HORROR FILM Eddie Adams’s picture changed hearts and minds.

Structured like a freewheeling crash course in media studies, Looking for an Icon offers close readings of four famous photographs, each a past winner of the World Press Photo of the Year. Perhaps the best known (and most notorious) is Eddie Adams’s searing 1968 shot of a Vietcong prisoner being executed, often credited with turning American sentiment against the war in Vietnam. Also on the syllabus are the last known photo of Chile’s Salvador Allende, a picture of the lone figure facing down tanks in Tiananmen Square and an image of a grieving American soldier during the Gulf War.

A slew of talking heads, including former New York Times picture editor John Morris and Benetton shutterbug Oliviero Toscani (a compellingly mad professor), talk us through the mysterious process by which a photograph conveys meaning and suggest how an iconic image relates some kind of historical parable. It’s heady stuff, though there’s no mention of how camera phones or YouTube may alter the equation. Icon is paired with a documentary short, The Day You’ll Love Me, which analyzes yet another legendary shot: the 1967 wire photo of Che Guevara’s eerily Christ-like corpse. (Now playing; Film Forum.) — Tom Beer