Singles (Cameron Crowe, 1992). Cameron Crowe’s rueful comedy about Generation X’s trials and tribulations in romance is full of bits that don’t quite work, and yet it is warm, observant, and just true enough to satisfy. Fortuitously set in Seattle during the early nineteen-nineties, Singles swirls around the love lives of several attractive twenty-somethings as they test out relationships, going back and forth between smitten joy and heartbroken disappointment. Janet (Bridget Fonda) struggles to get her grunge-rocker boyfriend (Matt Dillon) to give her a crumb of respect, Steve (Campbell Scott) pursues Linda (Kyra Sedgwick) while stressing over an upcoming pitch about mass transit to the city’s mayor, and Debbie (Sheila Kelley) tries everything she can think of to find a man, including a chintzy video dating service. There’s a scrapbook looseness to the storytelling, and Crowe tries out showy techniques, such as the characters directly addressing the camera, that don’t quite suit his sensibility. Crowe’s old music journalist instincts show up in a soundtrack packed with emerging grunge and grunge-adjacent acts, all of their songs used well. This film also brought the first solo tracks released by Paul Westerberg after the dissolution of the Replacements, and I can attest that hearing those pop-rock gems come blaring through a movie theater sound system back in the day was magical.

The Loveless (Kathryn Bigelow and Monty Montgomery, 1981). The Loveless is notable as the first film to earn Kathryn Bigelow a directing credit, but presumably the fingerprints of co-director Monty Montgomery are prominent here, too. In particular, the film’s greasers and small-town sordidness foreshadow some of Montgomery’s later work collaborating with David Lynch, most notably as a producer of Wild at Heart. A motorcycle gang on their way to Florida stops in a dusty burg where they disrupt business at a diner, hang out at a mechanic’s shop while one of their bikes is getting fixed, and raise some late-night hell in a bar. The film is less of a story than of a string of incidents. That noted, The Loveless is entertaining in a proud-trash sort of way, and it’s jammed with snappy, cool-lingo dialogue. It wears its debt to bygone B movies about bikers like a gleaming leather jacket, proudly and with a confident sense of the rebel authority it conveys. Only lightly modernized in its perspective, the movie is mostly content to revel in its crude-classic trappings. There are hints of Bigelow’s future stylishness and kinetic assurance to be found in the directing, and Willem Dafoe is appropriately unsettling in an early role. Other than the work by the future Oscar nominee, the performances are uneven, but rockabilly singer Robert Gordon is surprisingly good as one of the bikers.

The Fly (David Cronenberg, 1986). This gruesomely imaginative updating of a horror short story and famed film adaptation from the nineteen-fifties wastes no time whatsoever. The opening scene catches scientist Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) and reporter Ronnie Quaife (Geena Davis) in the middle of a conversation at a gala event. They’ve only just met, but that doesn’t stop Seth from boasting that he’s in the final stages of perfecting an invention that will change the world. Only another minute or two unspool before Ronnie is standing with Seth in his loft apartment and getting a demonstration of the industrial wasp’s nest–looking teleportation devices he’s developed. Soon enough, Seth rushes the testing process with himself as a subject and discovers the significant downside of running his device under compromised conditions. As directed by David Cronenberg, The Fly is a extraordinary work of body horror. It’s filled with uncompromisingly disgusting makeup effects (Chris Walas and Stephan Dupuis rightly won Academy Awards for their efforts), and its central conceit can stand as a metaphor for any number of wrenching experiences. The most obvious analog is the ravages caused by HIV/AIDS, if only because the disease was just beginning to be understood at the time, but other situations involving the deterioration of a loved one fit just as well. Goldblum is phenomenal in the leading role. He brings an mesmerizing physicality to his performance that sells the terror of his character’s transformation as effectively as the gooey onscreen effects. Davis is also great. She does the vital work of grounding the film in real, intensely felt emotion.