Currie, author of 'An Ontology of Art' (1989), of 'The Nature of Fiction' (1990), and of an incisive article on film and language (Currie, 1993), here offers a comprehensive monograph on topics classified variously as film theory and the philosophy of film. Principal among those he considers are the following: What is the essence of cinema? Do films operate by creating illusion? Or do moving pictures represent things? What is the nature of the likeness between things and moving pictures? Is there a language of film? What is the role of imagination in film viewing? How well can films represent time? How do the perceptual imaginings that cinema promotes coalesce into stories? (Ian Jarvie)