I don’t know why, but it was really important to me that my children watch the Sharks’ and Jets’ playground dance-off in “West Side Story.” I guess I wanted them to know where Michael Jackson got the idea for “Beat It.”

And I wanted my daughter to see Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 “Romeo and Juliet,” too, if she was going to see Claire Danes’ 1996 version. I wanted her to see the huge role that costumes alone can play in a movie.

And when my husband answered my son’s suggestion that he sell the old sailboat under the deck with the single word, “Rosebud,” I wished that my son had understood.

“There is nothing wrong with you,” said Ty Burr, The Boston Globe’s movie critic and author of the new book, “The Best Old Movies for Families: A Guide to Watching Together” (Anchor Books).

“The pop culture caters to our kids and it exists almost in the moment. There is no past and no future,” said Burr. “Unless our kids break out, they will never learn that there is a past, or a past of any interest.”

Burr’s movie guide began with his own experiences with daughters Eliza, 12, and Natalie, 10.

“I was on jury duty and I was trying to explain to my younger daughter what that was and she wasn’t getting it, so I looked in the paper and “12 Angry Men” was on Turner Classics that night. I said, ‘OK, watch this.’ And she got it.”

His older daughter has been bingeing on Katharine Hepburn movies since she saw her as a child actress in the original “Little Women.” But it went beyond movies. She started reading all of Louisa May Alcott and that led her to the Bronte sisters.

Burr’s list of movies will remind you of all the ones you watched and loved back in the days when movies were what you did on a Friday night and old movies were a staple on TV, before there were 500 cable channels.

I want my kids to see the tremendous grief in Richard Harris’ King Arthur in “Camelot,” the musical. I want them to pick up a little English history from “Anne of a Thousand Days,” Becket and “The Lion in Winter.”

I can’t imagine what my life would be like if I had never seen “To Kill a Mockingbird,” or “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.”  I love my husband because he loved “The Quiet Man.” I might be a feminist, not because of Gloria Steinem, but because of “Adam’s Rib.”

But most of all, I want my children to understand what someone really means when they say, “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.”

It is “Let the force be with you” from another age.