From Peepshow to Palace: The Birth of American Film Book

A very interesting analysis of what makes cinema special as an art, what makes it unique among the visual arts, how it engages our imagination and perceptual capacities, our narrative sense, and how certain styles of cinema making make use of the realism of cinema.
Not an easy reading: this is a professional book by a professional philosopher based on his research. It is still accessible, and anyone with a good general education can make a go at it. It helps if you know a bit about the philosophy of art (especially about Kendall Walton's and Noel Carroll's work), and if you have an idea of the developments in cognitive psychology and philosophy mind in the last 30 years.
The book can help you understand better how and why films have the effect on us that they do, how they engage us, and what similarities there are with other between film and other art forms.
An arch of the book is to push a general argument against philosophy of film which takes films to be a form of language, or to be politicized always. Currie addresses the relevant literature and the main arguments for these positions, and very calmly and convincingly shows that these approaches do not help much with understanding cinema.