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If I told you I was writing about movies that have meant something to me after my father died, you probably wouldn’t blink if I said that Hereafter and The Darjeeling Limited were among my choices. You might have even thought of them yourself. But Running on Empty? Don’t humor me—you wouldn’t have thought of it in a million years. After all, no one dies (on screen) in Running on Empty. The film does not take bereavement as its subject as the other two do. And yet every time I watch it now it reminds me of my father.

It was probably only a matter of time before the executive producers of Homeland, Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa, reverted to their roots on Fox’s “24,” eroding a lot of the goodwill that this show has built up. I’ve described last week’s episode, “The Weekend,” as the most perfect hour of TV drama I’ve seen since the Mad Men episode “The Suitcase,” and I stand by that rave. Unfortunately, a viewer’s endorsement can be undone by problematic twists, and I have a sinking feeling that’s what just happened on Homeland.

Martin Scorsese’s Cape Fear is first and foremost a work-for-hire directing job; this doesn’t make it a lesser film, simply a movie he didn’t attach himself to from the beginning. Released 20 years ago this month, Cape Fear was the bookend to that other thriller released earlier in the year, Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs. Yes, 1991 saw America’s top two filmmakers try their hands at psychological thrillers – adult horror stories, really – and the results were movies that wiped away the last remaining residue of ‘80s exploitation – mechanized shocks designed to elicit robotic responses. With Lambs, Demme, who had up to that point made a name for himself as the most humane of American directors, used his training from working for Roger Corman to execute an unrelenting serial-killer thriller. What made the movie special was Demme’s refusal to sacrifice humanity for easy scares. He turned the platonic doctor-patient relationship between Dr. Hannibal Lecter and F.B.I. trainee Clarice Starling into one of movie history’s unlikeliest love stories. Even when dealing with monsters like Hannibal the Cannibal or Buffalo Bill, Demme was incapable of seeing then as just monsters. He had to locate their humanity. With Cape Fear, Scorsese left behind his comfort zone of big-city streets to tell an intimate story of a seemingly normal family imploding. His ongoing exploration of sin and guilt – whether it is ever too late for a man who has done wrong to be saved – courses through every frame of Cape Fear. Both films were big hits, but while Lambs became a zeitgeist movie complete with a character cementing a permanent place in our collective imagination, Cape Fear might be, in hindsight, the more disturbing of the two.

Joan Didion says, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” In the months after my father died, the story I told myself was that I could write as I always had, about movies and movie directors, and that this would, in fact, serve as a useful distraction from my grief. I was certain that my professionalism would see me through this terrible time.