This book argues that the sustained interpretation of individual movies has, contrary to conventional wisdom, never been a major preoccupation of film studies—that, indeed, the field is marked by a dearth of effective, engaging, and enlightening critical analyses of single films. The book makes this case by surveying what has been written about four historically important and well-known movies (D. W. Griffith’s , Marcel Carné’s , Mike Nichols’s , and Michelangelo Antonioni’s ), none of which has been the focus of sustained critical attention, and by exhaustively examining the kinds of work published in four influential film journals ( , , and ). The book goes on to argue for the value of the work of interpretation, illustrating this value through extended analyses of Roman Polanski’s and Christopher Nolan’s , both of which thematize interpretation. Novak demonstrates the causes and consequences of reading poorly and the importance of reading well.