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I have an ongoing love affair with New York, the city that formed me. I was born here, and though I’ve left occasionally, it was never for very long. The pace, color, and excitement of this amazing town always drew me back like a magnet, and holds me still. No surprise then that I love experiencing the potent nostalgia of great films that recall the New York City of my early years.

I will always remember the pure exhilaration I felt watching Quentin Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction” for the first time in a theater thirty years ago. The memory is so clear of first realizing that I was experiencing an extraordinary piece of filmmaking, deliriously entertaining but also completely fresh and unique. What made “Pulp” so exciting and distinctive?

I’ll never forget the segment on “60 Minutes” a couple of years ago, when Morley Safer interviewed our most famous living historian, David McCullough.

Please don’t let a super-sized screen, nor that Best Picture Oscar (over “Pulp Fiction,” for crying out loud!), nor that $600 million-plus box office take convince you that “Gump" is anything but a treacly mediocrity. While it has moments of sweetness and charm, it is absurdly overrated.

Each year around Oscar time, there’s a lot of speculation about which film will win Best Picture. From what I’ve read online, it appears that my own favorite, Ryasuke Hamaguchi’s brilliant drama “Drive My Car,” is a long shot for the top prize.

In 1910, the prestigious Fred Karno theatrical troupe in England got the chance to tour America.  Its star attraction, a twenty-one-year-old performer named Charles Chaplin, was on-board that first ship crossing the Atlantic.

The movies' much beloved Everyman, Tom Hanks, turns 59 today, and he seems to be mellowing beautifully.