I’m a sucker for lavish recreations of Hollywood’s Golden Age and they don’t come much more spectacular than Martin Scorsese’s epic retelling of the life of Howard Hughes, The Aviator. The story and various legends of Howard Hughes could fill a couple of films. He was rich, by all accounts insane, and had an enormous influence on everything from aviation history to the dismantling of the Hollywood studio system. His life was by turns both enviably glamorous and enormously tragic. The Aviator doesn’t try to completely deconstruct Hughes because I think Scorsese realizes that there is something fundamentally mysterious about the man that no one key event from his life or particular psychological tic will ever fully explain. Instead, Scorsese focuses on Hughes as a man of his moment, documenting his rise and just hinting at the fall to come.

Inception is the brilliant vision of the future where corporate espionage is administered through the human mind instead of the tangible environment. Leonardo DiCaprio plays Dom Cobb, a brilliant thief and fugitive who is very accomplished in the enterprise of extraction. He and his associates are the best at what they do. Their job is to essentially hack into the minds of powerful businessmen, via their dreams, to obtain secret ideas. As a way for Cobb to clear his name and pave the way to redemption, he takes a job for Saito (Ken Watanabe), a wealthy businessman who has commissioned Cobb and his colleagues, not to cull ideas from his rival, but to plant an idea – thus, inception. It is not so much the act of inception that prevents our hero from obtaining redemption but an outside element that prevents Cobb from carrying out his duty.

Catch Me if You Can is the true story of Frank Abagnale Jr. (DiCaprio) who, by the tender age of seventeen, cut over $2.5 million dollars worth of fraudulent checks and was one of the FBI’s most wanted. Frank travels the globe, taking on such identities as a Pan Am pilot, a doctor, and an attorney. Always on his tail is fraud expert Agent Carl Hanratty (Hanks) from the Bureau.

Although a story of a con man on the run from the law, the way this story is told, it comes across more like a fairy tale about the impetuousness of youth. Steven Spielberg’s direction is flawless in maintaining this tone throughout, telling a “crime story” that is amazingly playful. John Williams’ hip retro score and the great momentum of Michael Kahn’s editing add to this happy-go-lucky sort of attitude. The vibrant color palette, fantastic sixties costume and production design, and Janusz Kaminski’s cinematography, all contribute to make up this wonderful “true story of a real fake.”