Before Sin City, probably the best evocation of a comic's visual and aesthetic style. Because there's a huge distance between being over-the-top and flat-out larger-than-life, I'm going to bust out a hyperbole: Dick Tracy is probably my favorite comic book movie. Cast by what appears like Beatty himself (frivilous yet perfect choices, i.e. - great actors form his generation like Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman and James Caan), putting himself in front and behind the camera in a singular vision of (above all) popcorn entertainment, cartoon silliness and 40s noir.

Charming and literate to the last, Powell and Pressburger sandwiched this one between a retelling of A Canturbury Tale and the horror and repression of the eerie nuns in Black Narcissus; So light on its feet, in fact, that even death defying setpieces like that of the stubborn boat on a stormy sea maintain a gravity because we love the characters and because they are scary or thrilling. This is a masterwork, beautifully acted, wonderfully told.

Extraordinarily classy filmmaking throughout the first couple of reels (really, some of their best), but it gets sidetracked for too long in its exposition of the actual ballet. The ballet proper doesn't relevantly parallel the main story of a ballerina torn between her lover and her director (or, the breakspeed closing transitions of nearly all the characters and their chemistry spoil the lavish, fantastic imagination of the ballet). Nevertheless, The Company was smart to keep the content of the ballet out of the whole affair; Once you start off to compare and contrast the two, it becomes exponentially harder not to nitpick. Powell and Pressburger are about their own little British world and their own little British style. The Red Shoes has a great deal of both.

Some Carpenter feels almost too low budget to pass mustard (which, of course, must be passed in order that we celebrate something more than camp value); The snow has rarely seemed more ominous with its great plains of white splitting to reveal a UFO buried in the ice, a barren, Hothesque snow planet where a helicopter chases a dog through the wide chasms of a remote Antarctic research base. The actual title Thing (as it were) morphs and changes, a more disease-like horror cheapening an already frugal cast's struggle to seem paranoid of each other. There isn't a moment that doesn't feel forced but somehow, in turn, we manage to appropriate the mood the film was going for in the first place (something lonesome and beautiful like Alien, no doubt).

In possession of some of his most decadent camerawork, Obsession falters only by sharpening the staff: It starts out deliciously vague, with Cliff Robertson falling into Vertigoesque trappings, performing the title action over an Italian painter who looks just like his dead wife. As the John Lithgow factor heats up (in BDP, JL always = V), the film becomes much less interesting, much clearer, and much hokier. It never, however, stops making me do this thing I do while I watch his films: Something outlandish or opulent happens and I laugh - out loud - at myself for acknowledging its brilliance in my head. No other director alive thrives on a contradiction so utterly baffling.

Talk about wowing them in the end. For almost two hours, Devils on the Doorstep is a politically-charged screwball comedy about WWII-era Chinese peasants tasked with hiding Japanese prisoners under the noses of their occupying oppressors (namely, the Japanese). The bracing violence that follows is part of its greatness: Devils on the Doorstep thinks on its feet, keeping the stakes raised and the scenes brisk. It reminded me of Kurosawa's middle pictures, particularly The Hidden Fortress, in the way it seemed to shift tones almost on a dime, and thrive on entertainment at any cost. The closing moments do not allow for breathing; Wen's film has one of the best final shots I've seen in a long time.

I was so tempted to upgrade - because Femme Fatale is likely the director's smoothest film in years - but Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, despite this being a DePalma film, is one of those frighteningly horrible/eye meltingly hot actresses you wish you could tolerate. Perfect example: Banderas' nobley scummy paparazzi may seem a bit absurdly paired with someone like Romijn-Stamos, but he's riding the Bruce Dern verve (in Family Plot, specifically).

The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, despite a goofy title, is one of Sturges' very best screwball comedies. The moost wonderful thing it does is to rub off on you. I became sociable and extroverted while watching this movie. I took it with me when I left. Long, drawn-out, occasionally chuckle-worthy example: After I watched this I went to the supermarket. As I was walking in, I passed two guys who were talking about a hot girl who at just passed by them. As I gathered my items - orange juice, a box of red tea, a case of water - I passed by a dude on a cell phone who says to his friend "I must be in the front row/Cuz I don't know". I walk to the deli where all the meat slicers are cracking jokes. The hot girl finishes up her order (it was ham) and I start mine. The cool slicer guy puts the ham unused in the hot girl's transaction on the scale. I turn to her and ask "May I take your ham?" She turns back and looks (rightly) confused. As I'm trying to get the case of water, I find that I'll need a basket. I lay my stuff down and proceed to the front of the store where I grab a basket and ask some idle employees, rhetorically, "May I take this?" They look confused. I put the water in, gather my items and make it to the self-check, where I go about my business. As I'm finishing, the two guys who were talking about the hot girl (earlier in the sordid tale) are now hovering over her as she finishes ringing her items. As she leaves, one of them yells after her "Call me...610-3-8-something-forty-four-hundred". She says nothing. He then tells his buddy, "I wouldn't trade that number for anything. I bet you'll remember it." He repeats it several times. When I get home, I'm energized. Full of life. I'm cracking jokes.

Goofy Men of the Sixties' prance 'round the globe looking for radical waves of righteous quality in places like Africa (where PC had not yet been discovered, it seems). The surfing footage, homeade to the last, is as often dulling to the action as it is enhancing to it. It's more of a snapshot (dig those low gas prices, man!), really, than a genre exercise or, even further stretches like (gulp), artistic expression marrying itself to the craft of surfing. I was never for a moment bored, but was more often tickled by the period feel of it than the groovy feel of it. Bonus points for getting Randy to tell me that his cronies and he watched this and giggled through it like it was a slapstick comedy (apparently).

Though it falls in the unfortunately oversized bucket of films I've tried more than once to stay awake through, Spielberg's wartime evocation - while obviously made in the style of his wonderment-in-Hollywood days of the 1980s and early 1990s (all the way up to Jurassic Park) - is something of greatness mostly because it eschews then-this-happened regiment and flirts with aimless, day-to-day ramblings; Coasts on fumes only so long, though, before collapsing into over wrought sentimentality. Christian Bale and John Malkovich, the cheap TV Guide reviews would say, were seldom better.