How do we understand films? How do we construct meanings out of the interplay of the various modalities in filmic text? These questions are still up to date in contemporary film theory and multimodal discourse analysis. The talk wants to give a general overview of how these questions are focused and answered with the help of advancements in text linguistics and discourse semantics. It will show general parallels between verbal and filmic discourse and introduce recently developed tools for filmic discourse interpretation. With the help of some filmic examples, it will furthermore give illustrations of concrete film analysis at work.