"This book takes on topics where critics fear to tread, into the moral and religious areas of life that really matter to ordinary people." James Hogan takes twenty popular films that have withstood the test of time-including Star Wars, Rain Man, Amadeus, The Shawshank Redemption, Groundhog Day, The Truman Show, and Forrest Gump-and discusses them with a view toward extracting lessons of Christian morality and, where appropriate, drawing parallels with the life of Jesus. Youth groups, adult film-discussion groups, and college and high-school classes on film will find this a valuable resource, particularly because the author has intentionally avoided movies about overtly religious topics. A set of reflection and discussion questions for each film facilitates use of the book in a group setting. Book jacket.

Catholic Literature and Film: Incarnational Love and Suffering is meant to be considered as a work of literary criticism, not film adaptation studies. In it, the author explores six literary works dealing with Catholic themes and the film versions of these works. The discussion of the films is at the service of analyzing the texts. Underlying all the discussions is an incarnational, sacramental view of the texts, which links to my interpretation of the film versions of them. Catholic and actually any Christian interpretation of literature or film or any other art form is rooted in an iconic and sacramental understanding of imagery as a means of conveying the sacred. Catholic spirituality lends itself to this sort of approach, as it is deeply rooted in the ability to see sacred things through physical means. A key sub-theme is romantic love in connection with salvation, which Charles Williams, one of the “Inklings” (the group of British writers, including J.R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, who met and discussed literature and theology), calls “the theology of romantic love,” as well as the sub-themes of redemptive suffering, and grace. My interest in the book is not an analysis of cinematography, per se, but on the films as vehicles for religious ideas. What makes this approach unique is that it doesn’t deal with only faith and film, as Peter Frazer does very well in his book Images of the Passion: The Sacramental Mode in Film, for example; it also goes beyond the realm of strict literary criticism in its tackling of how religiously oriented works of literature are affected by the transformation into film.

Store writing materials for unique learning activities inside attractive gift bags and watch students dig into them with gusto.

Edgar Award-winning editor Otto Penzler's new anthology rolls out the red carpet for the stories that Hollywood is made of. A Vintage Crime/Black Lizard Original. Lights! Camera! Action! The latest book in the Big Book series takes us behind the curtain to uncover the stories that became some of the greatest films of the silver screen. There's the W. Somerset Maugham short story that inspired Hitchcock's Secret Agent; Robert Louis Stevenson's horrifying tale that was later turned into the iconic movie The Body Snatcher, starring Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff; Sir Ian Fleming's "From a View to a Kill," later one of Roger Moore's greatest Bond films; and "Cyclists' Raid," the short story that formed the basis for the legendary Brando film The Wild One. Otto Penzler delivers the director's cut on these classic short stories and the films they gave rise to. So grab your Sno-Caps and a jumbo box of popcorn and curl up with these cinematic tales from the likes of Agatha Christie, Dennis Lehane, Joyce Carol Oates, Dashiell Hammett, O. Henry, Edgar Allan Poe, and Arthur Conan Doyle.

Salvation from Cinema offers something new to the burgeoning field of "religion and film": the religious significance of film technique. Discussing the history of both cinematic devices and film theory, Crystal Downing argues that attention to the material medium echoes Christian doctrine about the materiality of Christ’s body as the medium of salvation. Downing cites Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, and Hindu perspectives on film in order to compare and clarify the significance of medium within the frameworks of multiple traditions. This book will be useful to professors and students interested in the relationship between religion and film.