Do the Movies Have a Future?

The New Yorker critic, one of our most important film writers draws from a selection of his published pieces over a dozen years to examine the art, business, and future of what used to be America’s primary popular entertainment and is now an endangered species. David Denby chooses from among his much admired essays from the prestigious New Yorker to trace the radical evolution in the commerce and art of movies, which now compete more and more with television and the Internet in a global marketplace that drives the film business toward spectacle, digitalization, and perhaps eventual extinction. Examining the history of films and their centrality to our popular culture, Denby contemplates “fandom” and declares that a movie culture without star adoration is impossible to imagine. He praises the directors he admires—those who have temperament, are unique to themselves, and “make more than car crashes.” And he honors two great critics, James Agee and Pauline Kael, as he places them in the movie history they both embodied and transcended. Denby’s essays are passionate, wry, both admiring and skeptical. He writes about films as only a lover of movies can.