How to Watch a Movie

Critics at Large | The New Yorker · Aug 21, 2025 · 48m

In the early days of the Hollywood studio system, producers exerted far greater creative control than any individual director. Then, in the mid-twentieth century, a group of young French critics issued a cri du coeur that gave rise to the figure of the auteur: visionary filmmakers ranging from Jean-Luc Godard to Martin Scorsese and Wes Anderson. In the final installment of this year’s Critics at Large interview series, Vinson Cunningham talks with fellow staff writer Richard Brody about the origins of auteur theory, and about the lengths to which directors have gone for artistic freedom in…