Benjamin McElroy

The official Rear Window remake isn’t worth watching, even if you could see it for free through the floor-to-ceilings in a stranger’s living room. There’s a lesson in this, I think, considering the original is such an indulgence in unwanted glances. Alfred Hitchcock set his film in the big city, of course, where apartment buildings were closer than neighbors. But beginning in the 80s, amid the decade’s at times romantic, at times cynical, fascination with middle America, films that amounted to “Rear Window but with …”