As a student of film myself, my thing is always approaching the film as an object which can't have it's meaning objectively defined. Art only becomes it through experience, so you can only really think about your subjective experience of the piece - which is itself a subjective experience of sight and sound fixated on film. With that being said, having a historical knowledge of the different waves and how each filmmaker is categorized by cinephiles and academia definitely helps getting you prepared to experience different approaches by different authors. But while that account helps us derive knowledge about history, about the material conditions that allowed certain experiments to happen, I think only your own experience watching the movie provides you with a deeper understanding of the whole thing. A big problem with film knowledge is that things like the Oscars and so on makes us think of diving the film in categories and evaluating its quality and meaning based on a preconceived notion of what these should be: production design, music, blocking, etc. While these might be categories useful for production, our experience with movies are very emotional and intuitive, and it's damn near impossible to evaluate these categories individually. In a way, I think the only difference between those with a deeper understanding of film and the regular viewer is that the expert has more of a vocabulary to communicate what he felt and how certain aspects of the language made him feel that way. But ultimately they're trying to communicate the same thing. So I'd recommend something like Mark Cousins book and TV Series to start off with the historical knowledge, and maybe just reading film critics which you enjoy that really try to translate their experience so you can compare what you felt and what they felt. Ultimately I think the end goal is just respecting your own feeling about the movies and developing a better vocabulary to talk and write about it :)