Revisiting the work of the film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum can feel like looking back on a psychic whose predictions always came true.

So many great movies that are now widely revered, from Abbaski-Rostami's Taste of Cherry,

to Jacques Tati's Playtime, to Orson Wells' F for Fake, to Elaine May's Ishtar,

received early and enthusiastic support from Rosenbaum at a time when they were at best

divisive and at worst widely reviled. But Rosenbaum didn't just anticipate sinnophile taste. He shaped it.

In 1998, when the American Film Institute published its stodgy, conservative list of the 100

greatest films of all time.

Rosenbaum published his own alternative Top 100, and if that list feels so much more alive today,

it's a testament to how many of the people who read Rosenbaum as teenagers and young adults

grew up to be influential critics, programmers, and distributors themselves.

Rosenbaum has been a hero of mine since I discovered his book, Movie Wars, first published in 2000, at my local library.

Baring the subtitle, How Hollywood and the Media Limit What Movies We Can See,

it took aim at the gatekeepers of serious cinema in the United States, from the American

Film Institute to the New York Times art section to Harvey Weinstein's Miramax, accusing them of

limiting the horizons of filmgoers' imaginations. This posed a fascinating challenge to me as a teenager,

as these institutions were so often positioned in the mainstream media as

benevolent liberal organizations, kind enough to steer a primitive audience towards art it could

understand. Rosenbaum's writing has been left-wing, internationally attuned, and skeptical of the

received wisdom that so many of his contemporaries swallowed wholesale. From

1987 to 2008, he wrote for the Chicago Reader, where he had the freedom to write a lengthy

article explaining why Joe Dante's small soldiers was both better and more progressive than

another war movie playing at that same time, saving Private Ryan. His best work has been published in such books as

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