I have a friend – who shall remain nameless – who, I think, enjoys trying to wind me up every once in a while with a particular movie hot take. Every so often in my presence, this person will say a slightly different version of, “Any movie made before 1993 is basically hot garbage, right?” (This person is known for making incendiary and facetious statements, and it’s always in good fun. The sage observation comes from a third party (whom I’ve never met) who said that Demolition Man is the Rosetta Stone here.) Each time this little nugget gets trotted out, a half-smile appears on my face, and I respond with some variation of, “Yeah, it doesn’t matter how many times you say that, I’m never going to agree with you.”
If there is any single work to once-and-for-all incinerate the notion that “old movies are bad,” it’s Northern Irish documentarian Mark Cousins’s epic, 18+ hour magnum opus The Complete Story of Film, a meditation on the greatest art form ever invented.