'This book has an enormously attractive drive and fluency, carrying through a ground-breaking intervention in debates about basic gendering issues through a new kind of close attention to issues of aesthetics and mise en scène. The great thing is the way the prose itself operates in comparable ways to the 'men's cinema' forms of mise en scène that are being identified and analysed.' Charles Barr, Professorial Research Fellow, St Mary's University College, Twickenham 'Men's Cinema looks at familiar movies in surprising new ways. By paying close attention both to gender theory and to intricacies of film form, Stella Bruzzi shows us that male-centred films, from The Wild Bunch to Inception, provide more nuanced, and less oppressive, images of masculinity than is commonly suspected.' Steven Shaviro, DeRoy Professor of English, Wayne State University, Michigan How does cinema treat and evoke masculinity? How can a film's style convey and construct notions of 'being a man'? Is there such a thing as a masculine aesthetic? Men's Cinema offers a fresh theorisation of men in Hollywood cinema via a theoretical discussion of definitions of masculinity and the close textual analysis of classic and contemporary films. Through an examination of mise en scène, this book moves beyond discussions of representation and narrative to an exploration of the physical or instinctive effects of cinema and how we are invited to engage with, desire or identify with Hollywood's vision of men and masculinity. By delineating how Hollywood has built up and refined the language of men's cinema through a series of recurrent, refined tropes, Men's Cinema critically explores masculinity and the concept of a male aesthetic within film. Films discussed include: The Deer Hunter, Dirty Harry, Goodfellas, Inception, Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, Once Upon a Time in the West, Point Break, Raging Bull, Rebel Without a Cause, Reservoir Dogs, Sherlock Holmes, There's Always Tomorrow, The Wild Bunch. Stella Bruzzi is Professor of Film and Television Studies, University of Warwick and Fellow of the British Academy. Her previous publications include Undressing Cinema: Clothing and Identity in the Movies (1997) and Bringing Up Daddy: Fatherhood and Masculinity in Post-war Hollywood (2005). Cover image: Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, 2011 (c) Paramount Pictures/The Kobal Collection. Cover design: [EUP logo] www.euppublishing.com