The actress Mae West captured the elusive magic of movie stars best: “It isn’t what I do, but how I do it. It isn’t what I say, but how I say it. And how I look when I do it and say it.” Stars are alluring but contradictory in nature, as much emblems of cinema’s intimate magic as they are products of their time and place. They have a certain oomph, that ephemeral “It” factor, a term popularized by the incandescent Clara Bow performance in the 1927 silent romantic comedy It. The history of cinema and stars are forever linked. But ultimately, it’s the audience — and the box office — that decides which performers become stars. And it’s time that decides which of them become legends.

In classic Hollywood, the best stars had a firm grasp of the filmmaking process. They were technicians, acting for the eye of the camera with a keen understanding of how to create intimacy with the audience. Stardom has splintered, expanded, mutated in the decades since the fall of the studio system that minted and owned its stars under contract. Recently, the prevailing wisdom became that Hollywood couldn’t make stars the same way anymore. IP was — and remains — king. Today, the worth of a star depends on their ability to get films financed and produced, and the success of their films on streaming and their social-media influence prove crucial.

We’ll explore all of this and more in Performance Studies, the latest installment in our subscriber-exclusive newsletters series, New York Night School. Over the course of five weeks, we’ll examine stardom across time and place. We’ll focus on one star a week: Elizabeth Taylor, Tom Cruise, Pam Grier, Alain Delon, and Tony Leung Chiu-wai. Each edition will be a conversation between myself, Angelica Jade Bastién, and senior newsletter editor Jasmine Vojdani. And every week, you’ll work your way through our syllabus of selected films so you can revisit or get to know the greatest cinematic performances from these stars. New York subscribers will also get a limited-time discount for a subscription to the Criterion Channel, where a number of the syllabus films are available to stream. We hope you’ll watch along with us. Sign up below or by clicking here to get started. Newsletters will be sent once a week at 7 p.m. ET for five weeks.

 A five-week course with critic Angelica Jade Bastién examining stardom throughout film history — in and outside of Hollywood.