On the experience of seeing a great film for the first time and knowing it immediately.

There are films where you know, within the first ten minutes, that you are watching something extraordinary. Not because of anything the film has yet done but because of the quality of attention it's bringing to its subject. You can feel the intelligence behind the choices.

I had this experience with Yi Yi the first time I watched it. I had it with Portrait of a Lady on Fire. I had it with Memories of Murder. I had it with Moonlight.

This recognition is not infallible — there are films that start with tremendous promise and fail to sustain it — but when it's correct it has a specific quality of pleasure that is different from the pleasure of enjoying a film and different from the intellectual pleasure of analyzing one. It's more like the recognition of a kind of intelligence that you didn't know you were looking for.

The interesting question is what produces that recognition. My best answer: it's the feeling that the film knows something about its subject that the genre conventions it's using have never said, and that it's going to tell you what it knows.