The movies, whatever they may have been or may yet become, are currently filling (yet again) the emptiness left by our theater's abdication from anything we can recognize as our experience. And only snobbism, professional investment, or myopia can prevent us from seeing that. A handful of movies are filling the space: six, eight, perhaps a dozen in the last few years. Three or four are filling more of it than the rest. As for the bulk of films, more than one person has said that mass tastes belong more to sociology than aesthetics, a dictum as applicable to Broadway as to Hollywood. Most plays are bad, most movies are bad; yet it has been my observation that almost nothing in the recent theater has been nearly so good as some of the films of the new Iranians, of the so-called Fifth Generation in China, of the Europeans Aki Kaurismäki, Michael Haneke, Nanni Moretti, Mike Leigh, and the Dardenne brothers, of the Asians Jun Ichikawa and Hong Sang-soo, and of the following Americans: Neil LaBute, David Lynch, Jim Jarmusch, Victor Nuñez, and Todd Solondz.

Before going on, I should set down some propositions. The first, which should already be clear, is that the movies are an art form, full-fledged, conscious, of legitimate birth, and needing no more defenses or rationales.