Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate (1980) is, from a multitude of perspectives, a book-end. If Owen Wister is said to have spawned the Western genre (in fact a slightly spurious claim, given the multifarious incarnations of the myth in popular culture prior to The Virginian), Cimino is widely credited as its …

Cultural Borrowings: Appropriation, Reworking, Transformation, edited by Iain Robert Smith, is now online. This exciting new eBook of original scholarship on processes of adaptation in film, television and new media is a special edition of the peer-reviewed journal Scope: an Online Journal of Film and TV Studies. It includes my …

At first sight, Grant Heslov’s latest offering The Men Who Stare at Goats (2009) resides alongside the whimsical fantasia of an earlier McGregor outing, Tim Burton’s Big Fish (2003): the picaresque adventures of a little guy in a mysterious dream world. There is, however, more to this film than such a …