How fortunate that Gilberto Perez finished this book before his untimely death. His agility in combining criticism and theory—interrogating the rhetoric of films as disparate as Stella Dallas, Shoah, Sherlock Jr., Toni, Caché, The Deer Hunter, Nazarin, and Greed—testifies to his precision. And his graceful prose has the unfashionably literary virtue of honoring his discoveries.