Today, Hollywood cinema has made a striking turn regarding its portrayals of Russians, returning to the images of the Cold War. To explore the reasons for this sudden renewed interest in the Cold War, this book examines, among others, Guy Ritchie’s The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (2015), Steven Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies (2015), Ethan Coen and Joel Coen’s Hail, Caesar! (2016), David Leitch’s Atomic Blonde (2017), Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water (2017), Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther (2018), and Francis Lawrence’s Red Sparrow (2018), as well as such TV shows as Comrade Detective (2017) and The A ... More

Today, Hollywood cinema has made a striking turn regarding its portrayals of Russians, returning to the images of the Cold War. To explore the reasons for this sudden renewed interest in the Cold War, this book examines, among others, Guy Ritchie’s The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (2015), Steven Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies (2015), Ethan Coen and Joel Coen’s Hail, Caesar! (2016), David Leitch’s Atomic Blonde (2017), Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water (2017), Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther (2018), and Francis Lawrence’s Red Sparrow (2018), as well as such TV shows as Comrade Detective (2017) and The Americans (2013-2018). Are these recent films and series attempting to interpret the tightened political relations between the United States and Russia, suggesting the beginning of “Cold War II”? The chapters in this collection investigate the revival of the Cold War movie genre under multiple angles, including questions of patriotism, national identity, otherness, gender, and corruption. They are sensitive to the cinematic aesthetics and ethics of these representations as they reveal how these new images of the Cold War shape audiences’ understanding of the Cold War in general as well as of the relationship between the U.S. and Russia in particular. This collection defies the traditional definitions of the Cold War film and invites readers to discover the new phase in the Cold War movie genre: Cold War II.