For five years, film critic Scott Tobias compiled "The New Cult Canon" in a regular column for The A.V. Club -- his personal effort to catalog modern cinema at its best, weirdest, and most delightfully unexpected.

As a group of movies, The New Cult Canon not only reflects a distinct niche of cinema that fails to fit into traditional "high" or "low" boxes, but also defines Tobias's critical sensibility: Open, curious, diverse, deeply knowledgeable about history, and partial to filmmakers whose reach exceeds their grasp.

The New Cult Canon is one of the great, modern examples of list-making as trenchant criticism, and it deserves to be celebrated and remembered, both as an artifact of its time but also as a more-than-worthy extension of Danny Peary's Cult Movies books, which inspired Tobias's work.

Each list-entry includes a link to Tobias's article on the movie, found under Read Notes.