41 | CONTEMPORARY BRITISH CINEMA

This volume offers a detailed and comprehensive analysis of British film culture from 1997 to the present. Using a wide range of films from the Blair era and beyond as case studies – from from Notting Hill (1999) and Billy Elliot (2000) to 28 Days Later (2002) and The Queen (2006) – it examines the ways in which recent British filmmaking might be regarded as distinctive, relevant and successful.

November 2008

978-1-905674-71-8 (pbk)

£12.99

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James Leggott is Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at Northumbria University. He has published on various aspects of British film and television culture, and is a contributor to The Trouble With Men: Masculinities in European and Hollywood Cinema (2004).

'Leggott's slender volume proves a consistently compelling read, which, in offering ‘a survey of filmmaking during this period, and a summary of the major debates around contemporary British cinema', identifies intriguing commonality and diversity across a wide body of films.' - Deborah Allison, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television

'An informative, discursive and wide-ranging survey of home-produced cinema of the Blair and Brown eras.' – Top 5 Christmas Books (Film), Time Out London

'A lucidly written and informative overview of recent British cinema that will serve as an excellent introduction to its subject. It ranges widely over what is a complex and heterogeneous terrain (over 400 films are mentioned) and provides a judicious and thoughtful summary of the issues and debates that circulate around British cinema including genre, funding, the politics of representation, nationality and the perennial problem of the cultural value (or not) of the British film industry.' – Andrew Spicer, University of the West of England

'This is a comprehensive, detailed survey of British cinema in the Blair era. The scholarship is exemplary, having both range and depth of coverage. Everything is here, from popular genres to art cinema, from independent filmmaking to Lottery-funded cinema. Above all, this book dispels the myth that recent British films have been largely predictable. What emerges is a sense of the complex and contradictory forces at work, and of how this has produced the rich and varied terrain that is contemporary British cinema.' – Robert Shail, University of Wales, Lampeter