by Moe Zilla

Created on: February 10, 2008   Last Updated: January 08, 2009

* Barbershop. This film gave me a warm feeling, and found something new to say about community and the role of the local barbershop. (In this movie, a loan shark wants to convert a local barbershop in Chicago into a strip club!) Cedric the Entertainer and Ice Cube found a new way to connect with audiences, and this movie ultimately delivered a strong message about preserving what's important instead of opting for the highest offer. Besides being very touching, it's also very funny!

* Batman. Tim Burton's 1989 classic re-invented the genre of superhero movies, uniting all the elements of a perfect movie. Danny Elfman's music gave this film an extra intensity from its opening credits, and Jack Nicholson was perfectly cast as the villainous Joker. With a classic story to tell, Burton could let his imagination run wild, creating a Gotham City filled with dark skyscrapers and foggy back alleys. Batman's cave seemed to fit right in. This movie was original, intriguing, and genuinely exciting. And it was the first of its kind, finding new ways to bring a comic book to the screen.

* Breaking Away. The Oscar-winner for "Best Screenplay" was a surprise in 1979. "Breaking Away" was a "small" picture, focusing on four recent high school graduates trapped in a small town in Indiana. The one teenager harbors dreams of becoming a professional cyclist, "breaking away" from both his competitors and his stifling life. The film shows not only his parents, his friends, but a cross-section of life in this economically depressed town.
Soon big-budget movies would dominate the cineplexes, but this film offered one of the 70s last great character studies.

* "Beat the Devil." Humphrey Bogart reunited with Peter Lorre and director John Huston, who had worked with him on "The Maltese Falcon" for one of the most unusual films ever made. Huston collaborated with Truman Capote to re-capture the magic of Bogart's classic detective film, "The Maltese Falcon, but the two men made up the script as they went along. The result is an exhilarating mess of detective cliches and double crosses, delivered with sincerity. Roger Ebert later identified this as the movie which pioneered the "camp" genre.

* "Bad Day at Black Rock." Spencer Tracy was 55 years old when he filmed the story of a well-meaning old man who disrupts a town with a buried secret. He's confronted by a great cast of heavies, including Lee Marvin and Ernest Borgnine. But it's one of the great iconic performances, showing a good man triumphing

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