'Heat'

A brilliant movie. I could watch it over and over again despite being three hours long.

It was not only a feat in filmmaking and a really cool story, but it was a once-in-a-decade casting job that reaped bigger dividends down the road. DeNiro and Pacino are just the tip. Val Kilmer, Tom Sizemore, Ashley Judd, Diane Venora (who has been in four different TV-film adaptations of Shakespeare including playing Gertrude and Ophelia in two different versions of "Hamlet"), Amy Brenneman, Natalie Portman (between "Beautiful Girls," "The Professional" and "Heat" is she the best kid actor ever?), Dennis Haysbert, William Fichtner, Hank Azaria and the great Danny Trejo. What a cast! Nowadays you couldn't pull that off unless you're doing "Ocean's 15" and you've got George Clooney hoodwinking everyone to do it for nothing.

The theme I loved the most is not unlike one of the themes that drives the HBO series "The Wire." That would be the egocentricity of the police officer. That threshold that detectives reach when solving a crime isn't about helping the community or humanity by taking a monster off the street, but about proving you're better, smarter.

Once Al Pacino cased the first armored car robbery, it wasn't entirely about helping ease the suffering of the guards that were murdered, but about going mano y mano against a worthy adversary, in this case DeNiro.