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sense of mystery. They are small stories, well told, and all deeply old-fashioned, even when the effects are very special. The most intriguing thing about The King’s Speech is that it could have been made in 1937 at a time when a speech defect could seem, to the king, the gravest issue in the world.
    Try those films again: a boredom may begin to arise with the reiteration of so much niceness. For decades I watched Citizen Kane and believed I was getting more out of it: the possibility that the whole film was a daydream in Kane’s head as he died; the ironic place of applause; the rueful examination of the dangers in charm; the fallibility of memory. There were plenty of other movies as rich—Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou , Renoir’s La Règle du Jeu , most of Bresson and Ophüls, Resnais’s Hiroshima Mon Amour , several films by Kenji Mizoguchi, Ingmar Bergman’s Persona and Cries and Whispers , Godard’s Pierrot le Fou —or, more recently, Blue Velvet and Mulholland Dr . by David Lynch, No Country for Old Men by the Coen brothers, Magnolia by Paul Thomas Anderson, David Fincher’s Zodiac , or Martin Scorsese’s Casino .
    When I first saw Casino , in 1995, I didn’t like it. I regarded it as yet one more Scorsese gangster film, monopolized by its own violence and the inflammatory and implausible eloquence of hoodlums, with jukebox accompaniment and the dazzle of Las Vegas. Scorsese is vulnerable on all those counts, and on his reluctance in developing female characters. But ten years or so after Casino opened theatrically, the film played regularly on cable TV stations. I found myself watching it repeatedly (although I still reckoned I didn’t like it). What was happening? Well, in part it was the sheer cinematic fluency of the picture and its relaxed attitude to plot. Ostensibly, it concerned the rivalry between two friends (Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci) and how that turmoil ruined the sweet money mine of Las Vegas for both of them. Hadn’t that game been played in Goodfellas , and even in Raging Bull ? But in Casino , there was a variation: De Niro was the rational, orderly man fit to make the system work, while Pesci was madness determined to fuck it up. (It’s order and chaos, just like in Locke .) That wasmore interesting than the male relationships in Scorsese’s earlier films, because it began to offer (or I began to see) De Niro’s character, “Ace” Rothstein, as a tragic fool.
    What I never saw at first—and I’m not sure it was intended by the filmmakers—was the desperate comedy of De Niro being thwarted at every turn. This added to the disaster of his marriage to Ginger (Sharon Stone), the fullest female character in Scorsese’s work. She is greedy, treacherous, self-destructive, a thief, and a slut, but she fascinates Scorsese as much as she does “Ace.” So Casino is a story about a failed marriage, full of pain, but unable to shake off the tinge of gallows humor.
    Does this mean that if you watch any film long enough it gets better? Alas, no; there are plenty of films that discourage you (or me) from trying again. I’m not going back to Lars von Trier’s Melancholia or Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life . If you admire those films, we must live with our disagreements. It’s not as if there is any true state of being right or wrong. In suggesting “how to watch a movie,” I do not intend to present you with a tidy pantheon or a set of correct answers.
    Earlier, I mentioned the rumor that old people say movies can shift over time. But they can’t change, can they, not in a medium reliant on mechanical reproduction? Well, sad things do happen: almost any color system except Technicolor tends to deteriorate; it’s not common these days to see films projected (or shown on television) in the Academy frame format that was intended. You wouldn’t respect Las Meninas as much if