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Sometimes I think that one of the greatest things a movie can do is make you feel like a kid again. A documentary that can do so scores doubly impressive in my book.

The last one that did that to me was probably Jeffrey Biltz's Spellbound in 2002. The documentary tracking eight schoolkids and their paths to the Scripps Howard National Spelling Bee conveyed all of the kids' collective anxiety and hope as they worked their way through the competition. Mentally, I tried to spell every word with every child and my heart broke every time someone missed a word.

Whatever it was, I came across the movie while channel surfing at my parent's home this past weekend and couldn't turn away.

The motivation actually was probably generated from a Filmspotting podcast I has listened to a couple of weeks prior. After reviewing Iron Man as the opening film in the summer film season, the hosts talked about their top five box office - movies that did poorly at the box office despite heightened expectations - that the hosts genuinely liked and still would watch and enjoy given the opportunity.

I had been contemplating what films I would include in my list after hearing the podcast. Burton's Mars Attacks! was a definite inclusion, as was Soderbergh's remake of Solaris with George Clooney. I was slowly rounding out the list in my head while visiting family over the Mother's Day weekend, glancing through the offerings on Direct TV when I saw another one for my list on Encore Action! Tank Girl.

I would imagine that at this point several readers familiar with the film are wondering what I was smoking, but hear me out.

The movie scheduled for the evening was a "coming of age" tale about four young boys. So maybe it's not surprising that I would find out that weekend what my capacity for recall of naked or nearly naked breasts actually was. Though I am rather impressed it proved to be even more adept than that of my lesbian companion for the evening.

The movie on tap was 1986's Stand By Me. Directed by Rob Reiner and adapted from the Stephen King novella by Raynold Gideon and Bruce A. Evans, the film holds a special place in my heart for a number of different reasons. Released in late summer of that year, the film struck a resonant chord with me at a time when I was personally feeling disaffected and awkward in much the same fashion that the protagonists of the story were. My family had just moved to Fort Worth, our second move in two years after a lifetime in El Paso. Well, my lifetime, anyway.

This Film Is Not Yet Rated (2006) Directed by Kirby Dick; Writing credits Kirby Dick & Eddie Schmidt and Matt Patterson.

If the road to hell is truly paved with good intentions, my belief after watching This Film Is Not Yet Rated is that said road needs to be rechristened The Jack Valenti Memorial Highway. And it should be as wide as the man's ego and sense of self-righteousness.

From 1966 to 2004, Valenti served as President of the Motion Picture Association of America. He introduced the MPAA rating system for films in 1968 to rate suitability of a movie's content for a given audience. Like the Hayes Code before it, the MPAA rating system was an attempt by the film industry to self-regulate, keeping the government from imposing outside guidelines on artistic content.

In This Film Is Not Yet Rated, documentary filmmaker Kirby Dick attempted to highlight some of the hypocrisy, contradictions and secrecy that have been born by Valenti's brainchild. If the MPAA Board's purpose is to rate movies as they believe an average parental viewer might see them, Dick's film illustrates that the MPAA thinks that we're a nation that is much more accepting of violence than sex. That as a nation, homosexual sex gives us an overwhelming case of the "icks." And apparently witnessing a female orgasm of any significance is cause for alarm.

As a film geek, if there's one genre of films I find myself sorely lacking in more so than others, prison films might be it. Beyond something like Chicken Run, or the Stephen King tandem of Shawshank Redemption/Green Mile, it's hard for me to remember any prison flick that I've seen or stood out for me. Can't even claim The Great Escape or Stalag 17. Those are still somewhere in my Netflix queue, quietly waiting their turn.

Then again, it's possible that you don't need a heavy history with cell-uloid to appreciate the intensity, drama, and fury in the German film Das Experiment. It is a film that starts on a simple enough premise, starts turning up the squirm factor about halfway through, and by the end leaves you completely guessing as to how things will finally shake out, if you can handle the pressure of the last act.

Take a collection of six bumbling clones, a creepy mad-scientist who can't dream, a little-person assistant who is the scientist's sister (sort of), and a talking, disembodied brain. Add in a collection of thieving children working for conjoined Siamese twins. Combine one of the thieving children with one sideshow strongman who's trying to find his abducted little brother. Sprinkle in a collection of religious fanatics who've purposely blinded themselves to see the "true light," and who've abducted a number of children for the scientist's experiments, and have by chance taken the strongman's little brother. Stir with a bit of horror, dark comedy, and French surrealism. Serve.

As chaotic as the above recipe may sound put together, the end result is one of the creepier and more delightful adult fairy tales ever put on screen. Odder still would be the cinematic path that one of the two directors would follow from this movie forward. The film in question is French fantasy The City of Lost Children, from Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet.

A spoiler-laden summary of Logan's Run

Sometimes you go back and look at the movies of your youth, the ones you found to be the end all of cool. You see them again as an adult, and you wonder how you got past the age of twelve without sticking your tongue in a light socket. As I revisited one of those films this week, I've found that all this time, I've had it backwards. I thought life was supposed to begin at 30. Apparently I'm almost five years past my time to be in the grave.

That at least is the logic that drives the story in Michael Anderson's 1976 film Logan's Run. Based on a novel by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson, the screen text that opens the film advises us that by the 23rd Century, Earth has seen the population of the planet drastically reduced by war, disease, and other natural catastrophes. The remaining survivors have retreated to reform society in a city encased by a protective dome. Here within the dome, all needs are fulfilled, which explains why the future looks like a mall.

There is no apparent strife. Life is everything one could ask for. Naturally, there are a few catches. Part of the price for this streamlined utopia is that in order to manage resources, reproductive functions are closely monitored and regulated. People are not born to parents, but instead when the time is necessary for a new person to be born, individuals are selected to provide the genetic building blocks, which are then grown and developed in incubators. People don't know their birth parents in any way. Thankfully, Fox no longer exists, so this can not become the basis for a reality TV show.

In reviewing Rocky Balboa a couple of weeks ago, it was both surprising and refreshing to see Sylvester Stallone act a bit. Yes, it was rehashing some material and a character that's largely defined his career. The only other character he might be as known for, John Rambo of the First Blood movies, will also be resurrected in the near future, for good or ill I could not say.

Stallone has also been lambasted for his performances as an actor in much of the studio work he's done in his career. In every year from 1985 to 1997, Stallone has been nominated for a Razzie for worst performance of the year as an actor, screenwriter, or director, winning the trifecta in 1986. But the streak came to an end in 1998 as a result of a confluence of people that actually had some talking of Stallone getting his first Oscar nomination. Had that come to pass, it might have been every bit as warranted as every Razzie nom he received both before and after.

In 1997, writer/director James Mangold's Cop Land told the story of the town of Garrison, New Jersey. We're told in an introductory voice over that New York City police officers are bound by law to live within the city limits. The only exceptions granted are to Transit Authority employees, who are part of the tri-state network with New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Several enterprising officers who worked overtime for the subways were able to appeal to a board to be declared auxiliary transit workers. From this, they pooled resources and founded Garrison, where they were beyond the reach of all elements of the city.

"For me, stealing's always been a lot like sex. Two people who want the same thing: they get in a room, they talk about it. They start to plan. It's kind of like flirting. It's kind of like... foreplay, 'cause the more they talk about it, the wetter they get. The only difference is, I can fuck someone I've just met. But to steal? I need to know someone like I know myself."

~Corky, Bound

Any heist movie always finds its center around questions of trust. There's invariably a partner involved, because it provides for a nice pivot to turn the movie around if necessary. After all, we're talking disreputable people doing disreputable things. Can we really put that much faith in honor among thieves?

Which is why when someone can take the heist formula and turn it on its ear more than a little bit, it is a refreshing change of pace. When it can do so while throwing in a little bit of gender bending to boot, well, then you have something even more special. In this case, you have Bound.

Written and directed by The Wachowski Brothers and released three years before they struck paydirt with The Matrix, Bound focuses on Corky (Gina Gershon), an ex-con just released after a stint in jail for theft. She has a job, keeping her out of hock, working maintenance in a condo building renovating an unoccupied unit. It's as she rides the elevator up on her first day that Corky finds that trouble just seems to have a knack for finding her.