I often tell my film criticism students, as they prepare to review a new movie, that it's always helpful to familiarize yourself with a director's past work. That might sound like fairly obvious advice, but it's worth reinforcing for someone not accustomed to watching movies through the lens of auteurism, and who's still learning to see how recurring themes, ideas, narrative and formal strategies accumulate meaning across a filmmaker's body of work.
This extra research, of course, takes time. A busy college student may not be able to cram in the collected works of, say, Sarah Polley, M. Night Shyamalan or Steven Soderbergh (or even to catch up with "Au Hasard Balthazar," as I urged my students to do before they wrote about Jerzy Skolimowski's "EO," which was partly inspired by that Robert Bresson classic). That said, the research has never been easier than it is in the era of streaming, where a simple visit to an invaluable guide like JustWatch.com can show you where and how to catch up on an auteur's back catalog. And since I try to follow my own advice, it's a site I find myself visiting often: Time permitting, I'm trying to schedule in some strategic replays of Wes Anderson, Greta Gerwig and Christian Petzold, among other filmmakers with new releases coming out this summer.
But the pleasures of watching and rewatching, needless to say, are not limited to students or critics. Revisiting the work of a filmmaker you love — or a filmmaker you don't love but are trying to understand better — is one of the pleasures of going deeper into movies. Here are five filmmakers who have new movies that premiered recently at festivals and/or will be emerging in the coming months, and whose past work can be readily found, discovered and rediscovered on streaming platforms.
