The best part of Pulp Fiction, if you ask me (okay, but let’s pretend you did), was the sequence in which hit men John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson accidentally kill someone in their car and have to cover it up. They call in a specialist in the field, Winston (Harvey Keitel), and for once in this movie that is an exaggerated fantasy of criminal life, we are invited to ponder what the real daily hassles of people like these could be like.

Someone remind me—where are we at on the nostalgia chart at the moment? Have we finally managed to move the focus of misty, watercolored memory so near to the present that it’s time to go unstuck through the decades? (Any time, as ever, is always better than now.)