What business does a cultural institution have screening action movies? What indeed? Dr. Harvey O’Brien, of the UCD School of English, Drama, and Film, and author of the new book Action Movies: The Cinema of Striking Back (Columbia University Press, 2012), will discuss this most disreputable and yet prevalent of genres. 

Emerging through the prism of the death of westerns and war films in the early 1970s, action movies became an extraordinary visible symptom of societal unease through the 1980s before seemingly imploding in a hail of self-parody in the 1990s. The events of September 11th, 2001 seemed to signal an end to simplistic fantasies of dominance, and yet by the mid-2000s John McClane (Die Hard 4.0) and John Rambo (Rambo) had returned, and not for the last time. 

This event is FREE but ticketed. Please call the IFI Box Office on 01 679 3477 to book.