Violent women in cinema pose an exciting challenge to spectators, overturning ideas of 'typical' feminine subjectivity. This book explores the representation of homicidal women in contemporary art and independent cinema. Examining narrative, style and spectatorship, Loreck investigates the power of art cinema to depict transgressive femininity.

Screening Scarlett Johansson: Gender, Genre, Stardom provides an account of Johansson's persona, work and stardom, extending from her breakout roles in independent cinema, to contemporary blockbusters, to her self-parodying work in science-fiction. Screening Scarlett Johansson is more than an account of Johansson's career; it positions Johansson as a point of reference for interrogating how femininity, sexuality, identity and genre play out through a contemporary woman star and the textual manipulations of her image. The chapters in this collection cast a critical eye over the characters Johansson has portrayed, the personas she has inhabited, and how the two intersect and influence one another. They draw out the multitude of meanings generated through and inherent to her performances, specifically looking at processes of transformation, metamorphosis and self-deconstruction depicted in her work.

Critics regularly use the term "provocateur" to describe controversial film directors. Although most individuals who attract this term are men, there is a long and largely unexamined history of female auteurs who shock and unsettle their viewers. Provocation in Women's Filmmaking: Authorship and Art Cinema investigates how women directors participate in the tradition of provocative art cinema. Focusing on the post-millennium films of auteurs such as Lisa Aschan, Catherine Breillat, Jennifer Kent, Isabella Ekloef, Lucile Hadzihalilovic, Claire Denis, Anna Biller and Athina Rachel Tsangari, this book considers the aesthetics and strategies of women's provocative filmmaking in contemporary cinema. Challenging the gendering of provocation as a hyper-masculine mode of authorship, the book uncovers an enticing and complex array of divisive works by women.

Screening Scarlett Johansson: Gender, Genre, Stardom provides an account of Johansson's persona, work and stardom, extending from her breakout roles in independent cinema, to contemporary blockbusters, to her self-parodying work in science-fiction. Screening Scarlett Johansson is more than an account of Johansson's career; it positions Johansson as a point of reference for interrogating how femininity, sexuality, identity and genre play out through a contemporary woman star and the textual manipulations of her image. The chapters in this collection cast a critical eye over the characters Johansson has portrayed, the personas she has inhabited, and how the two intersect and influence one another. They draw out the multitude of meanings generated through and inherent to her performances, specifically looking at processes of transformation, metamorphosis and self-deconstruction depicted in her work.