Iris Barry (1895–1969) was the first woman film critic in England. A leader and innovator, she not only held her own in a predominantly masculine world, but also surpassed her male colleagues. From 1924 to 1930, during the transition from silent to sound pictures, she wrote for the Spectator and the Daily Mail. In 1925, opposing the prevailing censorship and advocating avant-garde films, she helped found the London Film Society, which became the prototype of the British Film Institute and of adventurous film groups throughout Europe and America.

Barry created the Film Library of the Museum of Modern Art in 1935 and was its pioneering curator until her retirement fifteen years later. During that time she taught film courses at Columbia and traveled widely through Europe and into Russia while attending film festivals and meeting prominent filmmakers, such as Sergei Eisenstein and Roberto Rossellini. She wrote extensively about the history of films, helped establish an aesthetic foundation for understanding them, and collected, preserved, exhibited, and circulated classic pictures, especially in colleges and museums, for both pleasure and serious study. During World War II she analyzed Axis movies, actively supported American propaganda films, and turned the Film Library into a branch of the Office of Strategic Services (later the CIA). Barry also published two minor novels, a life of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the influential Let’s Go to the Movies(1926), and a study of the director D. W. Griffith (1940). She liked entertaining, escapist, and dreamlike