Directed by Mark Cousins • Documentary • With Mark Cousins • 2022 • 167 minutes
A decade after The Story of Film: An Odyssey, an expansive and influential inquiry into the state of moviemaking in the 20th century, filmmaker Mark Cousins returns with an epic and hopeful tale of cinematic innovation from around the globe.
In The Story of Film: A New Generation, Cousins turns his sharp, meticulously honed gaze on world cinema from 2010 to 2021, using a surprising range of works — including Frozen, The Babadook, and Cemetery of Splendour — as launchpads to explore recurring themes and emerging motifs, from the evolution of film language, to technology’s role in moviemaking today, to shifting identities in 21st-century world cinema.
Cousins ponders what comes next in the streaming age: how have we changed as cinephiles, and how moviegoing will continue to transform in the digital century, to our collective joy and wonder.
“This is an unashamed celebration of cinema as an art-form." —The Guardian
“What sets it soaring is the discerning guide at its helm - a welcome voice in cacophonous times.” —The Hollywood Reporter
Up Next in On Cinema
-
Flipside
Directed by Chris Wilcha • Documentary • With Chris Wilcha, Ira Glass, Herman Leonard, David Milch, Judd Apatow • 2024 • 96 minutes
When filmmaker Chris Wilcha revisits the record store he worked at as a teenager in New Jersey, he finds the once-thriving bastion of music and weirdness from his y...
-
Conversations with Willard Van Dyke
Directed by Amalie R. Rothschild • Documentary • With Willard Van Dyke, Ralph Steiner, Joris Ivens • 1980 • 58 minutes
In 1935 photographer Willard Van Dyke moved to New York with the belief that films “could change the world” and began a new career as a filmmaker. His name soon became synonymou...
-
Looking for Robert (Kramer)
Directed by Richard Copans • Documentary • With Robert Kramer • 2025 • 74 minutes
Robert Kramer’s politics were as a radical as his approach to making films. A founder of the leftist Newsreel collective, he went on to direct documentaries and dramas, and films that blended both. Disgusted with t...
