This collection of essays examines the ways in which recent Shakespeare films portray anxieties of an impending global wasteland, technological alienation, spiritual destruction, and the effects of globalization. Films covered include "Titus", William Shakespeare's "Romeo & Juliet", Almereyda's "Hamlet", "Revengers Tragedy", "Twelfth Night", "The Passion of the Christ", Radford's "The Merchant of Venice", "The Lion King", and Godard's "King Lear", among others that directly adapt or reference Shakespeare. Essays chart the apocalyptic mise-en-scenes, disorienting imagery, and topsy-turvy plots...

The film sequel has been maligned in popular culture as a vampirish corporative exercise in profit-making and narrative regurgitation. Drawing upon a wide range of examples from early cinema to the twenty-first century, this volume reveals the increasing popularity of, and experimentation with, film sequels as a central dynamic of Hollywood cinema. Now creeping into world cinemas and independent film festivals, the sequel is persistently employed as a vehicle for cross-cultural dialogue and as a structure by which memories and cultural narratives can be circulated across geographical and...

Sequels, serials, and remakes have been a staple of cinema since the very beginning, and recent years have seen the emergence of dynamic and progressive variations of these multi-film franchises. Taking a broad range of sequels as case studies, from the Godfather movies to the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, Second Takes confronts the complications posed by film sequels and their aftermaths, proposing new critical approaches to what has become a dominant industrial mode of Hollywood cinema. The contributors explore the sequel's investments in repetition, difference, continuation, and...