Sternberg and Dietrich: The Phenomenology of Spectacle explores the philosophical questions broached by the films Josef von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich made together at Paramount in the early 1930s. These are films that rethink faith, appearance, the image of women, the treatment of history and the sense of the world. There can be no debating that Sternberg and Dietrich: The Phenomoneology of Spectacle constitutes a superb study of the seven films that the German pair made together between 1930 and 1935-but this hardly begins to convey the book's achievement. Whether he's writing about the eponymous collaborators, the function of the close-up, the liabilities of the off-screen, the nature of cinematic spectacle, Kant's account of beauty, or Levinasian ethics, Phillips remains inexhaustibly insightful, abidingly rigorous, and mercifully clear. Sternberg and Dietrich: The Phenomoneology of Spectacle is not a book to be missed.