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Action Cinema Since 2000 addresses an increasingly lively and evolving field of scholarship, probing the definition and testing the potential of action cinema to reframe the mode for the 21st century. Contributors examine a broad range of content, from blockbusters to smaller independent films, originating from China, Korea, India, France, the USA, and Mexico. Ranging from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) to Polite Society (2023), they consider the changing modes of action cinema, with streaming assuming global importance and an ever-increasing number of generic blends. They consider under-explored areas of action film, particularly how race, ethnicity, gender, and age figure in narratives and through image and soundtracks. Overall, the book demonstrates how 21st century action cinema engages with and reflects geopolitical, creative, and industrial developments. Arguing that it continues to offer fantasies of empowerment and mobility that say much about how power is understood in diverse contexts today.>
About the author
Chris Holmlund is Professor Emerita of Cinema Studies, Women’s Studies and French at the University of Tennessee, USA. She has longstanding research interests in action film, stardom, and performance. Her recent books include Female Trouble (2017) and editorship of The Ultimate Stallone Reader (2014). She is currently writing a book called Action Films, Action Stars.Lisa Purse is Professor of Film in the Department of Film, Theatre and Television, University of Reading, UK. She is a leading action and digital effects scholar with interests in the politics of representation and the aesthetics of contemporary digital cinema technologies. Her publications include Contemporary Action Cinema (2011), Digital Imaging in Popular Cinema (2013) and (as co-editor) Disappearing War: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Cinema and Erasure in the Post-9/11 World (2017).Yvonne Tasker is Professor of Media and Communication at the University of Leeds. She has written extensively on gender in popular cinema and television. Her most recent publications are Action Cinema Since 2000, co-edited with Chris Holmlund and Lisa Purse (BFI, 2024) and Jill Craigie: Film and Feminism in Postwar Britain, co-authored with Sadie Wearing (2025).
