Popular Hollywood Films Research Articles

Is fashion stupid? Ironic representations of fashion in popular Hollywood films

Popular culture, especially cinema, tends to view the world of fashion from a distance, often in admiration but mixed with feelings of incomprehension, perplexion and even derision. The current article will analyse the films Pret-à-Porter (), Zoolander () and The Devil Wears Prada () as expressions of general approaches to the fashion industry in the comedy film genre. As high profile films, they embody a pattern of representation endemic to film comedy at the turn of the 1990s and 2000s and emphasize a frivolous, ironic attitude to the superficial and exploitative nature of the fashion industry, reflecting a wider sense of postmodernist cultural critique in American cinema of the shallowness of commercialism and pop culture (while, ironically, being part of precisely the same system as the target of its critique). By conducting narrative analysis of these films, we will show how they use stereotyping as a mechanism to satirize the fashion industry, creating superficial flashes of ridiculous behaviour and excessiveness, while they reinforce these approaches themselves through the use of genre and aesthetic conventions. In doing so, the films highlight the idea that fashion, as a form of popular culture, functions as an exemplary locus of cultural critique to satirize hyper-consumption and hyper-commercialism. As these films evoke wider questions about the concept of irony within and towards fashion, the chapter is a part of a larger project on the theme of fashion irony that aims at defining it as a field of academic study.

“All Your Faves Are Problematic”: The Performative Spectatorship of Drunk Feminist Films

Abstract This article looks at the work of the Drunk Feminist Film (DFF) collective from Toronto, Canada. DFF screenings offer interactive in-person and online events that combine watching popular Hollywood films with simultaneous live commentary, audience participation, and hashtag dialogs on Twitter. The article looks specifically at how the multiplatform hybridity of online and embodied participation allows feminist audiences to create collective spectatorial communities. DFF events emphasize paratextual conversation and reimagine how we can relate to movie narratives in the twenty-first century. By looking at a specific screening of The Craft (dir. Andrew Fleming, US, 1996), this article illustrates how DFF indexes the potential of engaging mainstream films while also engaging in feminist conversations about them. Problematic narrative aspects are discussed in real time by a community and are recorded via Twitter, resulting in digitally archived debates about how audiences collaboratively reinvent difficult but popular myths within their favorite films. As a result, the collective decenters mainstream films in favor of paratextual ephemera that negotiate the audience's pleasure in and critique of their favorite films.

“LA LA LA AMERICA”: A MULTIMODAL ANALYSIS OF SELECT SONG IN THE HOLLYWOOD MUSICAL WEST SIDE STORY (1961)

Though the Hollywood Film Musical is conventionally centred on a heterosexual couple with antithetical attributes and attitudes, they are very often surrounded by supporting actors who join the singing and dancing almost spontaneously. Group singing and dancing had been a structural requirement in the case of backstage musicals that flourished in profusion in the genre’s infancy. This article examines a group song from a popular Hollywood Film Musical – West Side Story (1961) – to analyse how group songs impinge on the society’s dominant ideologies of the times in which they were made. Most of these group songs in conventional Hollywood Musicals are not performed with any overt agitational, mobilization, or political intent in the diegesis, but even then, on the surface level, they seem to challenge the social conventions vis-à-vis class, gender, race, and ethnicity. The article explores how the song “America” repudiates or reinforces stereotypes and stimulates a fresh debate on the social commitment of an artistic medium, through multiple modes of filmic communication.

Drone Bomb Me: cinema & warfare in The Good Kill and Eye in the Sky

ABSTRACT This paper asks how popular Hollywood cinema can provide a cognitive map of the complexities of drone warfare. Starting from observations made by Chamayou and Schuppli, who argue that drone warfare undermines the notions we generally employ to understand the political and moral implications of warfare, the essay turns to two recent blockbuster films that seek to give a realistic depiction of drone warfare, The Good Kill (Niccol, 2014) and The Eye in the Sky (Hood, 2015). Both films, the paper argues, use innovative techniques and narrative structures to evoke the sensorial impact of drone warfare. However, they culminate in narrative sequences that depict gendered scenes of heroism and empathy that undermine the goals the films had set out to achieve. The paper argues that both films’ failure is symptomatic of a structural problem inherent in all cinematic attempts at depicting drone warfare. In conclusion it turns briefly to the song “Drone Bomb Me,” by American singer Anohni, to meditate on what an alternative way would be to depict drone warfare.

Contemporary Hollywood Terrorism and ‘London has Fallen’ Cinema

A number of popular Hollywood films have coalesced around images of terrorist devastation wrought upon London as an eminent, if highly fallible, global city. Films such as V for Vendetta (The Wachowskis, 2005), Children of Men (Alfonso Cuarón, 2006), Closed Circuit (John Crowley, 2008), G.I. Joe: Retaliation (Jon M. Chu, 2013), Survivor (James McTeigue 2015), London Has Fallen (Babak Najafi, 2016) and Unlocked (Michael Apted, 2017) all mine the visual spectacle of London's identity as a ‘fallen' city, refiguring the capital as collateral damage within terrorist narratives rooted in urban disintegration and chaos. This article examines how such films function within a contemporary Hollywood that has worked to re-stage London's skyline as a backdrop for brutal bombardment. The subjecting of London's monumental spaces to architectural trauma via terrorist activity is, as this article argues, part of a wider trend in U.S. cinema showing London's destruction that is predicated on the ability of digital imagery to persuasively simulate the ruination of the city in a post-7/7 climate. Updating what Ian Conrich (1999) has termed the 1950s “trashing London” monster movies that tapped into wartime imaginaries of London, this article discusses how the reactionary and politically-charged “London has fallen” cycle leans heavily on – and is informed by – the iconography of the July 2005 terror atrocities. By examining how footage from these mainstream ‘terrorsploitation’ films have since been repurposed in propagandist videos by pro-terrorist broadcasters, this article unpacks the complex contribution and ambivalent sensitivity of Hollywood in framing terrorism in London as a blockbuster spectacle.

Deleuze's Three Syntheses Go to Hollywood: The Tripartite Cinema of Time Travel, Many Worlds and Altered States

What is called “time travel” cinema is but one aspect in a tripartite series of interweaving modes of disjunctive narration which is also – simultaneously – a cinema of “many worlds” and “altered states”. Exploiting Gilles Deleuze's three syntheses of time, space, and consciousness from Difference and Repetition (1968) allows a conceptual development of these cinematic series through three popular Hollywood film cycles beginning with Planet of the Apes (Franklin J. Schaffner, 1968), The Terminator (James Cameron, 1984), and Back to the Future (Robert Zemeckis, 1985). In so doing, film and philosophy are deployed as two series which together create inexhaustible atemporal, aspatial, and ahuman disjunctions, ungrounding everyday spatio-temporal identities, and affirming productive images of cinematic thought.

‘Male Gaze’ in Malayalam Cinema: a reading of K.G. George's ‘Adaminte Variyellu’

The theory of male gaze was first introduced by British film maker, scholar and theorist, Laura Mulvey in her 1975 essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.’1 According to Mulvey, cinema reflects the oblivion of patriarchal society and reinforces the notion that women are the subject of heterosexual male control and desire.2 Mulvey states that most of the popular Hollywood films respond to number of pleasures offered by cinema, particularly known as scopophilia. This process of gaining pleasure by taking people as objects and subjecting them to a domineering gaze is gendered and eventually establishes women as objects of scopophilia and men as bearers of the look. The function of the cinema, according to Laura Mulvey, is to serve as a voyeuristic medium that encourages the audience to take pleasure from looking upon. Many Hollywood movies, especially the ones of Hitchcock and Stemberg were widely studied on the basis of this version of psychoanalytic theory. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the Malayalam movie, ‘Adaminte Variyellu (Adam's Rib) directed by the veteran film maker, K.G.George in the light of Laura Mulvey's essay. Adaminte Variyellu, the 1983 movie, talks about the travails of three women from different socio-economic sections of the society. Content analysis was used to determine whether Mulvey's argument of ‘male gaze and female spectatorship’ was applicable to Malayalam films of the 80’s. This papertakes as its starting-point the way a Malayalam movie reflects, reveals and works on the socially established notions of sexual difference which apparently controls images, erotic ways of looking and spectacle.

Documentary Animism: Material Politics and Sensory Ethics in The Act of Killing (2012)

Ethics and the Difficulties of Documentary ActivismEARLY IN THE ACT OF KILLING, we meet Anwar Congo and Herman Koto, both in high spirits as they plan to make film. Anwar tells Herman, Whether this ends up on the big screen, or only on TV, it doesn't matter; . . . this is who we are, so in the future people will remember. We find variations on this sentiment in many documentaries: the participants want to tell their version of the truth. Of course, Anwar's opening affirmation is not straightforward. Anwar and Herman are two small-time living in Medan, and Anwar is complicit in Indonesia's murderous past-the horrific genocide of 1965-66. Today these killers lead comfortable lives while socializing with popular paramilitary organizations, media moguls, and high-ranking politicians. The Act of Killing documents bizarre camaraderie of murderers and narrates their rise to fame, celebrity, and stardom as they work toward cinematic autobiography.Following military coup in 1965, new Indonesian government formed under President Suharto. The military hired out paramilitary death squads to cleanse the nation of dissenting factions, targeting the world's third-largest communist party (the PKI), the intellectual community, artists, and the ethnic Chinese minority. The film titles cautiously cite the number at one million disappeared, but authority figures within the diegesis testify on state-television talk show and boast of 2.5 million deceased under the military regime's two-year transition to democracy. The contemporary Indonesian government is development from the cultural and political foundations laid by the massacres. The state currently allows Anwar and fellow premans, as they are colloquially known, to live freely and without punitive measures.The word preman roughly translates into gangster and is an etymological derivative of the English phrase free men. This libertarian freedom exists as an unchecked and approbated criminality, as the premans are softly endorsed by democratically elected politicians, often complicit in the illegal acts themselves. Benedict Anderson clarifies the half-authorized status of the premans as a sort of half-hidden lefthand of the New Order Leviathan: uncivil servants (281). The premans speak openly about their past crimes without fear of judicial or social consequence and show little regard for global attitudes toward genocide. In the film, they favorably compare their past deeds to those of Idi Amin and the Nazis, laugh at the tenets of the Geneva Convention, display flagrant misogyny, and brag about raping underage women.Anwar and his gang of death squad associates have origins as the theater gangsters who made their first illicit marks by selling movie tickets to popular Hollywood cinema in the early 1960s-a practice banned by the then-influential PKI. Throughout Joshua Oppenheimer's documentary, these men testify that the embargo on Western cinema infringed on their business since Hollywood films were the most popular and greatest attraction for their customers. The killers insist that the PKI boycott of Hollywood movies engendered hatred for the people they subsequently murdered. This entanglement of murder, culture, and diaspora precipitates one of the more shocking claims advanced in the film: the premans contend that Western cinematic aesthetics helped guide their hands in the contracted assassination of Indonesia's communists and many others. Anwar and company are fluent in film history and venerate Hollywood. As Anwar lightly points out, watching film like an Elvis Presley musical would allow him to kill in happy way. The cinephilia of Anwar and his friends inspired Oppenheimer to adopt an unusual documentary technique that defines The Act of Killing: the killers reanimate their memories and dreams of the murders by making an autobiographical film. The result of the killers' cinema is striking and surreal in its beautiful renditions of familiar narrative genres including Westerns, film noir, musicals, melodrama, and horror. …

Eco-Heroes and Eco-Villains: An Archetypal Analysis of Environmental Film, 1950–2010

Archetypes are characters recognizable by media consumers that operate at a subconscious level and often elicit strong emotional responses. Popular Hollywood films addressing issues of the environment offer hero and villain figures that demonstrate strong archetypal characteristics. Surrounding the intricate characters, many of these films also present a complexity of environmental messages. This study examines 44 Hollywood films with environmental themes from 1950–2010 and uses a neo-archetypal approach to identify heroes and villains within the narrative. Based on process-relational media models, the outcomes of this study have implications relevant to audience consumption, environmental message interpretation and corporate public awareness.

To Describe a Labyrinth: Dialectics in Jacques Rivette's Film Theory and Film Practice

This article will focus on the recurring and crucial role of Hegelian dialectics in the elaboration of Rivette’s theory of film across his articles and interventions in Cahiers du cinema . This appeal to philosophy can be seen as part of the Cahiers ’s concerted effort to defend the artistic legitimacy and seriousness of cinema, and not only avant-garde or art cinema but, first and foremost, popular Hollywood cinema (de Baecque 1991, 174-5). But, where a critic like Rohmer, with his references to classical art, seeks to canonise the artistic achievements of the cinema, Rivette’s vocabulary of dialectics seems to covet, for film criticism and film making alike, the status of a science.

‘Sometimes you have to make a little bit of mischief’: Matthew Warchus’ hybrid approach to musical theatre directing

While the contemporary musical theatre adaptations Matilda (2010) and Ghost (2011) share a director, Matthew Warchus, and also have designers in common, their critical reception and grosses have been markedly different. With a pop score and special effects demonstrating the latest innovations in scenic and video design for the theatre, and based on a popular Hollywood film, Ghost was much maligned from its inception. While it continues to run in London’s West End, it shuttered after a brief season in New York. Meanwhile, Broadway is breathless in anticipation of the quirky, family-friendly literary adaptation Matilda. This article traces the development of these musicals through opposing production models – the risk of the commercial production and the relative security of the state-subsidized theatre – and explores how one director’s range and hybridity is bridging an increasingly polarized musical theatre industry. A survey of critical responses in London and New York, along with analysis of directing, acting and design will help to illustrate why Warchus shuttles so regularly across the Atlantic, and between subsidized and commercial theatre.

Hollywood's Cote d'Azur: Playboys, Thieves and Racing Cars

For popular Hollywood cinema, the choice of Paris as physical backdrop has, for decades, provided film-makers and audiences alike with an instantly recognisable cultural marker, evoking a broad range of historical, literary, and artistic references. As Richard Armstrong has observed, 'it is overwhelmingly Paris that has claimed most attention [ ... ] provid[ing] the mise-en-scene for a Catholic rehearsal of living and loving and an antidote to the vicissitudes of American puritanism. However, alongside Hollwyood's on-going love affair with the French capital, there exists a significant parallel strand of popular American movies set, not in Paris, but rather in the towns and villages of the Cote d' Azur, locations whose renown outre-Atlantique is based not only on their onscreen embodiments, but also on the role they have played in the development of a transatlantic cinema industry and star system. The allure of the French Riviera is legendary across Europe and North America, and beyond. In Making Paradise. Art, Modernity and the Myth of the French Riviera, Kenneth E. Silver quotes one Anglophone visitor to the Cote d'Azur in 1923:

The "Problem" of Brandon Teena

Susan Muska and Greta Olafsdottir's documentary, The Brandon Teena Story (1998), released one year before the popular Hollywood film, Boys Don't Cry (Dir. Kimberly Peirce, 1999), is suggested by Jennifer Devere Brody (2002) to be a and perhaps even more experimental [film] (p. 92) than its fictional counterpart. Much has been written about the various media representations of the Brandon Teena tragedy. Most have focused on the inconsistencies revealed in the different texts, or the various ways in which transsexual identity is displayed. Valid as those approaches are, our paper is not going to compare texts, or discuss transsexual identity. Instead, we seek to investigate the notion of ethics in The Brandon Teena Story by assessing how its structure balances both message and metaphor. Throughout this paper, the message to which we refer is the arguments that the film advances, while the metaphors are representative of the narrative, the visual effects, the symbolic imagery, and the score. The intention is to provide an analysis on the ethics of representation in documentary, especially, as in this case, when the main subject of representation is absent. The documentary will be closely examined in order to interrogate the general assumption that it is more in its presentation of facts. We hope to reveal much more about the film's views on the subject of Brandon Teena's murder than may initially be apparent. The purpose of such analysis is to unveil how the documentary addresses Brandon Teena's in such a way that submerges the issues of gender identity beneath other social discourses. We intend to show how the documentary presents Brandon as a problem rather than a person.The events that ended Brandon Teena's life are a mix of fraud, sexual abuse and finally murder. While there have been various media recreations of the events that led to Brandon's death, it has been argued by Judith Halberstam (2005) that Kimberly Peirce's film Boy's Don't Cry than any other representation of the case has determined the legacy of the murders (p. 24). The fictional film was greatly influenced by the earlier, lesser-known documentary. Though these films provide similar accounts of the crimes there are several key differences between the two that affect the messages they provide. It is understandable that Brody, as stated above, may find the documentary ethical than the Hollywood film, since documentary through its association with presenting facts rather than constructing fiction, tends to encourage such opinions. However, in the case of the Brandon Teena topic, a crime story about a transsexual who is raped and murdered, what exactly does more mean? Does it suggest that we have a clearer understanding of Brandon's identity, or a clearer understanding of the sequence of events (cause and effect) that led to his murder? In our opinion, the interesting, but frustrating aspect of nearly all the texts that attempt to recreate this tragic story is how little we learn about the main character.Before we discuss the film we must first cast an investigatory gaze on why documentary has generally been considered a more construct than fiction. This has partly been generated by the fact that documentaries are considered to be more truthful representations of the real world. Jay Ruby (2005) argues that audiences believe documentary images to be accurate representations of reality, unless they are overtly altered (p. 213). Although we do not feel confident in arguing what most audiences believe, it is fair to say that documentary suggests itself as a truthful text. Filmmaker and theorist Jill Godmilow (1997) qualifies this view:The essential claim that traditional documentary films make is that there's unmediated truth here because this was not scripted-because the materials are found in nature-thus, the text built out of them is truthful as well. That truth claim is still at the center of most documentary work [p. …

The Influence of Fiction and Cinematic Excess on the Factual

Many popular Hollywood films about Oceania or set in the Pacific have been criticised and dismissed by Pacific scholars and film-makers as grossly misrepresentative of the region. Nevertheless, both critically acclaimed and populist films form an integral part of the mediascape within which more contemporary factual films by and about Pacific communities are situated. In many cases the dialectic between Hollywood and contemporary performance in the Pacific is strategic and self-conscious; however, in documentary formats, this dialectic can be problematic and consequently overlooked or repressed. Drawing upon the operations of irony in contemporary Pacific screen production, Thompson's description of cinematic excess and Nichols's elaboration of documentary excess, this paper examines how the critically acclaimed, anti-colonial, pro-self-determination factual film Act of War: Overthrow of the Hawaiian Nation reflects the return of repressed Hollywood imagery in its discursive practices.

PR goes to the movies: The image of public relations improves from 1996 to 2008

This qualitative analysis of public relations in popular Hollywood films from 1996 to 2008 looks at three questions: first, how is the PR practitioner portrayed in recent films? Second, what kind of public relations activities and models of public relations are depicted? Third, how do other scholars’ results in prior studies apply to the portrayal of public relations in current films? Results show that for major films from Mars Attacks! (1996) to Hancock (2008), public relations practitioners are more credible, respected and influential, and PR work is more varied and complex than found in studies of films through 1995.

Cars, Climates and Subjectivity: Car Sharing and Resisting Hegemonic Automobile Culture?

Cars, Climates and Subjectivity: Car Sharing and Resisting Hegemonic Automobile Culture?

The Real Movie: Reenactment, Spectacle, and Recovery in Pierre Huyghe's <i>The Third Memory</i>

Pierre Huyghe ends his short film The Third Memory (FR, 2000) with a clip of television footage from August 22, 1972. The shaky recording from a handheld camera shows John Wojtowicz pointing and yelling at a crowded street of police, bystanders, and media corps. A slight young man in a white T-shirt, Wojtowicz paces on a sidewalk in front of a bank while screaming, Put those guns down, put those fucking guns down! His impassioned commands mingle with the sound of droning helicopters and other voices yelling, Get back . . . alright, put 'em down, put 'em down. In the preceding nine minutes, Wojtowicz, this time wearing a suit, reenacts the events of August 22, 1972, when he attempted to rob a Chase Manhattan Bank in Brooklyn, New York. Now twenty-eight years older with silver hair and a portly build, Wojtowicz directs extras to play out the events from his past. A composed Wojtowicz supplements his directions with retrospective commentary while also playing himself as historical bank robber. These two representations of the same event diverge in numerous ways-in performance, dialogue, mise-en-scene, and cinematography-and even while the authenticating body of Wojtowicz connects the two, it also evinces the twenty-eight-year gap between them. As the young man disarming the police and the older man directing extras, Wojtowicz asserts his command by staging the unfolding events, and selfconscious performance marks both his sidewalk protestations and direction of extras. In these related yet distinct pieces of footage, Wojtowicz's identity bridges significant temporal and spatial gaps between his two performances, and these gaps reveal a key dynamic at work in reenactments: a dialectic of connection and difference between the reenactment and the preceding event to which it refers.1 This possibility for difference sparks the creative and critical ways artists put to use the reenactment. The prevalence of reenactments in contemporary art practice has steadily increased in recent years. While rooted in histories of artistic appropriation and performance, the artistic reenactment has emerged as a key cultural form of the twenty-first century, a phenomenon traced in numerous thematic exhibitions (and related publications) over the past few years: most notably, Life, Once More: Forms of Reenactment in Contemporary Art at Witte de With, Rotterdam (2005); Once More . . . With Feeling: Reenactment in Contemporary Art and Culture at Reg Vardy Gallery, Sunderland, UK (2005); and History Will Repeat Itself, a collaboration between the German organizations Hartware MedienKunst Verein and KW Institute for Contemporary Art (2007).2 For the most part, artists deploy the reenactment for two common critical purposes: to rewrite history by offering a forum for other viewpoints traditionally kept outside the grand and to deconstruct the images and accounts that have composed these narratives.3 These aims- allied with revisionist and deconstructive readings occurring in every discipline- are central to what Robert Blackson, the curator of Once More . . . With Feeling, calls the reenactment's emancipatory agency.4 By offering a means of expression to a formerly oppressed person, reenactments can help him or her to recover agency through the generation of new narratives and representations that potentially eclipse formerly dominant ones, or, in other words, to assert difference.5 Blackson argues that this liberating trait distinguishes the reenactment from kin of simulation, reproduction, and repetition and is what draws both practitioners and audiences to it again and again.6 From this perspective, we might ask: from what did the reenactment in The Third Memory liberate Wojtowicz? In between Wojtowicz's 1972 robbery and its reenactment in 2000, Sidney Lumet directed the popular Hollywood film Dog Day Afternoon (US, 1975), based on the original robbery, with Al Pacino starring as Sonny Worzik, the character based on Wojtowicz. …

Islam, Muslims and Arabs in the Popular Hollywood Cinema

This is the age of Hollywood, yet, the pedagogic utilisation of popular films as a legitimate extra-ecclesiastical resource for the study of religion is frequently ignored, unappreciated or under-utilised. To thrive in the post-Millennial period, however, the religion professions need to integrate movies proactively into the educational curricula that go beyond their traditional deployment as visual aides, diversionary entertainment or student pacification. Applied cinema studies can thus contribute significantly to interreligious understanding, cooperation and peace-building, particularly the exposition of the many anti-Islamic messages embedded within the films of the West. Using textually based, humanist film criticism as the guiding analytical lens, the critical literature was reviewed and the popular Hollywood cinema scanned to reveal selected (mis-)representations of Islam, Muslims and Arabic culture in general. Both deconstructive and constructive issues were addressed. It was argued that: (a) the Hollywood hermeneutic is a viable pedagogic resource for the classroom, home and pulpit, (b) popular films can be profitably employed as a legitimate mode of interreligious dialogue, and (c) Islamic sacred subtexts should be constructed
 to spread the message of God further afield. Additional research into
 the emerging interdisciplinary field of religion-and-film was recommended.

Scrambled eggheads: ambivalent representations of scientists in six Hollywood film comedies from 1961 to 1965

The American public's longstanding preference for intelligence over intellect informed ambivalent portrayals of American scientists in the postwar era. This essay considers how six popular Hollywood films from a largely neglected genre—comedy—projected ambivalent images of scientists from 1961 to 1965. It argues that scientists were often respected for their intelligence, but were mocked or even feared for their intellect. In the comedic subgenres of the family film and slapstick, scientists who were safely contained at institutions of higher education committed merely social transgressions and became objects of mockery. In the political satire of Dr. Strangelove, however, the direct threat of nuclear annihilation cast the scientist as an object of fear and a real threat to the security of the nation. This discussion of popular comedies thus accounts for an under-studied cultural barometer and powerful medium in the popularization of science.

Sacred cinema: exploring Christian sensibilities within popular Hollywood films

Numerous Christian sensibilities have permeated the popular cinema, but they are frequently undetected, unappreciated or unwanted by those fearful of the cinema’s potentially corrupting effect. Yet, a postmodern religious education requires the embracement of this communication media, not its rejection, employing discernment not denial. A first step in this corrective process is to raise the profession’s consciousness about the possibilities of sacred cinema, which is the primary purpose of this paper. Consequently, using textually based, humanist film criticism as the analytical lens, the critical film and religion literature was reviewed, the popular Hollywood cinema scanned and the following areas explicated herein, namely: (a) holy plotlines, (b) divine symbolism, and (c) sacred subtexts—the Christ‐figure. All three categories were supplied with copious inter‐genre exemplars to demonstrate their diversity and richness. It was concluded that the sacred cinema is a legitimate pop culture phenomenon and a living genre that has immense pedagogic utility for religious education aimed squarely at the proverbial children‐of‐the‐media. As such, it should be proactively employed as a postmodern act of applied cinema that simultaneously values the audiovisual, education and enjoyment. Further research into this emerging and exciting interdisciplinary field was recommended.