To Kill a Mockingbird

“To Kill a Mockingbird” is a time capsule, preserving hopes and sentiments from a kinder, gentler, more naive America. It was released in December 1962, the last month of the last year of the complacency of the postwar years. The following November, John F. Kennedy would be assassinated. Nothing would ever be the same again — not after the deaths of Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, not after the war in Vietnam, certainly not after September 11, 2001. The most hopeful development during that period for America was the civil rights movement, which dealt a series of legal and moral blows to racism. But “To Kill a Mockingbird,” set in Maycomb, Alabama, in 1932, has remained the favorite of many people. It is currently listed as the 29th best film of all time in a poll by the Internet Movie Database, but it should be used not as a record of how things are, or were, but of how we once liked to think of them. (Roger Ebert)