With this volume Martin Barker and Thomas Austin provide a jargon-free, accessible and very student-friendly introduction to film analysis, covering the how and the why in clear English. Barker and Austin take a close look at a range of popular Hollywood films in a variety of genres such as Titanic, Deep Impact, Sleepless in Seattle, The Lion King and The Usual Suspects, and provide vivid demonstrations of what can be achieved with close textual analysis - and, just as importantly, what can't. Explicitly rejecting much of the theoretical baggage that dogs contemporary film analysis, Barker and Austin work back from the problems their own students have encountered to quite literally strip the subject down to its bare essentials, before it vanishes in a haze of pseudo-psychoanalytic musings. In the process they enable students to see clearly the ways in which films make and distribute cultural meanings. This is a deliberately anti-theoretical text on film studies and filmic analysis - the cornerstone of film and media studies - which unpacks, explains, and demystifies what happens when we analyse film.