Returning for its 15th annual edition this weekend, the TCM Classic Film Festival will turn Hollywood Blvd. into the center of the movie universe again for four days, for that very obsessive and loving subset of film fans that has the network’s vintage fare as part of their weekly and daily lives. And just what time span “classics” falls into is exemplified by the big opening and closing night films.

The gala opening night picture is 1994’s “Pulp Fiction,” which festival director Genevieve McGillicuddy says “is one of the most contemporary films that we are showing this year, along with ‘The Shawshank Redemption’ and ‘Little Women,’ the 1994 version. ‘Seven,’ I think, is the most recent film we’re screening; that’s 1995. Just like with the network, we don’t have any official cutoff in terms of the years of films that we’re showing. But, interestingly — it’s the opposite of a cutoff,...