I consider myself a cinephile-in-training, always eager to learn about a director or writer, a film that somehow slipped under my radar.

Current favorites include Carl Theodor Dreyer, Orson Welles, Henri-Georges Clouzot—I also have a soft spot for film noir, creative mavericks, old Loony Tune cartoons, Alejandro Jodorowski and Jacques Tati.

Today’s films bore me: comic book adaptations, slasher flicks and self-indulgent rom-coms. Not for me, thanks. How about an old Budd Boetticher or Anthony Mann western instead? Peter Lorre trying to slip through a net cast by the entire underworld in “M”? Or David Thewlis pontificating about the end of the world in Mike Leigh’s priceless “Naked”? Screen gems that defy the limitations of “persistence of vision” and present us with a reality as enticing, convincing and terrifying as the “real” flesh and blood world. For 97 minutes we are transfixed…and in that interval we are also, in the best instances, transformed by a strip of soundtrack and light flickering at 24 frames per second.

A miracle, there’s no other word for it…