Praising its authentic depiction of the impoverished milieu in which it is set, critics variously described its style as evoking a home movie or a reality-style TV police series. Joe Leydon of Variety, capturing the way it crossed the line between genre and art film, called it a "diamond in the rough, or at least a shiny bit of jagged rhinestone." David Cronenberg, one of the leading B-movie auteurs of the 1970s, had stepped up in financial grade with Scanners (1980), a $3.5 million production that Time critic Richard Corliss associated with his earlier, low-budget films as well as George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead (1978) and John Carpenter's The Fog (1980) as "hip parables of contemporary moral malaise." Cronenberg's crowning achievement in that vein would come a decade and a half later: Like that of Scanners in 1980, the budget of Crash, $10 million, wasn't comfortably A-grade by 1996, but it was hardly B-level either. The film's imagery was another matter: "On its scandalizing surface, David Cronenberg's Crash suggests exploitation at its most disturbingly sick," is how Janet Maslin's New York Times review begins. The review ends with an explanation of the film's rating: "Crash has the NC-17 rating (No one under 17 admitted) that it fully deserves. It includes frontal nudity, many sexual encounters and coolly grotesque situations linking sex and violence in graphic, sickening ways." Financed, like King of New York, by a consortium of production companies, it was ultimately picked up for U.S. distribution by Fine Line Features. In more ways than one, this result resonated perfectly with the way the film scrambled definitions: Fine Line was a subsidiary of New Line, recently merged into the Time Warner empire—specifically, it was the old exploitation distributor's arthouse division. The B movie in the digital age: 2000s By the turn of the millennium, the average production cost of an American feature had already spent three years above the $50 million mark. In 2005, the top ten movies at the U.S. box office included three adaptations of children's fantasy novels (including one extending and another initiating a series, as well as a remake of a 1971 film), a child-targeted cartoon, a comic book adaptation, a sci-fi series installment, a sci-fi remake, and a King Kong remake. It was a slow year for Corman: he produced just one movie, which had no American theatrical release, true of most of