Successful in both Japan and the West, Akira had a huge impact on the international growth in popularity of manga and anime. Closely analysing the film and its key themes, Colin O'Dell and Michelle Le Blanc assess its historical importance, its impact on the Western perception of anime, and its influence on science fiction cinema.

Alien, that legendary fusion of science fiction and horror, was born out of a terrible monster movie script called Star Beast. Tracing the constellation of talents that came together to produce the film, this book explores how and why this interstellar slasher movie, this old dark house in space, came to coil itself around our darkest imaginings.

One of a cluster of extraordinary films to come out of post-war, post-Fascist Italy - loosely labelled 'neorealist' - Bicycle Thieves won an Oscar in 1949, topped the first Sight and Sound poll of the best films of all time in 1952 and has been hugely influential throughout world cinema ever since.

A study that sets the film "The Big Lebowski" into the context of 1990s Hollywood cinema, anatomized for its witty relationship with the classics it satirizes, and discusses in terms of its key theme: the hopeless flailing of ridiculously unmanly men in the world of discombobulated, mixed-up, or put-on identities that is Los Angeles.

"Black Narcissus" is a landmark film in the canon of Powell and Pressburger. This book draws on archival documents, original set drawings and stills to explore its enduring images of both place and gender. It also demonstrate the film's achievements, both as a production and as a vehicle for ideas exploring issues of technique, style and others.

Blade Runner has proved to be one of the most enduring and influential films of the 1980s. This new edition of Bukatman's study of Blade Runner is published in the BFI Film Classics 20th anniversary series of special editions, with a new foreword by the author and a stunning new jacket design by Paul Pope.

This study analyzes "Chinatown" in the context of the figure of the detective in literature and film from Sophocles to Edgar Allan Poe and Alfred Hitchcock.

In this book, which includes a new interview with Ballard who wrote the book on which the film was based, Sinclair explores the temporal loop which connects film and novel, and asks questions such as to what extent is Crash a premonition of some of the more remarkable media events of recent times. In the BFI MODERN CLASSICS series.

When it was released, "Dead Man" puzzled many audiences and critics. Here, the author argues that the film is both a quantum leap and a logical step in the director's career, and it's a film that speaks powerfully of contemporary concerns.

This work suggests that Humphrey Jennings' re-enacted documentary about the London Blitz, "Fires Were Started", is an understated propaganda masterpiece. It provides an account of how Jennings recaptured the reality of the Blitz for his cumbersome camera through a process of meticulous research.

Made at the height of the Cold War and Hollywood's anticommunist purges, director Fred Zinnemann, writer Daniel Taradash and producer Buddy Adler defied military and industry pressure to censor the material. Exploring the film's full production history and drawing upon archival documents and rare interviews with cast and crew, J.

Robert de Niro and Al Pacino have acted opposite each other once, and that was in Heat, Michael Mann's operatic 1995 heist thriller. Boasting a series of meticulously orchestrated setpieces that underline Mann's sense of scale and architecture, Heat is also a rhapsody to Los Angeles as Hanna closes in on his prey.

Jaws divides critics into those who dismiss it as infantile and sensational, and those who see the shark as freighted with political and psychosexual meaning. The author argues that both interpretations obscure the film's success as a work of art.