It’s hard for any film buff to believe that the famed British filmmaking team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger ever went out of fashion. The co-writers and producers, with Powell doing the directing and Pressburger taking the lead on the screenplays, produced a near twenty year run of classics that fill any cinephile’s bucket list.

“The Red Shoes” and “49th Parallel,” “Black Narcissus,” “I Know Where I Am Going” and “The Tales of Hoffmann” are merely the best-known titles in their ouevre, films that advanced the art and set the bar on what a World War II drama should be about (“What are we fighting for?”), filmmakers who produced the three most gorgeous films made in the lush, over-saturated heightened reality of Technicolor.

And yet the two two, making films as “The Archers,” had their flops, their tussles with production companies and their critical misses. Listen to actors heard here reading the brutal reviews of Powell’s “Peeping Tom,” or marvel at the kinky low-budget picture he ended his career with, “Age of Consent,” and you get it. “Ahead of their time” or “out of touch,” they all but disappeared for decades.

With “Made in England,” British documentarian David Hinton, who made the definitive doc on the making of “Gone With the Wind,” aimed his camera at Powell & Pressburger’s biggest fan, Martin Scorsese. And “presenter” Scorsese — narrating and appearing on camera — makes it both a personal essay on what their films meant to him, how he experienced them as a boy and student and the ways he’s incorporated their themes and styles into his own work, and a Master Class in understanding and appreciating the cinema of two of the medium’s greatest innovators.

Scorsese, who befriended his idol Powell as a young filmmaker, breezes through brief biographies of each man, devoting most of this two hour+ love letter into a dissection of their work — the films themselves, generously sampled from prints Scorsese himself had a hand in restoring to their former glory before putting them back before the public.

We see clips of Powell’s maturing early work — he got his start in movies working for a French studio where MGM’s Rex Ingram shot silent films in Europe — and note the “leap forward” from programmers like the striking “The Edge of the World” to perhaps the greatest “propaganda film” of World War II, the gloriously entertaining and nuanced “The 49th Parallel,” followed by “One of Our Aircraft is Missing,” and “A Canterbury Tale” once he teamed with Hungarian immigrant Pressburger.

After the war, they plunged into Technicolor for “Black Narcissus,” “The Red Shoes” and “The Tales of Hoffman.”

And when they filmed something in black and white, it still stood out from the crowd, a non-“noir” drama about alcoholism, “The Small Back Room” or the simple, scenic and evocative “anti-materialism” romance “I Know Where I’m Going,” which Scorsese labels “one of the most magnificent love stories ever told.”

Scorsese connects their films visually and thematically to his own, embraces Powell’s “All art is one” art ethos, which drove him to reinvent the ballet movie with “The Red Shoes” and do the same for opera with “The Tales of Hoffmann.”

In their trio of Technicolor masterpieces, Powell turned “each shot” into “a production unto istelf,” innovating the “total cinema” of acting, lighting, costuming, editing, music and dance into a new way of storytelling.

Scorsese, a film buff’s film buff before Tarantino ever saw his first VHS B-movie, makes his case for this team’s place in the cinematic pantheon, and gives any film buff additions to that “life list” of pictures one simply must see. I’ve already started to hunt for a place to stream “The Fighting Pimpernel,” the David O. Selznick bungled “Gone to Earth” and “The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp.”

Hinton’s terrific film ensures that he and Scorsese will do the same for you.

Rating: unrated, PG-worthy

Cast: Presented by Martin Scorsese, with archival interviews and footage of Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, David Niven, James Mason and others.

Credits: Directed by David Hinton. A Cohen Media Group release of a BBC Films production.

Running time: 2:11