Action Cinema Since 2000 addresses an increasingly lively and evolving field of scholarship, probing the definition and testing the potential of action cinema to reframe the mode for the 21st century.

Contributors examine a broad range of content, from blockbusters to smaller independent films, originating from China, Korea, India, France, the USA, and Mexico. Ranging from JSA: Joint Security Area (Gondonggeonygbi guyeok) (2000) to Polite Society (2023), they consider the changing modes of action cinema, with streaming assuming global importance and an ever-increasing number of generic blends. They consider under-explored areas of action film, particularly how race, ethnicity, gender, and age figure in narratives and through image and soundtracks.

Overall, the book demonstrates how 21st century action cinema engages with and reflects geopolitical, creative, and industrial developments. Contributors argue that it continues to offer fantasies of empowerment and mobility that say much about how power is understood in diverse contexts today.

Chris Holmlund is Professor Emerita of Cinema Studies, Women's Studies and French at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, USA. She has longstanding research interests in action film, stardom, and performance. Her books include Female Trouble (2017) and American Cinema of the 1990s (2208). She is editor of The Ultimate Stallone Reader (2014).

Lisa Purse is Professor of Film at the University of Reading, UK. She is a leading action and digital effects scholar with interests in the politics of representation and the aesthetics of contemporary digital cinema technologies. Her books include Contemporary Action Cinema (2011), and Digital Imaging in Popular Cinema (2013). She is co-editor of Disappearing War: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Cinema and Erasure in the Post-9/11 World (2017).

Yvonne Tasker is Professor of Media and Communication at the University of Leeds, UK. She has written extensively on popular cinema and is author of Spectacular Bodies (1993), Working Girls (1998), and The Hollywood Action and Adventure Film (2015). She is editor of Action and Adventure Cinema (2004), and co-editor of Interrogating Postfeminism (2007).