In this enterprising move, long-term architectural publisher Axel Menges (whose list running from the 1970s, currently extends to more than 240 titles, many now of historic value) has expanded his new film list with this volume of theory and critique, based on five fully worked case studies. In all, Kirsch has provided a superlative model for assessing the divisions ... Read moreof contemporary film thematics. First, the suspense drama: second, the comedy or satire; third, new science fiction; fourth, the slasher-horror typology; and finally Kirsch returns to a kind of revisionist realism, essentially an historical and rigorous corrective. In postmodern culture, the current parameters are open, the connections random and the galaxy infinite. What is interesting in comparing film critique today with actual contemporary architectural comment and analysis is the extent to which each can benefit from an informed comparability between both fields and it is to be hoped that the overlap can be more openly fostered in future. This volume is a useful, perhaps indispensable, contribution to the wider postmodernist debate pursued in film, a field still barely represented in recent museum and gallery exhibitions: but it is now humming for sure with both students and schools, in this world of instant electronic referencing and accessibility to other precedent and text. Michael Spens, in Studio International, March 2014 Show Less