Film noir has been understood as a genre exclusive to Hollywood. But classical US noir's downbeat sensibility also finds expression in later films from Japan, South Korea and greater China (including Hong Kong) and Taiwan that have both participated in and been excluded from circuits of global-noir traffic, past and present. Noir is a form of generic expression, an international filmic sensibility and a discourse loosely joining innumerable texts and a range of production and reception phenomena. However defined and categorized, the genre offers a compelling frame through which to view...

This book uses feminist and cultural-studies analysis to understand the global resonance of contemporary action cinema and its counterparts in popular literature.