With elegance, clarity, and rigor, the author tries to demonstrate that the cinema means as well as shows. His essays are thus acts of analysis and interpretation in the humanistic sense of those words. One purpose of Formal Matters: Studies in Film Adaptation and (Re)valuation is to stake out territory for a certain type of film critic, somewhere between a reviewer-journalist and a scholar-theorist. At a time when the movie review has degenerated into mere publicity for Hollywood pictures and film scholarship has become entangled in its own pseudo-scientific discourse, the author offers close readings of individual films, and film adaptations, which go beyond simple plot summaries and vague impressions about acting (the province of the newspaper review). Yet they also pull up short of oracular theoretical pronouncements on the state of the art (the province of the academic monograph). Formal Matters is arranged thematically into three sections, from an investigation of the...