All these filmmakers came to mind in the last three weeks. Murnau via "Shadow of the Vampire." Coppola because of the recent A&E abortion of "The Great Gatsby," a novel he adapted differently, and superbly, 30 years ago. And every time we look at the calendar and see the year 2001, Kubrick again commands attention.

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"The Bridge on the River Kwai" is an epic masterpiece that rests on the electric, black-comic relationship between British POW Colonel Nicholson (Alec Guinness) and Japanese commandant Colonel Saito (Sessue Hayakawa). Nicholson at first seems like a simple hero, but his rebellion against the Japanese consists of insisting on the class rights of officers. Saito at first seems like a simple villain, but he adheres to a more personal and mystic code of honor than Nicholson's.

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But at the low-budget, indie end of the spectrum, Bromell, with "Panic," enjoyed an even giddier "Me and Bobby McGee" type of freedom -- the freedom that comes when you have nothing left to lose. Debuting as a feature writer and director with a $2.5 million budget and a cast working for scale out of devotion to his script, Bromell did his job in a spirit of serious yet relaxed invention that netted far more cohesive and poetic results. It's not a diamond in the rough; it's a diamond about a rough.

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Watching "Cast Away" at a critics' screening five weeks ago, the Gore connection was inevitable -- after all, Tom Hanks' character, Chuck Noland, hails from Tennessee. Though the movie is in large part a "Robinson Crusoe"-type adventure about a FedEx hotshot who crash-lands in the ocean and learns how to survive on an island without a stopwatch, it is less about handling goods -- or loneliness, or the infinite -- than it is about transforming loss into victory.

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Mike Nichols' 1967 "The Graduate" boasted a shrewd mixture of cheekiness and sappiness that by 1970 gave it the biggest domestic gross in American movie history after "The Sound of Music" and "Gone With the Wind." The movie featured two unknowns, Dustin Hoffman and Katharine Ross, as post-collegiate drifter Benjamin Braddock and his true love, Elaine, and Anne Bancroft as Ben's sex-mate and Elaine's mother, Mrs. Robinson. But for all its unorthodox trimmings, the film had a simple, salable premise -- "the madcap adventures of a well-heeled young man and his 'family affair' with two generations of pulchritude" (to quote the cover of the hardback reissue of Charles Webb's 1963 novel).

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Robards got his third Oscar nomination in what remains Demme's finest film to date: "Melvin and Howard" (1980). Bo Goldman's screenplay took a story out of the headlines -- centering on the purported Howard Hughes will that left Melvin Dummar, a young Utah gas station operator, one-sixteenth of the Hughes estate -- and transformed it into a lyrical comic fable about the American Dream viewed from top to bottom. Demme and his cast, headed by Robards as Hughes and Paul Le Mat as Dummar, brought it off with sublime good humor, turning a slice of life into a piece of cake. In the opening sequence, Robards' Hughes races on his motorcycle through the desert outside Las Vegas -- a landscape that looks as barren and cratered as the moon. He's rabidly gleeful, seizing on speed and motion as if they were his only remaining pleasures. Then he crashes, and takes on the aspect of a moon man who landed head-first in the desert.

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Although for decades "It's a Wonderful Life" popped up promiscuously on local stations across the country, the NBC network now owns broadcast rights and presents it annually during prime time -- this year, from 8 to 11 p.m. EST on Saturday. Of course, carping at a film that compels this much allegiance is tantamount to burning the flag. "It's a Wonderful Life" probably is the most affecting Christmas movie ever made. But the Christmas movie genre comprises some tricky, drippy pictures -- and the influence of "It's a Wonderful Life" has helped keep it that way. Since nostalgia and renewal are keynotes of the season, here's a reevaluation of yuletide's movie mainstays -- the "Wonderful," the "Miracles," the "Carols" and the "Story" -- all presented with faith, hope and even a dab of charity.

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William Wyler's 1939 film of Emily Brontë's "Wuthering Heights," No. 73 on the American Film Institute's Top 100 movies list, tugs the audience immediately into a romantic, haunted vision of the Yorkshire moors. Its melancholy pull isn't a matter of special effects; until the end the ghosts remain off-screen. The picture's greatness arises from its aching beauty and the astounding piece of acting at its core: Laurence Olivier's performance as Heathcliff, the stableboy locked in destructive thrall with a country squire's daughter. Wyler ignites the 32-year-old Olivier's gift for irony, his feral potency and his unique dynamic sullenness. With a Ben Hecht-Charles MacArthur script that extracts the central relationship from Brontë's novel, the director and a crew of Hollywood's finest -- cinematographer Gregg Toland, art director James Basevi and editor Daniel Mandell -- create a mood of thwarted yearning and sustain it for 100 minutes.

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James Dickey, the poet-novelist who wrote "Deliverance" and its screenplay, told Sam Peckinpah's biographer, David Weddle, that he wanted Peckinpah to direct. When Dickey and Peckinpah met to discuss it, the director said to him, "You and I are doing the same thing, me with my images up on the screen and you with your words on the page. We're trying to give them images that they can't forget.'"

But instead of the controversial, unpredictable Peckinpah, Warner Bros. assigned John Boorman, the prodigiously talented British director who a few years before had made "Point Blank." Judging from the documentary program on this DVD, Dickey never recovered from his disappointment. He doesn't mention Peckinpah, but on the evidence of "The Dangerous World of Deliverance" it's clear that Dickey and Boorman didn't share an easy rapport.

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The film, based partly on a Vanity Fair article by William Prochnau, stars Russell Crowe as a professional negotiator and Meg Ryan as the wife of an American engineer who is kidnapped in the made-up South American country of Tecala. In the smashing, vertiginous opening-credit sequence, our hero sits in a pristine, ultra-modern London office and blandly recounts a blistering exploit rescuing a Frenchman in Chechnya. The mission unfolding in flashback on-screen depicts a realm in which deals are brokered, and broken, with bullets.

Always superb at serious play, Crowe deadpans his way through his boardroom presentation while we see him in Chechnya, hanging from a helicopter by his fingertips. In general, Crowe is never more there on-screen than when a script gives him some wiggle room, allowing him to suggest a distance between what he says with his eyes and with his mouth. It's his constant potential for righteous fury, mischief and unexpected sensitivity that makes him so magnetic. "Proof of Life" plops him down in a ruthless, rootless milieu that tests his wits and mettle.

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Instead, he, director Richard Lester and screenwriter Alun Owen keyed themselves into the team's joyous group vibrations and produced "A Hard Day's Night." In it, we see the Beatles establish an unmatched rapport with their audience. Their young female fans catch fire from their pop sensuality, and their young male fans soak up confidence from the group's freewheeling exuberance.

And, apparently, still do. In the opening weekend of its current rerelease, "A Hard Day's Night" grossed a jaw-dropping $50,000 in two theaters, one in New York and one in Los Angeles. Miramax president Mark Gill told me Monday, "We got astonishingly high audience surveys -- second only to the ones we got for 'Good Will Hunting.' It doesn't mean that we'll get as big an audience as we got for 'Good Will Hunting,' but it does mean that the people who come into the theater will walk out the door and tell other people that they love it. It's encouraging that not all of them identify themselves as Beatles fans. We're also getting nonfans, or people who are not yet fans, and they love the movie too."

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When it exploded in U.S. theaters in the early '70s, campus hipsters everywhere adopted "The Harder They Come" as a fable of political and musical rebellion. They transformed this feral Jamaican film into a mainstream American phenomenon: one of the great college-town hits of its era.

On the audio commentary track to this Criterion DVD, producer, director and co-writer Perry Henzell says that he thought the movie played like two different films to international and homegrown audiences. While American students escaped into its thrilling otherness, black Jamaicans, recognizing themselves on the big screen for the first time, reacted with unselfconscious, squalling cheers.

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But his ebullience is boundless, which may have been key for giving pop conviction to a giddy spree like "Charlie's Angels." In a 7:30 a.m. phone call from Los Angeles, he sounded either saturated in caffeine -- or, to use a suitably '70s phrase, "high on life."

First things first: What's your real name, and why is it McG now?

My real name is Joseph McGinty Nichol. My uncle's name was Joe, my grandpa's name was Joe and they just called me McG, short for McGinty, from the day I was born. It was challenging when I was making those first hip-hop videos. Everyone thought it was just some nickname I gave myself to sort of make things happen. But, honestly, it's my name since the day I was born in Kalamazoo, Mich.

You were called that even in school?

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Movie fans who don't follow fantasy films will find this packed-with-features DVD a deluxe crash course in digital production. Of course, devotees of space operas, dinosaur adventures, feature cartoons and comic-book films have known for nearly a decade how crucial digital effects have become to realizing out-of-this-world visions.

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Curtis Hanson's first film since his much-honored "L.A. Confidential" is about lead characters who range in age from 20 to the mid-50s. But right now "Wonder Boys" is the most youthful comedy around. It's the most open in spirit, the most generous and bighearted.

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In the midst of post-production on "Erin Brockovich," I asked Steven Soderbergh what drew him to material that usually results in on-screen stiffs like "A Civil Action." All I knew about "Erin Brockovich" was the fact-based plot: A single mother of three gets a job in a law office and suddenly finds herself taking on a giant California power company for its contamination of a tiny desert town. The story line did not portend a foray into the pop avant-garde that Soderbergh had made his turf in "Out of Sight" and "The Limey."

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