In "Kind Hearts and Coronets" (1949), Louis Mazzini (Dennis Price) schemes and murders his way to a dukedom. This title looks into the turbulent personalities that formed the complex style of this film to unravel the fusion of cynicism, contempt, sparkling wit and philosophical curiosity.

The film is a consummate thriller which takes in - without once losing sight of the human cost - police corruption, organized crime, the sleaze press, high-class prostitution, murder and the ways movies and life twist together.

In this detailed analysis of "Psycho", the author explores all the elements that make up this film. In addition he develops various lines of argument about spectatorship, Hollywood narrative codes, psychoanalysis and editing and shot-composition, amongst other themes.

Aristocrat and Marxist, master equally of harsh realism and sublime melodrama, Luchino Visconti (1906-1976) was without question one of the greatest European film directors. This book studies the director and includes the last three films that Visconti made before his death.

Stars, studio heads and colleagues - David Putnam is a regular target - all come under Parker's merciless gaze as he works out the frustrations of being a professional film-maker with acid wit in this collection of cartoons.

This is an examination of "The Night of the Hunter", Charles Laughton's only outing as a film director. It looks at the symbolism of the piece, at Willa, her throat cut sitting in the Model-T Ford, and the Preacher, a silhouetted threat on the horizon.

Dana Polan sets out to unlock the style and technique of "Pulp Fiction". He shows how broad Tarantino's points of reference are, and analyzes the narrative accomplishment and complexity. In addition, Polan argues that macho attitudes celebrated in film are much more complex than they seem.

Between 1918-1928 British film was poised between a Victorian past and a future marked out as American. Examining a cinema inextricably intertwined with notions of theatricality, pictorialism and literariness, in which the high cultural, middlebrow and popular intersect, this book re-evaluates films of the 1920s.