Third in the series of Sight and Sound Readers; Literary adaptations a well-studied topic and more heritage films are released than any other genre; Includes discussion of a range of films throughout the 90s, such as American Pyscho, The Beach and Jackie Brown; Includes section on Dystopias and Pulp Fictions; Major new essay by one of the UK's biggest name academics in the field of popular cinema; Period costume dramas are major box-office commodities, exploiting the lucrative gap between blockbusters and art films, with their mixture of rich visuals, popular sensibility, and literary association. But 'heritage cinema' is all too often discussed from literary (not cinematic) perspectives, and criticism of the films has long been overshadowed by the question of a film's fidelity (or lack of) to the original text. This volume of essays, reviews and interviews seeks to redress the balance, by examining the profitable but often antagonistic relationship between literature and film, representing both the view - and the critics of the view - that heritage cinema's elaborate aesthetics owe more to nostalgia than historical accuracy. In her challenging introduction to the volume, Ginette Vincendeau sketches the terms of the debate making a case for the genre as an important and often critically neglected form of popular cinema The latest in the series of Sight and Sound readers, Film/Literature/Heritage includes discussions of a wide selection of adaptations, from Shakespeare to William Burroughs, as well as interviews with the screenwriters and adaptors themselves, and covers all the major films from Elizabeth to LA Confidential, and directors from Martin Scorsese to Peter Greenaway. Contributors are drawn from the best industry, academic, literary and journalistic commentators on both sides of the Atlantic. They include Ian Christie, Richard Dyer, Lizze Francke, Andy Medhust, Claire Monk, Kim Newman and Amy Taubin.