary films is dispersed across, and influenced by, other media. Discussing films like Minority Report," King Kong," 300 "and Wanted" in relation to Film Adaptation theory, the work aims to challenge and rework the definition of adaptation.

New Nonfiction Film: Art, Poetics and Documentary Theory is the first book to offer a lengthy examination of the relationship between fiction and documentary from the perspective of art and poetics. The premise of the book is to propose a new category of nonfiction film that is distinguished from - as opposed to being conflated with - the documentary film in its multiple historical guises; a premise explored in case-studies of films by distinguished artists and filmmakers (Abbas Kiarostami, Ben Rivers, Chantal Akerman, Ben Russell Pat Collins and Gideon Koppel). The book builds a case for this new category of film, calling it the 'new nonfiction film,' and argues, in the process, that this kind of film works to dismantle the old distinctions between fiction and documentary film and therefore the axioms of Film and Cinema Studies as a discipline of study.

The 1990s violence in the Former Yugoslavia, the worst in Europe since World War II, triggered the conversion of multi-ethnic, multi-religious, and cosmopolitan areas of idiosyncratic and independent socialism into regions of xenophobic nationalism, wars, and, afterwards, Western-style democracy and capitalism. Unified by their artistic response to these cataclysmic changes, post-Yugoslav literary works and films have much to offer the wider world. Crnkovic reveals select post-Yugoslav literary and cinema works as groundbreaking exploratory achievements of global relevance. She presents post-Yugoslav literature and film as art that makes us aware of previously unconsidered things that bring us wars, and those that constitute part of the tapestry of peace. She foregrounds the radical potential of art to change and enrich the global landscapes of concepts, sensitivities, and politics. As such her book is important not only for those interested in this region, but also for all those wanting to discover and engage with world literature and cinema, and willing to encounter the potential of great new art to illuminate and challenge the world we live in.

When asked to name the first ""militant"" Black characters in film, we might imagine Blaxploitation heroes like Sweetback or Shaft. Yet, as this groundbreaking new book shows, there was a much earlier cycle of films featuring militant Black men - many of which were sponsored by the U.S. government. Militant Visions examines how, from the 1940s to the 1970s, the cinematic figure of the black soldier helped change the ways American moviegoers saw Black men, for the first time presenting African Americans as vital and integrated members of the nation. Elizabeth Reich traces the figure across a wide variety of movie genres, from action blockbusters like Bataan to patriotic musicals like Stormy Weather. In the process, she reveals how the image of the proud and powerful African American serviceman was crafted by an unexpected alliance of government propagandists, civil rights activists, and Black filmmakers. Offering a nuanced reading of a figure that was simultaneously conservative and radical, Reich considers how the cinematic Black soldier lent a human face to ongoing debates about racial integration, Black internationalism, and American militarism. She reads the Black soldier in film as inherently transnational, shaped by the displacements of diaspora, Third World revolutionary philosophy, and a legacy of Black artistry and performance. Militant Visions thus not only presents a new history of how American cinema represented race, it also demonstrates how film images helped to make history, shaping the progress of the civil rights movement itself.

JOHN HUGHES AND EIGHTIES CINEMA

John Hughes is the acclaimed writer and director of Ferris Bueller's Day Off, The Breakfast Club, Weird Science, Pretty In Pink and many other classic movies of the 1980s.

This book is the first full-length analysis of all of John Hughes's films throughout the 1980s; not only the features that he directed, but also those for which he provided the screenplay. By analysing these pictures and discussing their social and cultural significance in the wider context of the decade, Hughes's importance as a filmmaker will be considered, and his prominent contribution to cinema assessed. The book concludes with a detailed analysis of Ferris Bueller's Day Off, a film which is considered to be among Hughes's most critically successful works and also one of his most structurally refined.

REVIEW ON AMAZON

If like me, you were fortunate enough to live through and grow up during the 80's and early 90's, you'll remember just how rich comedy was back then. This book on it's own puts most comedies of the modern era to shame as it is a homage to one of the most talented minds in the game. I am of course speaking of none other than the late great John Hughes. This is a great book for getting into the details of how a master of his art came about and created such cinematic gems. Hughes will be sorely missed which is why books like this keep his spirit and work alive

I'd say this book is for people who are nostalgic 20-somethings or cinema buffs, but all-round a good book for just about anyone who would like to know what made one of the funniest minds of Hollywood tick.

EXTRACT FROM THE INTRODUCTION

Today John Hughes is just as well known for the scripts he created for hugely popular family films throughout the 1990s, including Chris Columbus's blockbuster Home Alone (1990), Brian Levant's Beethoven (1992) and Nick Castle's Dennis the Menace (1993), written under his pen-name of Edmond Dantes. But even these accomplishments couldn't compare to the artistic diversity of his output throughout the eighties. Although it is easy to remember Hughes for his meteorically successful teen movies right the way through the including The Breakfast Club (1985) and Ferris Bueller's Day (1986), he was every bit as adroit in his handling of suburban satires such as Mr Mom (1983) and Uncle Buck (1989), his wry observations of the great American holiday in National Lampoon's Vacation (1983) and The Great Outdoors (1988), the trials of an exasperated everyman commuter in Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987), and the expectation of anxious new parents in She's Having a Baby (1988). Throughout the course of Hughes's career, there has rarely been a lack of variety in his choice of subject matter.

The site of cinema is on the move. The extent to which technologically mediated sounds and images continue to be experienced as cinematic today is largely dependent on the intensified sense of being 'here, ' 'now' and 'me' that they convey. This intensification is fundamentally rooted in the cinematic's potential to intensify our experience of time, to convey time's thickening, of which the sense of place, and a sense of self-presence are the correlatives. In this study, Pepita Hesselberth traces this thickening of time across four different spatio-temporal configurations of the cinematic: a multi-media exhibition featuring the work of Andy Warhol (1928-1987); the handheld aesthetics of European art-house films; a large-scale media installation by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer; and the usage of the trope of the flash-forward in mainstream Hollywood cinema. Only by juxtaposing these cases by looking at what they have in common, this study argues, can we grasp the complexity of the changes that the cinematic is currently undergoing

How do we understand types of cinema that offer experiences of discomfort, awkwardness or disquieting uncertainty? This book examines a number of examples of such work at the heart of contemporary art and indie film. While the commercial mainstream tends to offer comforting viewing experiences - or moments of discomfort that exist largely to be overcome - The Cinema of Discomfort analyses films in which discomfort is offered in a sustained manner. Cinema of this kind confronts us with material such as distinctly uncomfortable sexual encounters. It invites us into uncertain relationships with awkward and sometimes unlikable characters. It presents us with challenging behaviour or what are presented as uncomfortable realities. It often refuses information on which to base judgments. More discomfortingly, cinema of this kind tends to provoke uncertainty at the level of what emotional responses we are encouraged to have towards difficult, sometimes controversial, characters or events. The Cinema of Discomfort examines a number of case-studies, including Palindromes by Todd Solondz (US) and Dogtooth from Yorgos Lanthimos (Greece), along with other examples from Austria, Sweden, the UK, the US and Germany. Offering close textual analysis of the manner in which discomfort is generated, it also asks how we should understand the appeal of such work to certain viewers and how the existence of films of this kind can be explained, as products of both their socio-cultural context and the more particular institutional realms of art and indie film.