Here we present a brief review of the latest book, wrote by the Peruvian researcher and critic, Isaac León Frías. This material tries to give a panoramic approach about the conditions of the appearance and evolution of modern cinema worldwide. The book takes up classic debates on modernity and classicism in the cinematographic theory and updates them with new perspectives and positions. The overwhelming number of films analyzed for this purpose accounts for the exhaustiveness and concern in trying to understand, in a much more accurate way, an aesthetic matrix present in a whole series of artistic movements during all the years of cinema's life. This is how this volume becomes essential to be able to answer a question as difficult as: what is modern cinema?