Yet some Americans have practised subversion as well, including Uri Caine, a pianist known for reshaping classical masterworks in his own ebullient way.

ECONOMIST: Our pick of the best, including music by Abdullah Ibrahim

In 1962, between Psycho and Marnie, his masterworks of raging id, Alfred Hitchcock, a city kid, filled the great outdoors with the embodiment of that impersonal fury.

NEWYORKER: The Birds

Most important of all, the pope ordered one of Gian Lorenzo Bernini's masterworks, La Fontana del Quattro Fiume, or the Fountain of Four Rivers, for the centerpiece of the space.

WSJ: Rome's Piazza Navona: Perfection, Squared | Masterpiece by Willard Spiegelman

Her resplendent images reference masterworks by Hitchcock and Godard, and canny, rectilinear framings of scenes shot in cars turn the city, as seen through rear windows, into rear-screen projections, holding natural imperatives and social artifices and inner lives and outer circumstances in exquisite and ambiguous balance.

NEWYORKER: The Captive

Her resplendent images reference masterworks from classic Hollywood and the New Wave, and canny, rectilinear framings of scenes shot in cars turn the city, as seen through rear windows, into rear-screen projections, holding natural imperatives and social artifices and inner lives and outer circumstances in exquisitely ambiguous balance.

NEWYORKER: The Captive

There are signs of that actually happening in the next few months -- not an avalanche of masterworks, not the sudden transformation of an obviously troubled part of the entertainment industry, but the emergence of a number of unusual movies with a better-than-even chance of artistic as well as commercial success.

WSJ: Fall Film Five