Is "Pretty Baby" a bad movie? No. Is it a good enough movie to justify filming an 11-year old Brooke Shields as the pet virgin of a Storyville whorehouse who kisses and marries a nearly middle-aged photographer? Also no, which is why it has so few defenders. Maybe, if this plot produced the greatest film of all time, we could look past how gross it is.

It's a well put-together film, shot on location, brilliantly recreating early Jazz age New…

As we get further from the DWD hype cycle (why can I still recall Harry Styles's junket answers, verbatim?) this has settled in as a mediocre sci-fi story with a few good scenes that should have been 30 minutes shorter.

Its core material is even more relevant now, with the anti-feminist backlash taking firm root in the conservative movement, and the Department of Homeland Security sharing Eisenhower-era advertising to imagine "America after 100 million deportations." You can look at the…