With impeccable timing, outrageous humor, irreverent wit, and a superb sense of the ridiculous, Groucho tells the saga of the Marx Brothers: the poverty of their childhood in New York's Upper East Side; the crooked world of small-time vaudeville (where they learned to carry blackjacks); how a pretzel magnate and the graceless dancer of his dreams led to the Marx Brothers' first Broadway hit, "I'll Say She Is!"; how the stock market crash in 1929 proved a godsend for Groucho (even though he lost nearly a quarter of a million dollars); the adventures of the Marx Brothers in Hollywood, the making of their hilarious films, and Groucho's triumphant television series, "You Bet Your Life!" Here is the life and lunatic times of the great eccentric genius, Groucho, a.k.a. Julius Henry Marx.

The power of the moving image to conjure marvelous worlds has usually been to understand it in terms of 'move magic'. On film, a fascination for enchantment and wonder has transmuted older beliefs in the supernatural into secular attractions. But this study is not about the history of special effects or a history of magic. Rather, it attempts to determine the influence and status of secular magic on television within complex modes of delivery before discovering interstices with film. Historically, the overriding concern on television has been for secular magic that informs and empowers rather than a fairytale effect that deceives and mystifies. Yet, shifting notions of the real and the uncertainty associated with the contemporary world has led to television developing many different modes that have become capable of constant hybridization. The dynamic interplay between certainty and indeterminacy is the key to understanding secular magic on television and film and exploring the interstices between them. Sexton ranges from the real-time magic of street performers, such as David Blaine, Criss Angel, and Dynamo, to Penn and Teller's comedy magic, to the hypnotic acts of Derren Brown, before finally visiting the 2006 films The Illusionist and The Prestige. Each example charts how the lack of clear distinctions between reality and illusion in modes of representation and presentation disrupt older theoretical oppositions. Secular Magic and the Moving Image not only re-evaluates questions about modes and styles but raises further questions about entertainment and how the relations between the program maker and the audience resemble those between the conjuror and spectator. By re-thinking these overlapping practices and tensions and the marking of the indeterminacy of reality on media screens, it becomes possible to revise our understanding of inter-medial relations.

In Film and Video Intermediality, Janna Houwen innovatively rewrites the concept of medium specificity in order to answer the questions "what is meant by video?" and "what is meant by film?" How are these two media (to be) understood? How can film and video be defined as distinct, specific media? In this era of mixed moving media, it is vital to ask these questions precisely and especially on the media of video and film. Mapping the specificity of film and video is indispensable in analyzing and understanding the many contemporary intermedial objects in which film and video are mixed or combined.

This book uses popular films to understand the convergence of crime control and the ideology of repression in contemporary capitalism. It focuses on the cinematic figure of the fallen guardian, a protagonist who, in the course of a narrative, falls from grace and becomes an enemy of the established social order. The fallen guardian is a figure that allows for the analysis of a particular crime control measure through the perspective of both an enforcer and a target. The very notion of 'justice' is challenged, and questions are posed in relation to the role that films assume in the reproduction of policing as it is. In doing so, the book combines a historical far-reaching perspective with popular culture analysis. At the core remains the value of the cinematic figure of the fallen guardian for contemporary understandings of urban space and urban crime control and how films are clear examples of the ways in which the ideology of repression is reproduced. This book questions the justifications that are often given for social control in cities and understands cinema as a medium for offering critique of such processes and justifications. Explored are the crime control measures of private policing in relation to RoboCop (1987), preventative policing and Minority Report (2002), mass incarceration in The Dark Knight Rises (2012), and extra-judicial killing in Blade Runner 2049 (2017). The book speaks to those interested in crime control in critical criminology, cultural criminology, urban studies, and beyond.

Fertile Visions conceptualises the uterus as a narrative space so that the female reproductive body can be understood beyond the constraints of a gendered analysis. Unravelling pregnancy from notions of maternity and mothering demands that we think differently about narratives of reproduction. This is crucial in the current global political climate wherein the gender-specificity of pregnancy contributes to how bodies that reproduce are marginalised, controlled, and criminalised. Anne Carruthers demonstrates fascinating and insightful close analyses of films such as Juno, Birth, Ixcanul and Arrival as examples of the uterus as a narrative space. Fertile Visions engages with research on the foetal ultrasound scan as well as phenomenologies, affect and spectatorship in film studies to offer a new way to look, think and analyse pregnancy and the pregnant body in cinema from the Americas.

The Cinema of Sofia Coppola provides the first comprehensive analysis of Coppola's oeuvre that situates her work broadly in relation to contemporary artistic, social and cultural currents. Suzanne Ferriss considers the central role of fashion - in its various manifestations - to Coppola's films, exploring fashion's primacy in every cinematic dimension: in film narrative; production, costume and sound design; cinematography; marketing, distribution and auteur branding. She also explores the theme of celebrity, including Coppola's own director-star persona, and argues that Coppola's auteur status rests on an original and distinct visual style, derived from the filmmaker's complex engagement with photography and painting. Ferriss analyzes each of Coppola's six films, categorizing them in two groups: films where fashion commands attention (Marie Antoinette, The Beguiled and The Bling Ring) and those where clothing and material goods do not stand out ostentatiously, but are essential in establishing characters' identities and relationships (The Virgin Suicides, Lost in Translation and Somewhere). Throughout, Ferriss draws on approaches from scholarship on fashion, film, visual culture, art history, celebrity and material culture to capture the complexities of Coppola's engagement with fashion, culture and celebrity. The Cinema of Sofia Coppola is beautifully illustrated with color images from her films, as well as artworks and advertising artefacts.

Contributions by Zoe Bursztajn-Illingworth, Marc DiPaolo, Emine Akkulah Do?fan, Caroline Eades, Noelle Hedgcock, Tina Olsin Lent, Rashmila Maiti, Jack Ryan, Larry T. Shillock, Richard Vela, and Geoffrey Wilson In Next Generation Adaptation: Spectatorship and Process, editor Allen H. Redmon brings together eleven essays from a range of voices in adaptation studies. This anthology explores the political and ethical contexts of specific adaptations and, by extension, the act of adaptation itself. Grounded in questions of gender, genre, and race, these investigations focus on the ways attention to these categories renegotiates the rules of power, privilege, and principle that shape the contexts that seemingly produce and reproduce them. Contributors to the volume examine such adaptations as Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof, Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past, Taylor Sheridan's Sicario and Sicario: Day of the Soldado, Jean-Jacques Annaud's Wolf Totem, Spike Lee's He's Got Game, and Jim Jarmusch's Paterson. Each chapter considers the expansive dialogue adaptations accelerate when they realize their capacity to bring together two or more texts, two or more peoples, two or more ideologies without allowing one expression to erase another. Building on the growing trends in adaptation studies, these essays explore the ways filmic texts experienced as adaptations highlight ethical or political concerns and argue that spectators are empowered to explore implications being raised by the adaptations.

Cult Film as a Guide to Life investigates the world and experience of cult films, from well-loved classics to the worst movies ever made. Including comprehensive studies of cult phenomena such as trash films, exploitation versions, cult adaptations, and case studies of movies as different as Showgirls, Room 237 and The Lord of the G-Strings, this lively, provocative and original book shows why cult films may just be the perfect guide to making sense of the contemporary world. Using his expertise in two fields, I.Q. Hunter also explores the important overlap between cult film and adaptation studies. He argues that adaptation studies could learn a great deal from cult and fan studies about the importance of audiences' emotional investment not only in texts but also in the relationships between them, and how such bonds of caring are structured over time. The book's emergent theme is cult film as lived experience. With reference mostly to American cinema, Hunter explores how cultists, with their powerful emotional investment in films, care for them over time and across numerous intertexts in relationships of memory, nostalgia and anticipation.

The story of an immortal Scottish warrior battling evil down through the centuries, Highlander fused a high-concept idea with the kinetic energy of a pop promo pioneer and Queen's explosive soundtrack to become a cult classic. When two American producers took a chance on a college student's script, they set in motion a chain of events involving an imploding British film studio, an experimental music video director still finding his filmmaking feet, a former James Bond with a spiralling salary, and the unexpected arrival of low-budget production company, Cannon Films. Author Jonathan Melville looks back at the creation of Highlander with the help of more than 60 cast and crew, as they talk candidly about the gruelling shoot that took them from the back alleys of London, to the far reaches of the Scottish Highlands, and onto the mean streets of 1980s New York City. With insights from Queen's Brian May and Roger Taylor on the film's iconic music, exclusive screenwriter commentary on unmade scripts, never-before-seen photos from private collections, and a glimpse into the promotional campaign that never was. If there can be only one book on Highlander then this is it!

This is an original investigation of how movies have reflected and helped to shape the values of a generation. From All the President's Men to Wall Street, US films of the 1970s and 80s were a kaleidoscope of shifting values and contrasting moral viewpoints. Knowing that movies mirror the way we think we are - or would like to be - O'Brien focuses on the key values (or their absence) found in films from this period in order to see more clearly what Americans really cherished in life, and how these values have evolved or changed. Comprehensive and thought provoking, this book addresses how and why movies glamorized and portrayed certain professions; the changing role of women; the targeting of religion for satire; the addressing of environmental issues and film's representation of and engagement with history.

Skepticism Films: Knowing and Doubting the World in Contemporary Cinema introduces skepticism films as updated configurations of skepticist thought experiments which exemplify the pervasiveness of philosophical ideas in popular culture. Philipp Schmerheim defends a pluralistic film-philosophical position according to which films can be, but need not be, expressions of philosophical thought in their own right. It critically investigates the influence of ideas of skepticism on film-philosophical theories and develops a typology of skepticism films by analyzing The Truman Show, Inception, The Matrix, Vanilla Sky, The Thirteenth Floor, Moon and other contemporary skepticism films. With its focus on skepticism as one of the most significant philosophical problems, Skepticism Films provides a better understanding of the dynamic interplay between film, theories of film and philosophy.

In a "return" to Edmund Husserl and Sigmund Freud, Intimacy and the Anxieties of Cinematic Flesh explores how we can engage these foundational thinkers of phenomenology and psychoanalysis in an original approach to film. The idea of the intimate spectator caught up in anxiety is developed to investigate a range of topics central to these critical approaches and cinema, including: flesh as a disruptive state formed in the relationships of intimacy and anxiety; time and the formation of cinema's enduring objects; space and things; the sensual, the "real" and the unconscious; wildness, disruption, and resistance; and the nightmare, reading "phantasy" across the critical fields. Along with Husserl and Freud, other key thinkers discussed include Edith Stein, Roman Ingarden, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Mikel Dufrenne in phenomenology; Melanie Klein, Ernest Jones, Julia Kristeva, and Rosine Lefort in psychoanalysis. Framing these issues and critical approaches is the question: how might Husserlian phenomenology and Freudian/Lacanian psychoanalysis, so often seen as contradistinctive, be explored through their potential commonalities rather than differences? In addressing such a question, this book postulates a new approach to film through this phenomenological/psychoanalytic reconceptualization. A wide range of films are examined not simply as exemplars, but to test the idea that cinema itself can be a version of critical thinking.

There are a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches to researching how film spectators make sense of film texts, from the film text itself, the psychological traits and sociocultural group memberships of the viewer, or even the location and surroundings of the viewer. However, we can only understand the agency of film spectators in situations of film spectatorship by studying actual spectators' interactions with specific film texts in specific contexts of engagement. Making Sense of Cinema: Empirical Studies into Film Spectators and Spectatorship uses a number of empirical approaches (ethnography, focus groups, interviews, historical, qualitative experiment and physiological experiment) to consider how the film spectator makes sense of the text itself or the ways in which the text fits into his or her everyday life. With case studies ranging from preoccupations of queer and ageing men in Spanish and French cinema and comparative eye-tracking studies based on the two completely different soundscapes of Monsters Inc. and Saving Private Ryan to cult fanbase of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy and attachment theory to its fictional characters, Making Sense of Cinema aligns this subset of film studies with the larger fields of media reception studies, allowing for dialogue with the broader audience and reception studies field.