Despite a few quibbles, "A New Generation" is pretty damn good.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 30, 2023

Forget film school, this epic tale of innovation is a masterclass in moviemaking.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 28, 2023

Sometimes [the structure] means jumping in time or location, but each leap from genre, from country, from time, leads to a greater understanding of cinema as a whole.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Dec 20, 2022

If you love movies, you definitely want to be in this discussion.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Sep 29, 2022

Cousins is always humble and affectionate enough to avoid excesses of snark, pretension or even genre bias. He’s just the shepherd through the latest chapter of a 120-year dream. May none of us ever wake.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Sep 21, 2022

Absent any context, these clips lose their meaning and their power... But certainly I admired his chutzpah in putting this all together.

| Sep 19, 2022

I do enjoying following his passion along his road and on his terms.

| Sep 19, 2022

As much as I admire anyone who can put this kind of time and energy into this anthology of clips, I do have a problem with his basic thesis... I don't think he really accounts for the crisis going on in film right now.

| Sep 19, 2022

The film is far more an admiration, almost a filmmaking museum, than a pop-culture-infused doc on the magic behind the movies.

| Original Score: 8/10 | Sep 19, 2022

You won’t see everything, but you will see enough to create an impression of just how vibrant and alive to possibilities the cinema remains, and for that reason alone The Story of Film is worth the telling.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 14, 2022

As Cousins takes us on a journey through nearly 100 different films from recent years, he often achieves the hypnotic effect that he sees as one of the artform’s most universal and enduring qualities.

| Sep 12, 2022

Can be unwieldy (and contentious). But you want to follow it, wherever it goes.

| Original Score: B+ | Sep 9, 2022

[Cousins] aesthetic commentary and analysis, delivered through voiceover in the same monotone as the first film, is consistently clunky and half-cooked.

| Sep 9, 2022

Watching “Story,” one realizes that so much of what most of us most love about the movies isn’t the medium, per se, but its appurtenances: stardom and glamour and the pull of narrative.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 9, 2022

Cousins’s assessments offer plenty to argue with, but it’s possible to enjoy “A New Generation” without agreeing...

| Sep 8, 2022

The films collected in A New Generation speak for themselves even when they don’t necessarily slot neatly into Mark Cousins’s curlicue thinking.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 7, 2022

Mark Cousins narrates with his lilting Irish brogue, which also helps to mark his work as personal and distinctive, as if his perceptive insights and artistic analysis were not enough. It's another fabulous cinematic experience.

| Sep 6, 2022

Cousins shows us that dreams still live within the realms of cinema. And that the greatest films still can offer us hope, escape and contemplation.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 20, 2022

Cousins continues to reveal his value to this dialogue and avoiding elitism, he allows all types of films to contribute to the discussion.

| Jan 3, 2022

Inevitably, there is a tacked-on quality here, yet Cousins' flair for providing visual pleasure means that, like that first champagne cocktail of the night, The Next Generation bubbles with sparkling uplift.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 21, 2021