Screen Epiphanies by Geoffrey Macnab; Palgrave Macmillan, 321 pages ($29).

Thank heaven for the British Film Institute. At any given point in the film year, it is consistently responsible for some of the best and most cinematically literate books about movies.

This one, obviously, features an idea whose relatives have been continually published ever since the Film Culture explosion of the late ’60s (whose heyday, along with the movies that were its offshoot, was the ’70s, the second Golden Age of American film). In other words, we’ve seen a lot of anthologies about what films most significantly awakened important directors to movies but seldom done this well.

What editor Geoffrey Macnab collected were major filmmakers on the subject of the films that first inspired them and made them what they are, whether you’ve got the “Sir” Alan Parker, “a working class kid playing on a North London Street in the ’50s” stealing “away to watch a scratchy second-run film in a fleapit cinema” (“Little Fugitive,” a “black and white film shot in Brooklyn about a little kid who ends up in Coney Island,” a film, says Parker, “shot in a very naturalistic, documentary style . . . the first film I had ever seen that wasn’t manufactured to be a movie”) or Martin Scorsese, at age 9 or 10, seeing Michael Powell’s “The Red Shoes” with his father who worked in New York City’s garment district and liking it “for its sense of mystery” and “the kind of mystical endeavor of art that it showed.”

You ain’t heard nothin’ yet. Sure, you get Mike Leigh on “Room

at the Top,” and Paul Schrader on Bresson’s “Pickpocket” and Danny Boyle on “Apocalypse, Now” but would you believe Bertrand Tavernier on John Ford’s “Fort Apache,” David Puttnam on “Pinocchio,” Albert Maysles on “Captains Courageous” and, yes, animator Nick Park, of Wallace and Gromit fame, on Hitchcock’s “Rebecca” with Judith Anderson as Mrs. Danvers and “the way Hitchcock gets her to float around as if she has no legs.”

A first-rate film book from a source we’ve come to expect nothing less of.

—Jeff Simon