This book examines performances in the American film industry's highest-earning and most influential films. Countering decades of discourse and the conventional notion that special effects are the real stars of Hollywood blockbusters, this book finds that the acting performances in these big-budget action movies are actually better, and more genre-appropriate, than reputed. It argues that while blockbusters are often edited for speed, thrills, and simplicity, and performances are sometimes tailored to this style, most major productions feature more scenes of stage-like acting than hyper-kinetic action. Knowing this, producers of the world's highest-budgeted motion pictures usually cast strong or generically appropriate actors. With chapters offering unique readings of some of cinema's biggest hits, such as The Dark Knight, Pirates of the Caribbean, Star Wars, Iron Man and The Hunger Games, this unprecedented study sheds new light on the importance of performance in the Hollywood blockbuster.

"Star Actors in the Hollywood Renaissance: Representing Rough Rebels" serves as a corrective supplement to the extant, director-centric history of American cinema's most lauded period. In contrast to star studies that showcase disparate performances, this book focuses on a specific time and place - Hollywood in the crucible, formative years from 1968 through 1971 - and offers close analysis of star actors' deterministic influences over nine of the era's most hallowed films. By examining film reviews and 'star press' from the national magazines whose covers they then dominated, Smith-Rowsey shows how three emergent 'Rough Rebels' - Dustin Hoffman, Jack Nicholson, and Elliott Gould - were understood and contextualized as the best possible responses to Hollywood's twin crises of capital and creativity. As a summary, Hoffman, Nicholson, and Gould, as well as their peers and successors, were positioned and received as absurdist, ironic, and dismissive toward women, and these qualities cast a wide shadow over both their films and much Hollywood cinema in the following decades.

Netflix is the definitive media company of the 21st century. It was among the first to parlay new Internet technologies into a successful business model, and in the process it changed how consumers access film and television. It is now one of the leading providers of digitally delivered media content and is continually expanding access across a host of platforms and mobile devices. Despite its transformative role, however, Netflix has drawn very little critical attention-far less than competitors such as YouTube, Apple, Amazon, Comcast, and HBO. This collection addresses this gap, as the essays are designed to critically explore the breadth and diversity of Netflix's effect from a variety of different scholarly perspectives, a necessary approach considering the hybrid nature of Netflix, its inextricable links to new models of media production, distribution, viewer engagement and consumer behavior, its relationship to existing media conglomerates and consumer electronics, its capabilities as a web-based service provider and data network, and its reliance on a broader technological infrastructure.

Netflix is the definitive media company of the 21st century. It was among the first to parlay new Internet technologies into a successful business model, and in the process it changed how consumers access film and television. It is now one of the leading providers of digitally delivered media content and is continually expanding access across a host of platforms and mobile devices. Despite its transformative role, however, Netflix has drawn very little critical attention-far less than competitors such as YouTube, Apple, Amazon, Comcast, and HBO. This collection addresses this gap, as the essays are designed to critically explore the breadth and diversity of Netflix's effect from a variety of different scholarly perspectives, a necessary approach considering the hybrid nature of Netflix, its inextricable links to new models of media production, distribution, viewer engagement and consumer behavior, its relationship to existing media conglomerates and consumer electronics, its capabilities as a web-based service provider and data network, and its reliance on a broader technological infrastructure.