Studying British Cinema: 1999-2009 adopts a number of approaches to popularist, mainstream, and esoteric arthouse films. The book considers the institutional and financial factors that influence U.K. film production and assesses issues of genre, representation, authorship, and social, economic, and political contexts. The growth of coproduction is considered by looking at both Aardman Animation and the Harry Potter franchise (2001 to the present). Representations of social class factor into films as diverse as Red Road (2006) and Love, Actually (2003), and developments in...

Ever since its inception, British cinema has been obsessed with crime and the criminal. One of the first narrative films to be produced in Britain, the Hepworth's 1905 short Rescued by Rover, was a fast-paced, quick-edited tale of abduction and kidnap, and the first British sound film, Alfred Hitchcock's Blackmail (1930), centered on murder and criminal guilt. For a genre seemingly so important to the British cinematic character, there is little direct theoretical or historical work focused on it. The Britain of British cinema is often written about in terms of national history,...