Notes from Lincoln Center:

1. I've realized that I love Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger because their films do the same thing for me, as a quasi-adult, that Disney did when I was younger. Imagine a Walt Disney—the Disney of Mary Poppins—whose live-action films were imbued with a buried awareness of sex and death, and you'll have an idea of the weird appeal of the Archers.

2. Between 1943 and 1948, Powell and Pressburger directed The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, A Canterbury Tale, I Know Where I'm Going!, A Matter of Life and Death, Black Narcissus, and The Red Shoes. This string of six masterpieces in six years is, I think, easily the greatest run in movie history; I know of no other director who matches it. (By way of comparison, six years was the average time that elapsed between movies in the last three decades of Kubrick's career.)

3. Besides The Red Shoes, my favorite of the bunch is currently A Canterbury Tale, which is practically a lost movie: it only has a measly 345 votes on imdb.com (compared to, say, 66,080 for Casablanca). Yet it's almost unbelievably wonderful. The featherlight plot harks back to Chaucer but also looks ahead to the New Wave, with its visual zest, greediness for location detail, and willingness to take happy digressions. It also features, in the person of Shelia Sim, one of most appealing ingenues I've ever seen. It's a movie that the young Wong Kari-Wai would have loved.

4. I Know Where I'm Going! is even better than when I blogged about it a year and a half ago, funnier, more generous, more exciting. A Matter of Life and Death, in which David Niven begs for his life before a heavenly tribunal, is an honest-to-god, archetypal movie-palace movie that taps into the basic reasons why we go to the movies in the first place, and features some drop-dead classic lines. (A heavenly messenger, moving from a black-and-white afterlife to the world of men, says, "One is starved for Technicolor up there!" Who needs Wim Wenders?)

5. The later films are interesting and often wonderful, but not quite as good. The Tales of Hoffman has some brilliant sequences, and shows off Moira Shearer's abilities as a dancer to far greater effect than The Red Shoes, but it also contains the first dull stretches I've ever seen in a movie by Powell and Pressburger. Gone to Earth is involving and powerful while you're watching it, and it contains a fine performance by Cyril Cusack, but it's strangely impersonal, as if Powell and Pressburger weren't quite sure what to do with the material they'd chosen. The evidently hasty Oh...Rosalinda!! is something of an embarrassment, but it's a movie I wouldn’t have missed for the world.

Tomorrow I'm off to see Colonel Blimp, and maybe A Matter of Life and Death for the second time. It's strange: these movies make me want to go out and live life to the fullest, and yet I'm spending most of my time in a darkened theater. Is that ironic?