Rhetoric is persuasion, but there is a kind of rhetoric, Gilberto Perez suggests, that is ‘all the more persuasive for seeming not to persuade.’ Similarly there is, at least in this amazing book, a powerful kind of film theory that seems not to be a theory at all but only a closely studied collection of film moments. We learn a lot here about the rhetoric of film, how it works, and the many forms it takes. But the range of examples is so wide and so rich, and the discussion of them so detailed, that a second book begins to hover discreetly behind the first: an introduction to the whole art of film itself. It’s a piece of amazing good fortune to have both works together.