Reviews    From Publishers Weekly   Hollywood may shelve its bomb movies and Law & Order may cut the Twin Towers out of its opening credits, but it's full steam ahead for Jerome F. Shapiro's Atomic Bomb Cinema: The Apocalyptic Imagination on Film.   From "prototypical bomb films" such as 1927's Metropolis to modern farces like Naked Gun 2 1/2. Shapiro, an assistant professor at Hiroshima University, examines hundreds of movies that deal with survival in the face of destructive power.   It's a dense and scholarly volume, and one that film students will pounce upon. Others might, too, if they buy Shapiro's thesis that "atomic bomb cinema is the paradigmatic site of struggle over cultural power for our times."   © 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.       From Library Journal   As professor of cinema and comparative culture at Hiroshima University, Shapiro is uniquely qualified to explain American and Japanese cinematic approaches to nuclear holocaust. Here he argues that "atomic bomb cinema is the most recent manifestation of the ancient apocalyptic tradition of continuance."   In either his detailed analysis or his filmography, Shapiro hasn't omitted any relevant film, low or high budget, including First Yank in Tokyo, The Beginning or the End, Split Second, Them!, Gojira/Godzilla, The Amazing Colossal Man, Night of the Living Dead, A Boy and His Dog, Total Recall, Waterworld, and Natsushojo. Besides employing his own considerable ana-lytical powers, Shapiro draws on the work of psychologists, scientists, novelists, and film critics and will best be appreciated by film scholars and those familiar with such terms as synecdochical and anagogic. Recommended for film collections in academic and large public libraries.   Kim Holston, American Inst. for Chartered Property Casualty Underwriters, Malvern, PA   © 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.   © 2001 Atomic Bomb Cinema, Ltd