Known for his New York street realism, director Sidney Lumet opens Dog Day Afternoon with sunny shots of the streets of Brooklyn while Elton John's "Amoreena" plays on the soundtrack. Creating a documentary-like feeling under the fluorescent lights of an urban bank, Lumet creates a tense "you are there" feeling. Doing so, Lumet has made one of the great bank robbery films, as well as a powerful character study and a taut drama. Apparently based on a true story, it marks career peaks for Lumet and the young Al Pacino, in maybe his most likable performance.

Trying to raise money for his boyfriend's sex-change operation, Sonny (Pacino) and Sal (John Cazale) rob a bank (there is a third cohort who gets cold feet and walks away at the start). After wasting time letting the bank employees use the bathroom, the police get involved and turn a simple robbery into a hostage situation. With news crews hovering, this was the beginning of instant news turning criminals into stars. Sonny plays to the crowds who have gathered to gawk outside the bank by yelling at the cops and shouting Attica (a prison riot that turned into a massacre by a trigger happy state trooper, that was still hot in the day, another reason for folks to question the authority of "the man."). The working class Sonny also has a big fat shrew of a wife (whom he abuses) and a ton of kids, as well as a pushy, emotional mother - you can see why this Vietnam vet is so tightly wound.

Once upon a time a guy name Peter Bogdanovich was on top of the movie world. In the very early '70s, along with Francis Ford Coppola, he was once considered the voice of a generation (but then again, so was Dennis Hopper, briefly). Following his solid Roger Corman-produced micro-budgeted thriller, Targets, Bogdanovich got thrown front and center onto the major filmmaker map with The Last Picture Show, a perfect piece of dust-bowl Americana. This is a film that would establish a number of actors: Jeff Bridges, Cybill Shepherd, Timothy Bottoms, and Ellen Burstyn would all shine. While older cowboy actor Ben Johnson and ex-beauty queen turned character actress Cloris Leachman would win well-deserved Oscars for their performances.

A lot of directors working today try to ape Hitchcock. His films are the gold standard for artful forays into psychological terror. Christopher Nolan is just the latest celebrated director trying to tap into a rich vein of Hitchcockian malice for his own films. But while Nolan succeeds with astonishing set-pieces within his films—think of the face-to-face interrogation room sequence between Batman and the Joker in The Dark Knight—his films are, for the most part, long on disorienting gimmicks and rather low on psychological depth. He also doesn’t go near the subject of sex and Hitchcock’s films are full of sex—sexual obsession, sexual dread, sexual paranoia—the one exception being sexual fulfillment which seemed to exist only within the arms of his most beautiful and iconic star couplings in films such as Notorious and To Catch a Thief.

With the film JFK, superstar editors Joe Hutshing and Pietro Scalia were able to do some of the most groundbreaking editing since Psycho and Battleship Potemkin, which would mean some of the greatest editing in film history. Combining actual news footage, historical recreations, and a dense investigation and courtroom story with literally hundreds of speaking roles, they were able to piece together a three-hour drama that, no matter what you feel about director Oliver Stone’s politics or often ham-fisted approach, this film is now the definitive pop-culture record on the murder of President Kennedy.

There was a phony outrage and assault thrown at the film JFK before it was even released or seen. Critics of Oliver Stone howled that he should not be messing with history, slanting it to fit his picture. But of course that’s what any good biography or historical account will do. The combination of news footage and recreations were called manipulative. But after thirty years of the "mainstream" press in lock step with the Warren Commission’s cover-up, it’s about time to see a "mainstream" movie question the events. No matter how much that news footage apparently confused some audience members, the bottom line is: this isn’t a documentary, those are actors. Not to mention, there are enough actual documentaries and books out there on this subject to fill a library. Some right, some wrong, some rational, some hysterical. If you need to hear from the other end of the spectrum, maybe the best made documentary on the assassination was Oswald’s Ghost, a very persuasive piece of filmmaking, but in the end it has Norman Mailer declaring there was no conspiracy.

Neo-realism is having a bit of a renaissance within the American indie film world of late. Perhaps as a reaction to how Hollywood has all but ignored the working poor - or the just plain destitute - for decades there’s a new interest in stories about how middle Americans are coping with increasingly dire odds to surviving in a country where manufacturing jobs have left en masse to be replaced by meth labs and fundamentalist Christian churches. There’s a hopelessness about our future that has been encroaching for decades—wage stagnation, the credit crisis, the decline of labor unions, and the housing bubble are all symptoms of the decline of our much mythologized way of life. These new stories feature white, non-urban females in the lead roles. They have been deserted by deadbeat males who are overwhelmed by the stark realities of poverty.