Los Olvidados (1950) established Luis Bunuel's reputation as a world-class director. Set in the slums of Mexico City, it follows the crime-filled and violent lives of group of juvenile delinquents. The film exhibits some of Bunuel's recognisable themes of love's yearnings, social injustice, and surrealism, but with a layer of compassion that sets it apart from many of his other films. In 2003, 'Los Olvidados' was inducted into UNESCO's Memory of the World programme, which preserves documentary heritage of world significance. Mark Polizzotti explores the historical context, aesthetic importance and biographical significance of the film, providing the first complete overview of 'Los Olvidados' in English. He also presents an introduction to the Mexican film industry and places Bunuel and his films within it. While many critics have taken 'Los Olvidados' as a film about urban poverty, Mark Polizzotti sees it as a much more personal and mysterious statement about yearning, loss, and the need for redemption. By taking the notion of hunger as its structural principle, he explores the themes of love, betrayal, desire, and death that make the film such a powerful statement more than fifty years after its release.

This is the first book in English to concentrate exclusively on Los Olvidados and it seeks to present a concise but complete overview of the film, its history, production, and influence.

This Companion to Latin American Film is a new, up-to-date introduction to the best twenty-five films of the region. It is designed for the general reader who wants to know the basic facts, figures and ideas about the movies in Latin America. The introductory essay traces the history of Latin American cinema from its humble beginnings in the mid- 1890s until the smash hits of recent years: Like Water for Chocolate (1993), Central Station (1998), Love's a Bitch (2000), And your Mother Too (2001), City of God (2002). The early period when Latin American cinema was dominated by foreign film makers or foreign models (such as Hollywood), as well as the 1960s when as a genre it finally found its feet (the New Latin-American Cinema movement) - are also covered in depth. Each film chapter contains all the information you need -- cast and crew, awards, plot -- as well as a detailed analysis of the themes and techniques which make the film tick. There is a Guide to Further Reading which offers the reader advice on what to read next (all the important books, articles and Internet sites), as well as a Select Bibliography and an extensive index for ease of reference.

The second title in David Baldacci's bestselling series, The Forgotten is a fast-paced action thriller, featuring the hero of Zero Day – John Puller. Criminal investigator John Puller is drawn closer to home when his aunt is found dead in her house in Paradise, Florida. The local police have ruled the death as an accident, but Puller finds evidence to suggest that she may well have been murdered. On the surface the town lives up to its name, but as Puller digs deeper he realizes that this town and its inhabitants are more akin to Hell than Paradise. His belief is confirmed as evidence of strange and inexplicable events come to light. And when Puller learns the truth about what is happening in this once sleepy town, he knows that his discoveries will impact far wider than Paradise.

No longer content with accepting whiteness as the norm, critical scholars have turned their attention to whiteness itself. In "Critical White Studies: Looking Behind the Mirror," numerous thinkers, including Toni Morrison, Eric Foner, Peggy McIntosh, Andrew Hacker, Ruth Frankenberg, John Howard Griffin, David Roediger, Kathleen Heal Cleaver, Noel Ignatiev, Cherrie Moraga, and Reginald Horsman, attack such questions as: *How was whiteness invented, and why? *How has the category whiteness changed over time? *Why did some immigrant groups, such as the Irish and Jews, start out as nonwhite and later became white? *Can some individual people be both white and nonwhite at different times, and what does it mean to pass for white? *At what point does pride in being white cross the line into white power or white supremacy? *What can whites concerned over racial inequity or white privilege do about it? Science and pseudoscience are presented side by side to demonstrate how our views on whiteness often reflect preconception, not fact. For example, most scientists hold that race is not a valid scientific category -- genetic differences between races are insignificant compared to those within them. Yet, the one drop rule, whereby those with any nonwhite heritage are classified as nonwhite, persists even today. As the bell curve controversy shows, race concepts die hard, especially when power and prestige lie behind them. A sweeping portrait of the emerging field of whiteness studies, "Critical White Studies" presents, for the first time, the best work from sociology, law, history, cultural studies, and literature. Delgado and Stefancic expressly offer critical white studies as the next step in critical race theory. In focusing on whiteness, not only do they ask nonwhites to investigate more closely for what it means for others to be white, but also they invite whites to examine themselves more searchingly and to look behind the mirror.

Though Luis Buñuel, one of the most important filmmakers of the twentieth century, spent his most productive years as a director in Mexico, film histories and criticism invariably pay little attention to his work during this period. The only book-length English-language study of Buñuel's Mexican films, this book is the first to explore a significant but neglected area of this filmmaker's distinguished career and thus to fill a gap in our appreciation and understanding of both Buñuel's achievement and the history of Mexican film. Ernesto Acevedo-Muñoz considers Buñuel's Mexican films—made between 1947 and 1965—within the context of a national and nationalist film industry, comparing the filmmaker's employment of styles, genres, character types, themes, and techniques to those most characteristic of Mexican cinema. In this study Buñuel's films emerge as a link between the Classical Mexican cinema of the 1930s through the 1950s and the "new" Cinema of the 1960s, flourishing in a time of crisis for the national film industry and introducing some of the stylistic and conceptual changes that would revitalize Mexican cinema.

The Cinema of Latin America is the first volume in the new 24 Frames series of studies of national and regional cinema. In taking an explicitly text-centered approach, the books in this series offer a unique way of considering the particular concerns, styles and modes of representation of numerous national cinemas around the world. This volume focuses on the vibrant practices that make up Latin American cinema, a historically important regional cinema and one that is increasingly returning to popular and academic appreciation. Through 24 individual concise and insightful essays that each consider one significant film or documentary, the editors of this volume have compiled a unique introduction to the cinematic output of countries as diverse as Brazil, Argentina, Cuba, Mexico, Bolivia, Chile and Venezuala. The work of directors such as Luis Buñuel, Thomas Guiterrez Alea, Walter Salles, and Alfonso Arau is discussed and the collection includes in-depth studies of seminal works as such Los Olvidados, The Hour of the Furnaces, Like Water For Chocolate, Foreign Land, and Amoros Perros.

The author's main reason for writing this book, however, is simply to provide an introduction to the Mexican commercial cinema for American and other English-speaking readers. Although the United States has been, and continues to be, a major foreign market for Mexican movies, the overwhelming majority of Americans are unaware of them. Mexican films are restricted to the Hispanic theater circuits and shown without English subtitles; therefore anyone wishing to see a Mexican movie would have to be fairly fluent in Spanish. Such a requisite effectively eliminates almost the entire general audience in the United States from exposure to Mexican cinema.

Renewed interest in Latin American film industries has opened a host of paths of scholarly exploration. Productions from different countries reflect particular social attitudes, political climates and self-conceptions, and must be considered separately and as a whole. The search for national identity is a key component of Latin American films in a time of decreasing cultural diversity and pressures to westernize. Globalization and falling government support have fueled cross-border collaborations, calling into question the idea of a movie's "nationality," and leaving some nations' film industries on the brink of collapse. Whether thriving or barely surviving, struggling to remain distinct or embracing globalization on its own terms, addressing the government or society, Latin American cinema remains vibrant, offering a wealth of material to scholars of all stripes. These collected essays explore important elements of Latin American cinema and its associated national film industries. The first section of essays examines the impact of modernization on both Latin American screen images and the industry itself, offering modern and historical perspectives. The second section focuses on filmmakers who deal with issues of gender and sexuality, whether sexual transgression, the role of female characters, or societal attitudes towards sex and nudity. The final section of essays discusses the relationship between national identity and Latin American film industries: how movies are used to create a sense of self; Uruguay's ongoing identity crisis; and Brazil's use of Hollywood's stereotypical depiction of the country to depict itself. Photographs and an annotated bibliography accompany each essay, and an index supplements the text.