"Aldama’s done it again! With Critical Approaches he brings together preeminent scholars of film and popular culture to throw wide open the portals into understanding Rodriguez’s rich and bountiful cinematic world. Profoundly responsive to Rodriguez’s artistic vision and practice, the groundbreaking scholarship herein powerfully undercuts all those misguided judgments about Latino cultural production. Critical Approaches will certainly cement Rodriguez as at once an entertainer of the first order and as a dissonant creator who radically carves out new experiential spaces for Latinos today and tomorrow."

"The complex cinematic work of Robert Rodriguez finally gets its comprehensive due. Moving from El Mariachi to Sin City and crossing audience reception, content, and production, Aldama pulls together the most cutting-edge scholars in the field to provocatively map out Rodriguez’s significance to the study of film generally and Latina/o film specifically. If you love to watch, examine, and make film—it’s an absolute must-read!"

"This lively collection investigates the broad range of Rodriguez’s output, from his explosive action flicks, to his hurly-burly children’s adventures, to his groundbreaking cinematic comic-book revamp, Sin City. Uniformly informative, insightful, and engaging, these analyses are as ingenious, varied, and entertaining as the films themselves."

"Aldama’s Critical Approaches is like a film itself! Picture it: over the Western horizon rides a talented posse of wily vaqueros y vaqueras, like some ridiculously over-talented, ivory-tower-ensconced version of The Magnificent Seven—only there are twelve of them and running lead, the lucky thirteenth, Prof/Caballero Aldama. They are packing six-shooters with sharp piercing intellectual ammo: Kim’s cognitive dynamite, Serrato’s mighty boogers, Hogan’s deft palette, Anderson’s whiptastic noir, Eighan’s nasty multimodalities, González’s mighty intertextuality, García’s randy miscegenation, Ingle’s fraught frontera, Donahue’s social mind reading, Stavans’s probing paradigms—with Saldívar and Fojas there too, riding shotgun. Before they ride off into the sunset, this rambunctious posse of cultural critics holds forth and lays bare the complexity of our great cineaste of the Americas, Robert Rodriguez. Buy this book. Teach this book. Or else, pardner—you’ll be messing with the magnificent trece, ese!"