Ever since, baby boomers — the economically, politically and culturally dominant demographic group of nearly every subsequent decade — have had a movie for all ages and stage, from their divorces in “An Single Woman” and “Kramer vs. Kramer” to their ambivalence about aging in “The Big Chill.”

And these contemporaneous portraits of contemporary life weren’t just White and middle class: While Dustin Hoffman was floating through life in his parents’ swimming pool and Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper were motorcycling through the counter culture, Ivan Dixon was giving voice to the struggles and triumphs of African American laborers within the South in “Nothing But a Man.” If “Woodstock” solid a fond look back at Nineteen Sixties idealism that was already a dim memory in 1970, the 1975 comedy “Cooley High” was just as vivid a portrait of Black teenagers spending a carefree day skipping highschool in Chicago. For each tragic “Love Story” there was a tricky but funny and optimistic “Claudine” (1974), starring Diahann Carroll as a single mother making a life and finding romance in Harlem.

By the Nineteen Eighties and Nineties, Gen X was having its big-screen moment: “Stand By Me” and “The Breakfast Club” and “Do the Right Thing.” “Boyz n the Hood” and “Set it Off” and “Slacker.” “Reality Bites.” “Office Space.” Come to think about it, for a bunch of disaffected latchkey kids, those Gen Xers were amazingly adept at creating a sturdy cinematic universe, from the oeuvre of John Hughes to such pungent one-offs as “Clueless,” “Kicking and Screaming,” “Beautiful Girls” and “Friday.”

Certain genres lend themselves to generational touchstones: If boomers had “Love Story,” Gen Xers had “Before Sunrise” and millennials had “The Fault in Our Stars.” “Rosemary’s Baby” begat “Halloween” begat “The Blair Witch Project” begat “Get Out.” It’s been said that generations are defined less by chronological age than by the technology they grew up using; one other reliable indicator is which “Little Women” adaptation they swooned to: George Cukor’s, Mervyn LeRoy’s, Gillian Armstrong’s or Greta Gerwig’s.

Admittedly, technology has made generational touchstones more endangered: The inherently collectivist analog culture of moviegoing has increasingly given strategy to an atomized, hyper-individualist type of consumption, wherein Gen Z — the primary cohort to be fully immersed in the web and social media — is more likely to seek out common ground in Minecraft and “Office” reruns than a two-hour teen drama. But, just when film critics were able to pronounce generational touchstones relics of a vanished age, Gen Z has found its voice in filmmakers like Gerwig, Jordan Peele and the Daniels.

But, just when film critics were able to pronounce generational touchstones relics of a vanished age, Gen-Z has found its voice in filmmakers like Gerwig, Jordan Peele and the Daniels.

Granted, those filmmakers have all made big hits. But, unlike “The Godfather,” “Star Wars” and “Titanic” which were box-office benchmarks, “Get Out,” “Lady Bird,” “All the pieces All over the place All at Once” and now “Barbie” are all movies that work on two levels concurrently, appealing to general viewers but serving as urtexts for his or her specific audiences: speaking their vernacular, normalizing their evolving morés, embracing their taste in music and fashion, winking at the identical meta-humor. These are movies that don’t just capture the zeitgeist but, in today’s parlance, make people feel seen — and in so doing function crucial vehicles to clarify one generation to a different. (Or not: In 1955, some parents surely recoiled in distaste from James Dean’s “You’re tearing me apart!” in “Rebel With out a Cause,” just as their very own children would do around 30 years later when Mookie threw the rubbish can through Sal’s window in “Do the Right Thing,” just as their children would do around 30 years later when Michelle Yeoh fights off butt-plugging time travelers in “All the pieces All over the place All at Once.” Kids as of late!)

But, to cite the one-woman generational touchstone often known as Pink, what about us? What about those in-betweeners who, by dint of birth date, temperament or easy pigheadedness, don’t fit neatly into the expected cinematic pigeonholes? What are the films that defined our rites of passage — our adolescent longings, first-love tragedies, young-adulthood breakdowns, middle-aged yips?

I used to be born in 1960, on the tail end of the boom and the primary inklings of Gen X. I used to be too young to see the debuts of “The Graduate” or “Easy Rider,” too old to relate to “Slacker” and “Reality Bites.” By the point I caught up with the classics — the “Klutes” and “Apocalypse Nows” of the world — I appreciated their artistry, but could only relate to them as idealized artifacts of other people’s realities. Even wildly popular movies featuring characters, storylines and locales that jibed with my very own life — “Animal House,” which got here out as I began college, or “Working Girl,” released as I used to be embarking on a profession in Latest York — left me feeling just outside the cultural frame, peering in with a mix of envy and misguided contempt.

I used to be born in 1960, on the tail end of the boom and the primary inklings of Gen X. I used to be too young to see the debuts of “The Graduate” or “Easy Rider,” too old to relate to “Slacker” and “Reality Bites.”

Which isn’t to say I don’t have my very own generational touchstones. It’s just that lots of them aren’t approved or acknowledged as such, because I don’t fit their “goal demographic.” Or because they aren’t considered classics — and even any good. Why should I care? These movies have penetrated my consciousness in ways in which have proved inexplicably potent and everlasting, immediately recalling the time and place and emotional state I saw them in. (Except a “My Sensible Profession” here and an Eric Rohmer film there, the movies that I internalized skewed heavily to the American women I reflexively identified with as I used to be growing up.) My generational touchstones don’t form a cinematic canon as much as a crazy quilt of vibes, impulses, bat signals and dog whistles that — randomly, digressively, but in some way coherently — define the arc of a random, digressive, in some way coherent life.

These are the films that get on the continually shifting truth of what it was prefer to be me through six a long time of growing up, having adventures, making mistakes and observing the world through my not-quite-this, not-quite-that, not-quite-chronologically-correct lens. And, I’d wager, most individuals reading this have similar hyper-specific canons of their very own. Movies are touchstones, in any case, because they touch us in such profound and quirkily personal ways. Whether or not they qualify as great is inappropriate. There are specific movies which have come to define each of us — for higher, for worse and perpetually. Listed here are just a few of mine.

The Nineteen Sixties are often known as a pivotal era in American film, when the secure cinematic language of the Fifties gave strategy to edgy recent modes of expression, informed by European art movies, cinema verité documentaries and the political ructions that roiled the second half of the last decade.

The Sixties were also after I was seeing my first movies, which followed the contours of “Mary Poppins” and “That Darn Cat!” In fact, 1968 was a watershed in Hollywood: The racially conscious drama “Within the Heat of the Night” won the Oscar for best picture of 1967, having competed against such era-defining breakouts as “The Graduate” and “Bonnie and Clyde”; that yr, Stanley Kubrick would blow the very best minds of his generation with “2001: A Space Odyssey,” Roman Polanski would redefine the horror genre with “Rosemary’s Baby” and John Schlesinger would begin filming “Midnight Cowboy,” a shocking but tender drama about two hustlers navigating Manhattan’s scuzzier nether-regions.

While American cinema was being revolutionized, nevertheless, a few of us were safely ensconced in its prelapsarian past. The scary, grown-up stuff was for folks and babysitters on something they called “dates”; for in-betweeners like me, 1968 was defined by the healthful family comedies that, despite the changing tastes of the time period, still appealed to mass audiences. My movie memories of 1968 are of my grandmother taking me to a theater in downtown Des Moines to see “Oliver!,” whose portrayal of Dickensian poverty and Fagin-esque corruption pierced my 8-year-old innocence; while my elders were flocking to “Planet of the Apes” or honing their indie connoisseurship on John Cassavetes’ “Faces” or grooving to underground cult classics like “Head,” I used to be having my very own psychedelic — if barely tamer — experience on the exquisitely staged big-screen musical “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang,” for my age group as radical a portrait of unfettered self-expression and anarchic freedom as “Easy Rider,” which could be released six months later.

While American cinema was being revolutionized, nevertheless, a few of us were safely ensconced in its prelapsarian past.

Probably the most formative movies, nevertheless, were the blended-family comedies that got here out that yr — precursors of “The Brady Bunch” about widowed parents who meet, fall in love after which are forced to confront the inevitable domestic and emotional conflict.

Hilarity ensued, but in addition — for slightly kid, no less than — transient glimpses of real life that felt deliciously grown-up. In “Yours, Mine and Ours,” Henry Fonda and Lucille Ball found sublime slapstick comedy in the journey of melding three-kids-each into some form of functional whole (the nightclub scene is a very toothsome piece of period farce). But what landed most powerfully was the film’s ending, when the family’s oldest son, played by Tim Matheson, leaves to affix the U.S. Marine Corps, an oblique but somber nod to the Vietnam War that was virtually invisible in most family movies of the day.

Much more unforgettable was “With Six You Get Eggroll,” through which Doris Day plays Abby McClure, the mother of three sons who falls in love with a widower who has a teenage daughter named Stacey, played by newcomer Barbara Hershey. As predictable because the turf fights, Freudian jealousies and supreme pleased ending were, Brian Keith and Day (in her final big-screen performance) gave even the hokiest plot points wry authenticity.

Nevertheless it’s a scene between Day and Hershey that lodged into my consciousness, and still brings me to tears each time I see it. After enduring Stacey’s criticism and power-plays for many of the movie, Abby finally calls her bluff: If Stacey desires to be the “lady of the home” that badly, she will be able to stay home all day to cook, clean, iron and mend while Abby goes to the hairdresser. It’s classic wicked stepmother stuff, punctuated by one among my all-time favorite movie moments, when Day suggests working on the list for the following day, which is a Saturday.

“There’s an awful lot to do, you’re going to need to get an early start,” she says as Stacey looks at her, crestfallen. “The very first thing I would like you to do is call your mates and go to the beach for the entire day. After which come home and fix your hair and nails, and make some nice long phone calls and have your dinner, and go to the films.” She pauses for the punchline. “Unless you’d somewhat be the girl of the home.”

Day and Hershey play the scene perfectly, marking the film’s emotional turning point. Today, I see it is a creative little bit of boundary-setting and psychological jujitsu on Abby’s part. For 8-year-old me, though, it was a revelatory portrait of a mother-daughter relationship based on greater than expectations and rigid roles; at its core was empathy, insight and something akin to spiritual grace. I’m not afraid to confess that Doris Day showed me what parenting should appear to be.

We all know what happened to American movies within the Nineteen Seventies: They grew up — into taut paranoid thrillers, searing social commentaries and gritty urban crime dramas — before regressing back into popcorn entertainments like Star Wars and “Superman.”

The Nineteen Seventies were the era of auteurs like Hal Ashby (“Shampoo,” “Harold and Maude”), Alan Pakula (“The Parallax View,” “All of the President’s Men”) and Robert Altman (“McCabe & Mrs. Miller,” “Nashville”). “Five Easy Pieces” and “Midnight Cowboy” continued the edgy tone and content of the previous decade. However the movie that kicked off the last decade was the old-fashioned three-hankie romantic drama “Love Story,” a PG-rated movie I used to be actually allowed to see (having already stolen Erich Segal’s novel from my mom’s bedside table). Thus began a lifelong grudge against a universe that didn’t bless me with Ali MacGraw’s lithe figure and unforced, utterly natural beauty; and thus began a private decade of movie-watching which may charitably be described as “eclectic.” I used to be 12 when my father took me and a friend to see “Cabaret,” perhaps considering it a teachable moment about Germany’s descent into fascism and intolerance; all we could speak about was the scandalous moment when Liza Minnelli demands to know if Michael York’s character is a homosexual (she used a crueler epithet within the movie).

This was the last decade of “The Bad News Bears,” which I probably (wrongly) considered too babyish for teenage me; also when the trauma of Vietnam could be examined in postwar dramas like “The Deer Hunter” and “Coming Home” and Fifties nostalgia could be indulged in “American Graffiti” and “Grease.” The Nineteen Seventies reached a creative apotheosis in 1976, when “All of the President’s Men,” “Taxi Driver,” “Network” and “Rocky” would galvanize cinema as each an art and a business. I didn’t see any of them on the time, as an alternative opting for his or her fellow best picture contender “Sure for Glory,” having recently discovered the thrill of folks music while working at a record store, and wanting to know more concerning the film’s predominant character, Woody Guthrie. And, I cannot tell a lie: I took myself to see “Lifeguard,” greater than once, to bask within the glow of Sam Elliott in all his tanned, bare-chested glory, the primary time I can remember experiencing objectification from the angle of the one deriving the pleasure. (Take that, male gaze!)

Midnight movie screenings of “Woodstock” allowed me and my friends to pretend that, if we could never be true hippies, we were cool enough to grok their music; “Annie Hall” ignited a fascination with Latest York (in addition to the ill-advised decision to wear men’s khakis I didn’t have the hips for). “Halloween” put a definite damper on my babysitting profession, largely because Jamie Lee Curtis’s portrayal of the bookish, un-clique-y Laurie Strode felt so uncannily personal. And “Breaking Away,” a criminally under-remembered coming-of-age drama a few kid within the Midwest who pursues related obsessions with Italian culture and bicycle racing, turned out to be the proper vehicle for my very own restless urges — urges that had something to do with absorbing unfamiliar weather and a foreign language and songs I didn’t know the words to — the form of urges that make you would like to go somewhere and be anyone. Preferably in Italian.

In some ways, my Nineteen Seventies took some time to indicate up on screen: In 1980, Robert Redford limned upper-middle-class inhibitions and teenage angst that felt startlingly familiar in “Strange People”; five years later, Joyce Chopra captured the tantalizing promise and really real terror of a 15-year-old girl’s sexual curiosity in “Smooth Talk.” Nevertheless it wasn’t until the Nineties — with such on-point time capsules as Richard Linklater’s “Dazed and Confused” (the keggers!) Ang Lee’s “The Ice Storm” (the repression!) and Sofia Coppola’s “The Virgin Suicides” (the puka shells and powder blue tuxes!) — that my Seventies-era adolescence could be captured in all its flared, Farrah-feathered detail.

Let’s just get this out of the best way: I can’t defend my moviegoing gaps within the Nineteen Eighties. By rights, the coming-of-age comedies of John Hughes and Cameron Crowe — a beloved catalogue that features “The Breakfast Club,” “Sixteen Candles,” “Say Anything” and “Singles” — must have been in my emotional wheelhouse; but by the point they arrived in theaters I had aged out of their worldviews, and located them hopelessly jejune. (Which is completely my loss, as someone who went around using words like “jejune.”) If “Heathers,” the deliciously dark teen comedy starring Winona Ryder, had come out 10 years earlier, it might have been made for me; by 1988, I had sadly outgrown its poisonously funny observations of highschool life.

Similarly, the adult-oriented pictures of the era left me cold, if not repelled. I assumed the Motown-singing-in-the-kitchen scene in “The Big Chill” was slightly cringe (I might have said “lame” on the time); even on the tender age of 27, I picked up on the anti-feminist hysteria that propelled “Fatal Attraction,” a psychosexual thriller with the emphasis on “psycho.” I felt similarly alienated by the dubious premise of “Baby Boom,” a have-it-all fantasy starring Diane Keaton as a business executive who discovers the thrill of motherhood — and the profit margins of homemade organic baby food! — when she unexpectedly inherits an infant from a dead cousin.

None of those narratives had a thing to do with the life I used to be leading within the Nineteen Eighties: living in Latest York, attempting to make it as a author, attempting to work out if men were friends or lovers or each, having way an excessive amount of fun at a time blessedly freed from cellphones and social media. One reason I missed out on the films of the ’80s is that I used to be too busy devouring town I had desired to explore since seeing my first “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” rerun on TV; why see the movie when you may have the actual life, in all its thrilling, sometimes bruising, immediacy?

Still, in between the bars and plays and bands and more bars, the too-late nights followed by the too-long brunches and deadlines and book clubs, I managed to see some movies. A couple of even hit home. I still can’t watch the ultimate scene of “Local Hero” without crying, identifying completely with its depiction of the longing that sets in a journey of heart-opening discovery. “My Sensible Profession” struck a deep (and still resonant) chord with a young woman of unbounded ambition but uncertain self-worth. “My Dinner with André,” a talky two-hander starring Wallace Shawn and André Gregory, thrilled me as a portrait of what each day life in the large city have to be like, bantering over dinners at Café des Artistes about Jerzy Grotowski, fear of death, the profundity of “The Little Prince” and Shawn’s girlfriend Debbie.Two movies launched a virtually lifelong devotion to directors who’ve never ceased to enthrall me: Jim Jarmusch’s “Stranger Than Paradise” and Spike Lee’s “She’s Gotta Have It,” polar opposite movies when it comes to energy and storytelling style, but each of which looked as if it would reach through the screen to talk on to a young woman who felt hip, nerdy, confident and wary all at the identical time.

Like most ladies my age, I associate the ’80s with “Desperately Looking for Susan,” an identity-switch comedy starring Rosanna Arquette and fabulously pre-filtered Madonna set amid Manhattan clubland. As a nightlife picaresque, it’s of a chunk with the similarly antic, dark-hearted “After Hours” and “Something Wild.” But as vividly as those movies convey the Latest York of that point, it’s “Smithereens” — the debut of “Desperately Looking for Susan” director Susan Seidelman — that revels most unapologetically within the manic, fraying energy of Manhattan’s post-punk era. Although I had little in common with the film’s opportunistic, gratingly self-involved antiheroine, Wren (Susan Berman), something about her free-spirited craving — not to say the trashed and tawdry city through which she moves — resonated.

The Nineteen Eighties produced a number of the finest romantic comedies of all time, including “Moonstruck” and “When Harry Met Sally”; on paper, the finicky, ambivalent women of those stories must have been my cinematic avatars. As a substitute, I discovered my people in two other classics: “Broadcast News” and “Crossing Delancey,” through which young women played by Holly Hunter and Amy Irving try to remain true to their skilled ambitions while navigating friendship, sexual passion and (perhaps) romantic commitment with men. (The ’80s were a banner decade for gay romance as well, with such swoony classics as “Personal Best,” “Desert Hearts,” “Parting Glances” and “Maurice.”)

Was there ever a more prolific yr in producing generational touchstones than 1991?

Give it some thought: Baby boomers got “JFK” and “Grand Canyon.” Millennials got “Beauty and the Beast” (two years after the last word millennial nostalgia trip, “The Little Mermaid”). Gen Xers got “Reality Bites,” “Slacker” and “Boyz n the Hood.”

Indeed, Gen Xers made out like bandits within the ’90s, which yielded a bumper crop of movies that indulged virtually every mood swing of a cohort often known as a collective middle child — neglected, ignored, stubbornly analog at the same time as it tiptoes into the pc age.

A slew of movies got here out documenting the ambiguities of a generation tellingly labeled “X,” as in — could mean anything. Linklater’s “Slacker” would turn out to be one other catchall label, but movies like “Clerks,” “Scream,” “Before Sunrise,” “Fight Club,” “Paris is Burning,” “Clueless,” “Beautiful Girls,” “My Own Private Idaho,” “Kicking and Screaming,” “Office Space,” “The Wood” and “Singles” would prove equally adept at capturing the nuances of a cohort that was reluctantly embarking on adult life when the ’90s dawned.

I recognized the growing pains dramatized in those movies. Now in my 30s and having abandoned the vagaries of a contract existence in Latest York for full-time jobs in Texas and Maryland, my thoughts were turning to dental plans and mortgages. Probably the most indelible movie images of those years is from Jodie Foster’s “Home for the Holidays” — starring Holly Hunter (again) as an adult child fighting the inevitable pull of childhood family dynamics when she returns to Baltimore for Thanksgiving. The image occurs early within the film when, on the best way from the airport, she locks eyes with a man in the very same position: stuck within the back seat of his parents’ automobile, haplessly trying to keep up his grown-up composure as all of the old patterns kick into gear.

I used to be in that automobile, just as I had been just a few years earlier while I watched “Thelma & Louise,” which really had nothing to do with my real life, aside from the exhilaration of watching two women light out for the territory, with zero figs to offer and needing only one another for support. Is that this what “Easy Rider” felt prefer to baby boomer men? And why did it take greater than 20 years for ladies to say their share of the asphalt? Regardless of. That is the movie that, for thus many ladies my age, fulfilled the feminist promise we were raised on but rarely saw on the large screen: that our lives and friendships were worthy of the buddy movies, road pictures and mythic westerns long dominated by adventurous, rule-flouting men. If the large screen is an extension of social space (and it’s), “Thelma & Louise” was nothing lower than a two-woman rebellion (with a charismatic recent kid named Brad Pitt for extra credit — move over, Sam Elliott!).

One other welcome feature of the Nineties (and early 2000s) was a spate of movies that, marketing-wise, weren’t “for” me, but that made me feel seen by making my friends and family members feel seen. The freewheeling gay rom-com “Go Fish” (1994) engaged the identical flirtations and political arguments that had been swirling around me since my 20s; when “Love Jones” got here out in 1997, its portrayal of ambitious, conflicted, commitment-craving African American professionals looked like a rather more idealized version of my neighbors in Baltimore. (A couple of years later, I’d vibe much more heavily with Gina Prince-Bythewood’s “Love & Basketball,” especially Sanaa Lathan’s spot-on portrayal of a perennial tomboy who isn’t sure she even wants a handsome prince, let alone deserves one.)

If life in my 30s may very well be summed up in a single movie, though, it might need to be “Walking and Talking,” Nicole Holofcener’s funny, sharply observed writing-directing debut about best friends whose relationship goes wobbly when one among them gets married. By the point the movie got here out in 1996, I had been to greater than my share of showers, weddings and more showers. I had met the person I might eventually marry, but Holofcener’s portrait of an offended, panicked, bumbling singleton — played with perfect pitch by Catherine Keener — might have been lifted from probably the most hapless chapters of my very own halting journey to maturity.

It’s all whizzing by so fast: Where did the primary decade of the brand new millennium go? Because the twenty first century dawned, I used to be having fun with its fruits together with fellow boom Xers, in addition to millennials who were starting to find movies: “Donnie Darko” explained the Reagan years of our kind-of-distant past; “High Fidelity,” Stephen Frears’s adaptation of Nick Hornby’s novel, perfectly conveyed the obsession and snootiness of the record store clerk I had been during highschool and college; Wes Anderson’s “The Royal Tenenbaums” mainlined a collective ennui and alienation I instinctively recognized (I recognized the Scalamandre zebra wallpaper, too, having dined often at Gino on the Upper East Side; hay-and-straw with secret sauce perpetually!). I laughed together with audiences at “The Proposal” when Ryan Reynolds broke into an impromptu version of the ’80s hip-hop anthem “It Takes Two.” Spike Lee’s “twenty fifth Hour” devastated me, not only as a wonderfully crafted drama, but the primary neorealist portrait of post-9/11 Latest York.

Nevertheless it was Holofcener’s movies that might proceed to mirror my very own life with uncanny verisimilitude, like cinematic doppelgängers. Her 2001 sophomore film, “Lovely & Amazing,” starred Keener, Emily Mortimer and Raven Goodwin as sisters coping with insecurities inherited from their mother (a scene through which a lover critiques Mortimer’s character’s naked body — at her request — carried a masochistic sting). Then got here Holofcener’s 2006 comedy “Friends With Money,” wherein I saw myself reflected — with hilarious, unflattering candor — in Frances McDormand’s 40-something wife and mother grappling with the futility of life’s repetitive cycles (she’s stopped washing her hair because her arms get drained, which you’ve got to be at a certain time in life to know).

These are the years through which I became a wife and mother myself. In 2003, as my husband and I were preparing to adopt our daughter, I watched Catherine Hardwicke’s harrowing coming-of-age drama “Thirteen,” about adolescent girls running amok in Los Angeles. Suddenly, the lens had modified: The acting out and experimentation I once related to as a daughter had morphed into self-destructive behavior that appalled and terrified me — a shift very like the one which occurred after I watched that yr’s remake of “Freaky Friday.” Some women know they’ve turn out to be a mother once they’ve given birth, some after they find themselves quoting their very own parents; I knew I’d turn out to be a mom after I identified with Jamie Lee Curtis as an alternative of Lindsay Lohan.

The flicks that defined my 40s weren’t nearly women: On the surface, I didn’t share much DNA with the creator affected by author’s block played by Michael Douglas in “Wonder Boys.” (I actually didn’t ever smoke that much pot.) However the story of somebody grappling with ambition, self-sabotage and once-assured potential passing him by felt wryly familiar. Between its themes of rue and regret and a soundtrack dominated by Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen and Van Morrison, the film felt prefer it had been reverse-engineered to succeed in all my pleasure-and-pain centers at the very same moment.

In 2010, while millennials and young Gen Xers were rocking out to “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World,” British writer-director Mike Leigh released “One other Yr.” By then I had turned 50, the perfect age to understand Leigh’s bittersweet group portrait of a long-married couple and the family and friends who drift out and in of their lives. (Lesley Manville delivers a bravura portrayal of a single friend whose loneliness becomes more achingly palpable with each faux-cheerful swig of wine.) It was as if the nice hangout movies of the Nineties had aged gracefully right into a narrative with the identical observant wit, but one tinged with more melancholy, more hard-won generosity, more clear-eyed honesty about how some lives manage to rumble along happily, while others derail.

When Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke made “Amour” in 2012, he illuminated the struggles my late father endured while taking good care of my mom at the top of her life. As I watched, I routinely related to the fictional couple’s middle-aged daughter until I spotted that it was really about what lies in store for my husband and me, just across the corner. A couple of years later, Linklater presented his portrait of the ravages — and revelations — of time in the fantastic coming-of-age epic “Boyhood,” while Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay provided a recent lens on the evolution of affection and desire in “45 Years.” I’m not nearly as good a reporter as Sacha Pfeiffer, nor am I as gorgeous as her or Rachel McAdams, who plays Pfeiffer in “Highlight.” However the journalistic thriller, concerning the Boston Globe’s investigation of sexual abuse inside the Catholic church hierarchy, was my “All of the President’s Men,” its frisson of realism heightened by the undeniable fact that I used to be working for the real-life Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber) on the time.

The 2010s were stuffed with other vivid spots: Emilio Estevez’s “The Way” depicted the Christian journey, not as an anodyne greeting card or pietistic march toward saintliness, but a rocky road to precious, fragile redemption; Sarah Polley’s documentary “Stories We Tell” chronicled the messiness of family memories and narratives higher than any movie before or since; the Australian horror flick “The Babadook” is the scariest — and most psychologically accurate — movie about maternal ambivalence since “Mommie Dearest.” As much as I might have liked to consider I used to be more akin to Daniel Kaluuya’s character in “Get Out,” I winced in self-recognition at Catherine Keener’s serenely self-assured — and wantonly destructive — White liberal.

As much as I might have liked to consider I used to be more akin to Daniel Kaluuya’s character in “Get Out,” I winced in self-recognition at Catherine Keener’s serenely self-assured — and wantonly destructive — White liberal.

It’s comprehensible that I don’t find as many movies to relate to as of late: I’m not anyone’s idea of Hollywood’s goal demographic (thank goodness for “You Hurt My Feelings,” this yr’s recent Holofcener mind-meld). But there’s one movie I can at all times revisit to feel understood, regardless of what the last decade. Perhaps it was demographically fated that my go-to generational touchstone was directed by Ron Howard, the quintessential baby boomer I first met as Opie on “The Andy Griffith Show.” In 1989, he made “Parenthood,” a movie I’m pretty sure I avoided in its time, because parenthood was a distant abstraction I had no real interest in entertaining.

Since then, I’ve returned to the movie often, finding myself in several characters every time. Was I ever Martha Plimpton’s rebellious teenager? Dianne Wiest’s single woman on the lookout for love? Steve Martin’s overanxious parent? Yes.

And now I’m 63, one yr younger than the paterfamilias played by Jason Robards, who delivers one among the best speeches ever written concerning the worry and pain of raising a family. “It’s not like that each one ends if you’re 18 or 21 or 41 or 61. It never, ever ends,” he tells his son, played by Martin. “There isn’t a end zone. You never cross the goal line, spike the ball and do your touchdown. Never.”

“Parenthood” still works as each a window and mirror on life, revealing different truths depending on what truths are needed in the mean time. And it proves something elusive concerning the movies which have uncannily captured their moments. True generational touchstones aren’t made. They’re found, time and again.