In the sixties, the recycling of pop culture - turning it into Pop art and camp - had its own satirical zest. Now we're into a different kind of recycling. Moviemakers give movies of the past an authority that those movies didn't have; they inflate images that may never have compelled belief, images that were no more than shorthand gestures - and they use them not as larger-than-life jokes but as altars.

It would be very convincing to say that there's no hope for movies - that audiences have been so corrupted by television and have become so jaded that all they…

Unlike storybook heroes and heroines but like many actual heroes and heroines, she was something of a social outcast. (As Simone Weil noted, it was the people …

People have expected less of movies and have been willing to settle for less. Some have even been willing to settle for Kramer vs. Kramer and other pictures th…

The illusion that times that were are better than those that are, has probably pervaded all ages.

When I got back from the war in 1946 people didn't want the Mr. Smith kind of movie any more, and I refused to make war pictures.

We are apt to form romantic and exaggerated notions about the moral innocence of our ancestors. Ages of ignorance and simplicity are thought to be ages of puri…