If you've ever found yourself escorting others to, or hosting home viewings of, entertainments that your loved ones found resolutely not entertaining, here are five titles from 1977 to 1995 that, for me and my friends, led to awkward silences, napping, outright hostility, or, in one case, someone storming out of the room.

Here's a salute to wonderful performances – all of them filmed before the actors turned 13 – available as home-viewing entertainment: a dozen 1973-to-1999 movie portrayals (five of them Oscar-nominated or -winning) that strongly suggest that acting gifts have precious little to do with age.

Damned if this fiercely funny, inventive, thoughtful, and affecting release doesn't feel like the first movie comedy designed specifically for the pandemic era: a spiky yet empathetic commentary on modern life and modern romance in which “modern,” for once, genuinely means “this exact moment right now.”

As we continue to wait for large, semi-large, and even intimate public-entertainment venues to safely open again, here are a few more home-viewing favorites from my nostalgia cabinet: five – well, make that six – excellent works from 1979 to 1992 all focused on the business of show, with different titles for different nostalgic moods.