FILMS OF ENDEARMENT

A film critic revisits personally meaningful films of the 1980s.

“The story of the movies is basically one long, heterosexual romantic epic,” writes Koresky, a gay man who contributes to the Criterion Collection, Film Comment, and Film at Lincoln Center. Yet growing up in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, in the 1980s, he couldn’t get enough of cinema, watching “all kinds and as many as I could get my hands on.” He credits his mother, Leslie, with instilling this love, a love they continued to share after Koresky’s father died in 2011. In this memoir, he describes their project of revisiting ’80s films she had introduced him to, one from each year. All of them are “about and starring women, movies that put their emotional inner lives front and center.” Interspersed among thoughtful readings of such movies as Mommie Dearest, Terms of Endearment, and The Color Purple are stories from Koresky’s family life, mainly about Leslie’s attempts to balance motherhood and work and about Koresky’s coming to terms with his sexuality. Sometimes the films are only tenuously connected to these stories—the chapter on Aliens takes a jarring turn from a discussion of Ripley, Sigourney Weaver’s warrior lead, to his mother’s giving birth—but most chapters are smooth and focused. In the chapter on the workplace comedy Nine to Five, the author writes that Leslie still feels the sting of a visiting associate who told one of her male bosses, “Can your girl get us some coffee?” A discussion of the trans character in Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean includes the moment when Koresky called his mother from New York to come out to her. Before he could get the words out, she asked, “Michael, are you gay?” and later revealed that she and his father knew about his orientation long before he did.

A moving portrait of a bond film lovers will understand: between a cineaste and the people who nurtured that love.