Clockwise, from top left: The Lady Eve. 1941. USA. Written and directed by Preston Sturges; The Passion of Joan of Arc. 1928. France. Directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer; On the Waterfront. 1954. USA. Directed by Elia Kazan; The Great Dictator. 1940. USA. Directed, produced, and written by Charles Chaplin; Raging Bull. 1980. USA. Directed by Martin Scorsese; Yojimbo. 1961. Japan. Directed by Akira Kurosawa; Jaws. 1975. USA. Directed by Steven Spielberg; Witness for the Prosecution. 1957. USA. Directed by Billy Wilder; Rabbit of Seville. 1950. USA. Directed by Charles M. (Chuck) Jones

Last week you may have noticed that Charles Silver’s long-running Tuesday column, An Auteurist History of Film (based around the MoMA daytime screening series of the same name), was absent. Unfortunately, the August 26 post about Woody Allen’s Manhattan marked the final installment in the series. (A new daytime screening series, Acteurism, curated by Dave Kehr, begins at MoMA on October 1.)

Aside from a brief hiatus back in 2011, Charles’s Auteurist History essays have appeared on this site every Tuesday for almost exactly five years. That’s some 225 posts on everything from Soviet documentaries of the silent era and Japanese domestic dramas to Bugs Bunny and homicidal birds—and I’ve had the pleasure of editing all of them. Suffice it to say that over the course of this half-decade I have developed a deep affection for Mr. Silver’s musings on cinema.

Whether he’s branding sacred cows (his opening paragraph on Casablanca is a personal favorite); extolling the virtues of Charles Chaplin, Elia Kazan, and, most of all, John Ford (“John Ford…is the greatest film director America has ever had [or ever will], and is quite possibly the country’s greatest artist. His usual reaction to such views was that of a snarlingly sarcastic sonofabitch”); or confronting American cinema’s troubling racial legacy, Mr. Silver’s writing acts as a reminder that passion and humor in equal measure are a reliable recipe for great film scholarship. Besides, if it weren’t for this series, I might have gone to the grave having never seen Ford’s The Searchers, Alfred Hitchcock’s I Confess, or even Leni Riefenstahl’s chilling Triumph of the Will the way they were meant to be seen: projected, on film, onto a large screen in a dark theater.

While I encourage you to discover, share in, or dispute Charles’s myriad cinematic proclivities and prejudices by reading (and commenting on) each and every one of his columns, I will close by using the pulpit to call out a few more of my favorites: Don’t miss the entries on George Cukor’s Holiday, John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath, Walt Disney’s Pinocchio, Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull, and Charles Chaplin’s Limelight.