Every art form has its “virtue,” a special property, a single thing it does better than any other. Film’s virtue is showing pictures of the world. And the pictures in David Lean’s masterpiece are exalted. No other film I know — not “Eraserhead,” not “Gone With the Wind,” not “Red Desert” — overwhelms the eye, and the mind’s eye, like “Lawrence.” You drown in it. It is stupefying. You stumble out of the movie — whose length is as majestic as its subject — dazed by a vision of implacable splendor and horror, dazed by vision itself.

In one sense, then, “Lawrence” is “about” nothing but the desert. But it is also about one of the most enigmatic figures in history — T.E. Lawrence, a highly educated British army officer who, operating on his own initiative, led Arab tribesmen in a guerrilla war against the Turks in World War I, returned to England, wrote an amazing, unfathomable book called “The Seven Pillars of Wisdom,” joined the Royal Air Force and died in 1935 in a motorcycle accident. Like Nietzsche, Dostoevsky’s Ivan or Conrad’s Kurtz, Lawrence strived to be, as he put it in a letter, “greater than mankind” — to somehow break through the limitations of ordinary existence by sheer will. Did he succeed? Fail? He struggled, mightily, then died.

Perhaps an actor can only capture gleaming facets of a diamond-hard personality like this. In a performance that becomes more evocative, more densely textured with each viewing, Peter O’Toole captures dozens of them. They glint and shine for an instant, then vanish.

Some critics have assailed “Lawrence” for being murky, muddled, unsure of what it is saying. There is some justice to this criticism. But this is that rare film whose weaknesses are not only swallowed up by its vast, disturbing ambition, but somehow become part of its strengths. Lawrence’s dark, inchoate vision does not fit neatly into the “epic war film” box. It does not fit into any box. His goals are turned against themselves, alien, never entirely known even to their possessor. They stand above and outside. Straining, sweating, “Lawrence of Arabia” reaches toward them.

Two mysteries collide in this film: The earth and the human soul. It doesn’t resolve them. It couldn’t. We can’t. It is a telescope aimed at the unknown. It is a huge film.

And yet.

The only time I ever fell in love in a movie theater, I was
watching “This is Elvis.” And I didn’t fall in love with my date. (Who am I
kidding? What date?) I fell in love with Elvis Presley, who had been dead
for four years.

By the time I came along, Elvis was just another one of those washed-up
guys who’d been famous for a long time and had a TV special every once in a
while, like Andy Williams or Jonathan Winters. I knew the story — the
lunging crowds, the screaming girls, the anti-rock ‘n’ roll speechifying. I
knew about all the records he’d sold and the endless devotion of his fans.
I just never really got it. He’d always seemed, well, sort of tame. You
know, let me be your teddy bear.

Sitting in a theater as a teenager, I figured I’d see more of what I’d
already seen. I sat through the ridiculous early scenes, starting — as
post-1977 Elvis books and movies always do — with the fateful keeling over
in the potty scene, then rushing through his childhood and adolescence,
where he’s portrayed as sort of a Huck Finn with a guitar, not the pretty,
sensitive boy who was much clucked-over by the neighborhood women.

Then comes his television debut, on Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey’s “Stage Show.”
The kinescope clip is a pretty common bit of Elvisianna now. But it wasn’t
in 1981, and I’d never seen it. Elvis comes out in a dark suit and white
tie and launches into “Shake, Rattle and Roll.” For most of the song he’s
in close-up, but at the instrumental break, he and the camera both back up.
Now visible head to toe, he does this frenetic, bouncing, standing-in-one
spot dance as he furiously strums his guitar. As he walks back to the mike,
he turns his gum over in his mouth before singing the next verse, actually
a segue into “Flip, Flop and Fly.”

I felt like I’d taken speed. My heart pounded. I wanted to tear my chair
out of the theater floor and throw it. I wanted to head-butt somebody or
drive 100 miles an hour. Imagine seeing that performance in early 1956,
when singers were gracious, polite and subdued, before people got used to
the idea that one might punctuate his performance by, say, biting the head
off a chicken. He was just so damn wild.

It’s downhill from there. Within minutes, he’s in tails, singing to a dog
on Steve Allen’s show. He appears to be stoned on an interview show called
“Hy Gardner Calling!” The long, dreary decline that occupied 21 of the 22
years Elvis was famous — interrupted only for one night, the magnificent
1968 “comeback special” — is well-documented. And now, Elvis is one of our
national jokes. The impersonators and the wedding chapels and I saw him in a
supermarket in Kalamazoo ha ha ha.

It’s his own fault. He lived like a damn fool and squandered a prodigious
talent. But it’s a shame that he’s remembered more for shooting at TVs and
eating disgusting sandwiches than for his inimitable singing (sorry, lame
impersonators) and his astonishing charisma. I remembered him that way too,
until I saw “This is Elvis.” It taught me a whole new way to see, and what
more can you ask from a night at the movies?

Based on Graham Greene’s novel, with a screenplay also written by Greene, “The Third Man” boasts his trademark of moral confusion coupled with a devious plot. Reed gives the movie a weird, exhausted, paranoid atmosphere in which the rest of the characters observe Holly’s “investigation” with the impassive tolerance of adults humoring a deluded child. The skewed frames; the gnomish middle-aged Viennese with their myriad secrets, tiny dogs and fussy clothes; the inky, cobblestone streets and the interiors — whether battered or ornate, they’re always strangely hollow — combine to make a menacing, alien environment where Holly is immediately, and obliviously, over his head.

As Harry, Orson Welles shows how easily Holly’s energy and initiative could curdle into evil if only he were a bit smarter, too smart in fact, for anyone’s good. Harry’s satanic charm — he gets the movie’s best speech, a jaunty bit about the art of the Medicis vs. the Swiss and their cuckoo clocks — gives the movie just enough additional gas to power it through its famous sewer chase with that gorgeous, indelible shot of Harry’s fingers reaching through the grate.

Holly may be the protagonist of “The Third Man” (such a movie could never have a “hero,” or for that matter even an “antihero”), but (Alida) Valli, as Anna, Harry’s grieving lover, is its soul. Playing a principled woman who learns that the man she loved was entirely bad, and that even this doesn’t matter in the end, Valli has a dignity seldom afforded to women in movies — her inner life surpasses those of the men around her. If the bruised-little-boy heart of noir finally grew up, it might wear a face as beautiful and sad as hers. The sewer chase may be the most famous sequence in “The Third Man,” but I’ve always remembered her cool, solitary walk down the long graveyard road at the movie’s end, her deliberate indifference to Holly’s offer of comfort. It’s the walk of a woman who knows herself, however painful that knowledge, and she stands taller than any cowboy.

On paper, Paul D. Zimmerman’s screenplay reads like Woody Allen in his “Take the Money and Run” period. Jerry Lewis is in it, for heaven’s sake! But on-screen, “The King of Comedy” skews quite differently. It’s Martin Scorsese’s second least popular movie, after “The Last Temptation of Christ.” Which is a shame, because it’s Scorsese’s second greatest film, after “Taxi Driver.”

Robert De Niro’s whiny, childlike Rupert (he’s like a dumb sitcom version of Travis Bickle — you keep expecting him to turn to the camera and ask, “You laughin’ at me?“) and the film’s underworldly lighting and colors, all spotlight whites and blood reds, give “King” a weird, fable-like quality. And it’s one of the blackest black comedies ever made. “King” makes you squirm in your seat out of embarrassment for Rupert’s excruciating lack of talent and overbearing persistence, and for the humiliation of Jerry (played by Lewis), and for Scorsese’s unprotective treatment of Sandra Bernhard (as Rupert’s kooky accomplice, Masha). No wonder the movie bombed — watching it felt like a violation.

Which was Scorsese’s intention. The film was released in 1983, in the wake of the assassination of John Lennon by a crazed fan and the attempt on President Reagan’s life by a deranged admirer of “Taxi Driver” star Jodie Foster. “King” is Scorsese’s answer to the politicians and cultural critics who blamed “Taxi Driver” for “causing” the Reagan assassination attempt.

“King” knocks down the wall between the famous and the average, but not in the way Rupert, in his imagined friendship with Jerry, desires. Scorsese puts you in the celebrity/artist’s shoes and asks, “Do you have an obligation to be nice to every pest? Should you be held responsible for every unstable person who reads something into your work that isn’t there?” “King” slams the People magazine culture that feeds on Americans’ obsession with the rich and famous. In the film’s piercing final sequence, Rupert’s actions produce the desired effect — he gets on TV, his face appears on magazine covers, he lands a book deal. And that ending threw off moviegoers who had been waiting for this insufferable loser to get his comeuppance.

But this is Rupert’s comeuppance. His is a cheap fame with an expiration date; it’s as hollow as the canned laughter that greets his wretched “Langford Show” monologue, as empty as his mechanical show-biz grin. “Better to be king for a night than schmuck for a lifetime,” he tells the audience, but the joke is on him. He stole Jerry’s show but not his crown: Jerry’s talent, his status, his professionalism remain forever out of reach. Jerry and his celebrity cronies can rest assured that Rupert will never be “one of them.”

What prevents “King” from being a filmmaker’s elitist rant about keeping the little people in their place is that Scorsese and Zimmerman want us to feel some sympathy for Rupert’s pathetic misunderstanding of the order of things. So Jerry accepts that, OK, maybe he is a little too skilled at seeming like everybody’s friend — the same way that maybe Scorsese’s movies are a little too flirtatiously dark, his thugs and Mafiosos and psychos a little too heroic and alive. But Scorsese stops well short of accepting responsibility for fathering the real-life Travis Bickles and Rupert Pupkins who stalk the land. Art reflects society; society is troubled. It’s an ages-old tangle.

The scene where Rupert shows up at Jerry’s beach house and his expectation of friend-to-friend recognition is met instead by Jerry’s weariness, alarm and anger makes you laugh from nervous tension, the way a great horrormovie makes you laugh. It’s as if Rupert and Jerry — and fan and filmmaker — have entered each other’s nightmares.

As predictive futurism, to be sure, “2001″ is pretty spotty. Attention has been focused this year on the film’s vision of the HAL 9000 computer; HAL supposedly went online in January 1997, and that has been enough, in this computer-obsessed era, to inspire magazine covers and scholarly conferences noting how little “2001″ got “right.” As our calendars race toward the film’s date, we also note that our steps into outer space have been far more timid than “2001″ imagined. At best, the film’s predictions remind us that the future never unfolds as we dream it.

Predictions, fortunately, are the least interesting and most disposable aspect of “2001.” The chief reason the movie still holds — no, demands — our attention, long after a million bad science-fiction epics have deservedly faded from memory, is its respect for its own mystery. Its vision of what science-fiction authors call “first contact,” the first brush of Homo sapiens with some other intelligent species, remains disturbingly and enticingly spectral. There are no bug-eyed monsters here, just profound questions to ponder.

“2001′s” ambiguities are not, as is so often the case today, a by-product of sloppiness or last-minute editing-by-committee; they are a deliberate choice, a preference for open-ended speculation over the pat satisfactions of tying up loose ends. Do the monoliths actually spark the stages of human evolution, or simply witness them or beam information about them back to its alien creators? Why does the supercomputer HAL turn on its human companions? What exactly happens to astronaut Dave Bowman on Jupiter? And what does the apparition of the fetal “Star Child,” floating in space at the film’s finale, portend? “2001″ is stubbornly — and, to some, distressingly — unwilling to spell out its secrets. (I know that Arthur C. Clarke’s “2001″ novels have offered detailed answers to virtually all the film’s questions; that’s why they should be avoided.)

The film’s willingness to entertain unanswerable questions is a function of the era in which it gestated. The 1968 collaboration between director Stanley Kubrick and science-fiction master Clarke took place in a time unlike any other in American film and American history. Old formulas were no longer working. Here and there, artists responded by abandoning formula entirely. But the window of opportunity didn’t stay open long, and once “Star Wars” demonstrated that the old themes and characters and devices could be spiffily and profitably resuscitated, Hollywood, relieved, returned to form.

Still, the power of that historical moment remains strong. I first saw “2001″ as a 9-year-old in the year it was released. Somehow I assumed that this was what all movies ought to be: treasures for moral and aesthetic contemplation that did not provide all their answers on first contact. Today’s Hollywood not only would never make “2001,” it has forgotten even how to aspire to such a movie. At this stage, it would take the ministrations of a “2001″-style monolith, discovered high atop the Hollywood Hills, for the movie industry to leap again into such marvelous, uncharted voids.