Shirley MacLaine in absinthe green. Wilder knows how images can steal the heart and run away from their context; beyond the shocks of pastel that make his point, he gives us a prostitute named "Lolita," with nothing familiar to that name beyond the heart-shaped glasses. Only a year after Kubrick's adaptation--defined by the film, or by the poster? The gap between those possibilities, and the fact that we build identities without seeing the baggage that comes along. Lemmon's Nestor adopts…

Canon is an unbreakable contract, and yet Jakku is Tattooine, and there's nothing cyclical about it. The title crawl formally introduces the FIRST ORDER and the RESISTANCE, which are, very self-consciously, synonyms for EMPIRE and REBELLION--the sort of words that you use when you're trying to make a knock-off or, at the very least, a parody. Abrams uses them as a reassurance that you'll never see those big bad prequels again, and all of your favorite characters have been locked…