Jesse Hassenger reads the spirit of our time in an exhaustive analysis of the past year in film:
Eighties nostalgia has been building for so long that it has threatened to turn into ‘90s nostalgia. In 2011, it expanded to encompass a whole series of throwbacks to all sorts of time periods. The geeky cultural sifting of Quentin Tarantino has gone mainstream. This could be troubling, an expansion by definition self-limiting, based on a generation re-buying its favorite toys on eBay, but many of the year’s best films indulged in fascinatingly varied degrees of nostalgia, homage, and occasional skepticism.
The Dish 