Michael Bay - 143

If size counts for anything, Michael Bay towers over his contemporaries.

His summer-defining event films involve extraordinary production costs and churn enormous box office returns.

His ability to mastermind breathtaking spectacles of action, mayhem, and special effects continually push the movie industry as much as the medium of film toward new frontiers.

Lutz Koepnick engages the bigness of works like 'Armageddon' and the 'Transformers' movies to explore essential questions of contemporary filmmaking and culture.

Combining close analysis and theoretical reflection, Koepnick shows how Bay's films, knowingly or not, address profound issues about what it means to live in the late 20th- and early 21st centuries.

According to Koepnick's astute readings, no one eager to understand the state of cinema today can ignore Bay's work.