Rupert Read is Reader in Philosophy at the University of East Anglia, UK. He is a renowned Wittgensteinian scholar, with research interests in political and environmental philosophy. His published monographs to date are Kuhn (co-authored, 2002), Applying Wittgenstein (2007), Philosophy for Life (2007), There is No Such Thing as a Social Science (2008), Wittgenstein Among the Sciences (2012), and A Wittgensteinian Way with Paradoxes (2012). His editorial experience includes The New Hume Debate (co-edited, 2000), Film as Philosophy: Essays on Cinema after Wittgenstein and Cavell (2005), and the work for which he is perhaps still best known, The New Wittgenstein (Routledge, 2000), which offers a major re-evaluation of Wittgenstein's thinking.

Inspired by the philosophy of Wittgenstein and his idea that the purpose of real philosophical thinking is not to discover something new, but to show in a strikingly different light what is already there, this book provides philosophical readings of a number of 'arthouse' and Hollywood films.

Introduction: Film as Freedom: The Meaning of Film as Philosophy

1. Implicating the Narrator, Implicating the Audience: Waltz with Bashir and Apocalypto

2. How to Represent a Past We Would Rather Forget: Hiroshima Mon Amour and Last Year at Marienbad

3. Learning from Conceptually Impossible Versions of Our World: Never Let Me Go and The Road

4. When Melancholia is Exactly What is Called For: Melancholia and Solaris

5. Gravity's arc; or Gravity: A Space Odyssey

6. The Fantasy of Absolute Safety through Absolute Power: The Lord of the Rings trilogy and Avatar

Conclusion: What have we learnt?