So film critic Stanley Kauffmann loves an old foreign film only to find that he panned it in a review forty years ago. Reflecting on the critic’s changes of heart, he finds himself in good company.

The plain,

discomfiting fact is that every one of us who has

watched plays and films or read books or listened to

music or looked at painting and architecture is, in some

measure, self-deceived. Filed away in the recesses of

our minds are thousands of opinions that we have

accumulated through our lives, and they make us think

that we know what we think on all those subjects. We

do not. All we know is what we once thought, and any

earlier view of a work, if tested, might be hugely

different from what we would think now.

The New Republic