Hollywood has largely run out of artists and doesn’t seem able or perhaps even interested in producing movies that can hold a candle to the great achievements of its 100-year history. America still dominates cinema, but it has debased it to “content” that people “stream.” One of the few people left in Hollywood who can be called an artist is Quentin Tarantino, and he has a book out, Cinema Speculation, an attempt to recapture the artistic daring of his childhood years, the ’70s, the triumph of the New Hollywood.

Cinema Speculation looks like 13 essays on movies from Bullitt and Dirty Harry to Taxi Driver and Escape from Alcatraz. But Tarantino doesn’t write essays. He’s not trying his hand at movie criticism. He writes like he talks, trying to convey both his enthusiasm for the movies with which he grew up and his vision of cinematic art as a perfection of the American experience of freedom.

[The 1970s cinema had its drawbacks too, but it told better stories. It didn’t get caught up in tentpole franchises, comic-book mentalities, and especially not wokery. I’m not a big fan of Tarantino, but he’s correct about this point. — Ed]