Judd Apatow would possibly agree with this theory. Recently I e-mailed him a bunch of questions and that was the only one he ignored. He was writing material for comics when he was a teenager, and his insights into the stand-up world inform “Funny People,” his new film that has a lot of humor and gnashing. It’s centered on Adam Sandler’s best performance, playing George Simmons, a superstar comic who learns he has a very short time to live.

He is without the resources to handle this news. He doesn’t have the “support group” they say you need when you get sick. He’s made a dozen hit movies and lives in opulence in a house overlooking Los Angeles but is so isolated, he doesn’t even seem to have any vices for company. Adam Sandler modulates George’s desperation in a perceptive, sympathetic performance; I realized here, as I did during his “Punch Drunk Love,” that he contains an entirely different actor than the one we’re familiar with. His fans are perfectly happy with Sandler’s usual persona, the passive-aggressive semi-simpleton. This other Sandler plays above and below that guy, and more deeply.

“Funny People” is not simply about George Simmons’ struggle with mortality. It sees that struggle within the hermetically sealed world of the stand-up comic, a secret society that has merciless rules, one of which is that even sincerity is a joke. “No — seriously!”

Here is a man without confidantes. When you depend on your agent for emotional support, you’re probably only getting 10 percent as much as you need. On the circuit, George meets a hungry, ambitious kid named Ira Wright (Seth Rogen), who has written some good material. George hires him to write for him, then gives him a chance to open for him and then finds himself pouring out his worries to him.

There was a girl once in George’s past, named Laura (Leslie Mann). She was the one who got away. He encounters her again, now married to an obnoxious macho Aussie named Clarke (Eric Bana, playing him as a guy who seems to be weighing the possibility of hitting everyone he meets). George was once able to sort of confide in Laura, until success shut him down and now he finds he still sort of can.

The thing about “Funny People” is that it’s a real movie. That means carefully written dialogue and carefully placed supporting performances — and it’s about something. It could have easily been a formula film, and the trailer shamelessly tries to misrepresent it as one, but George Simmons learns and changes during his ordeal, and we empathize.

The film presents a new Seth Rogen, much thinner, dialed down, with more dimensions. Rogen was showing signs of forever playing the same buddy-movie co-star, but here we find that he, too, has another actor inside. So does Jason Schwartzman, who often plays vulnerable but here presents his character as the kind of successful rival you love to hate.

Rogen and Leslie Mann find the right notes as George’s impromptu support group. The plot doesn’t blindly insist that George and Laura must find love; it simply suggests they could do better in their lives. Eric Bana makes a satisfactory comic villain, there is a rolling-around-on-the-lawn fight scene that’s convincingly clumsy, and Mann mocks him with a spot-on Aussie accent (not the standard pleasant one, more of a bray).

Apatow understands that every supporting actor has to pull his weight. The casting director who found him Torsten Voges to play George’s doctor earned a day’s pay. Voges is in some eerie, bizarre way convincing as a cheerful realist bringing terrible news: miles better than your stereotyped grim movie surgeon.

After an enormously successful career as a producer, this is Apatow’s third film as a director, after “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” and “Knocked Up.” Of him it can be said: He is a real director. He’s still only 41. So here we go.

2. As the actor who played Dumbledore passed away between movies, parents will be forced to explain why he “looks different”.

3. The descriptions of butterbeer give the impression it’s an alcoholic beverage. An alcoholic beverage consumed by 12 years olds.

4. It must be said – the Professor Umbridge had Harry write over and over again on the back of his palm, “I must not tell lies.” Even if we ignore the fact he was telling the truth and was still punished, the fact that he was not only writing, but in actuality cutting himself repeatedly at the instruction of a person in the position of authority is, I think you’ll agree – quite troubling.

5. After JK Rowling exposed Dumbledore as being a homosexual, the inordinate amount of time spent with Harry, along with their consumpion of the assumedy alcoholic butterbeer together, leaves us wondering whether or not Dumbledore was less the loving father figure and more the creepy old guy who stands way too close to you at a bus stop.

6. Fred, or George – one of the Ginger twins – dies. The thing is, it’s a kid’s book – and we have people dying left right and center – including children. Then there’s the graphic description of his parents’ sorrow. “Happy 12th birthday Jimmy! Enjoy the book.”

7. There is an old man constantly chasing a young boy in an effort to murder him, having already wasted his entire family.

8. Standing amongst flames in your fireplace will teleport you.

9. Dementors – hooded creatures sucking the happiness out of everyone and causing both traumatic flashbacks and, one would imagine, suicidal thoughts.

10. Children are often forced to face their greatest fears or, possibly worse still, do things that wont kill them, due to the “magic” shite, but will cause them incredible pain.

David Yates, who directed Order of the Phoenix in 2007 and will steer the Potter films to the finish line, energizes the quiet strengths in the Steve Kloves script. A major character dies. And a minor one — the half-blood prince who’s been scheming behind the scenes — rises to the fore. Romance? Harry (Danel Radcliffe) pines for Ginny Weasley (Bonnie Wright), and Hermione (Emma Watson) watches in jealous disgust as Ron Weasley (Rupert Grint), Harry’s bff and Ginny’s brother, imbibes a love potion that makes him the sex slave of Lavender Brown (Jessie Cave). I exagerrated the kinky part—the movie is rated PG, though Grint is a comic delight in hormonal transport.

What makes Half-Blood Prince top-tier is the descent of darkness on the lives of these characters. The unseen Lord Voldemort cooks up fresh hell by planning to have Harry’s arch rival, the blond, bulling Draco Malfoy (Tom Felton), kill wise old Professor Dumbledore (Michael Gambon). And then there’s potions teacher Severus Snape (the great Alan Rickman) making a deal to protect Draco. I’ll never tell why, except to say that it’s a pleasure to watch the mesmerizing Felton take the role to the next level, discovering a vulnerabile humanity in Draco. And Rickman is a dynamo, lacing the Severus sneer with glimmers of conscience and moral doubt.

All the actors excel at pulling us into the film’s mysteries. Radcliffe’s growing maturity as Harry gives the role a touching gravity. His scenes with Gambon, superb as Dumbledore, exude ferocity and feeling, notably when they seek a horcrux, where part of the Dark Lord’s soul resides, on a lake teeming with undead corpses. It’s scary, resonant magic, poetically shot by the illustrious Bruno Delbonnel (Amelie). The shadows, and the dangers lurking within, have always drawn me deepest into Potter world. Newcomers shouldn’t worry about playing catchup. Getting lost in the hypnotic Half-Blood Prince is what gives the movie its haunting power.

Sadly, most of the film reviews I wrote back then are not online . . . I’d love to share the absolutely horrible review I wrote of The Story of O for the Daily Texan, circa 1975. But alas . . .

Geeks and movies go together quite nicely. I’ve been thinking about films that reflect tech and geek culture, and have pulled together a list of 15 movies that should probably be on any geek’s must-see list.

These are in no particular order, except that the first one is my No. 1 Must-Watch-for-Geek-Cred film.

• Brazil – There are some geeks who’d argue you should just list “any film directed by Terry Gilliam,” but I’m only putting three on my list. Brazil tops it, though, for the ultimate in skewed sci-fi dystopia. Geeks relate to its themes of freedom, longing and getting the girl, despite being quite dorky. Oh, and Robert DeNiro as a subversive air-conditioning repairman rocks, too.

• The Matrix – Yeah, the second two in this series almost ruined the legacy of the first, but The Matrix remains an icon of geek culture. A fun mix of sci-fi, cyberpunk lit and sociopolitical commentary, it extends the notion of machines run amok further than any previous film. And after seeing it, I dare you not to wonder whether we all are, indeed, jacked in to some cheesy simulation of reality.

• The Fifth Element – The best Terry Gilliam film he didn’t make, The Fifth Element has some cheap special effects but makes the list for its vision of media, society and art. If the vocal performance of the tube-headed alien doesn’t give you goose bumps, you’re not alive. Oh yeah, and Bruce Willis is pounds of fun, too.

• Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan — William Shatner’s cry of “Khaaaaaaaaaaan!!!” has entered the Geek Movie Scene Hall of Fame, as has Chekov’s getting an earful of a space worm. Lines such as “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one,” uttered by Spock as he sacrifices himself to save the Enterprise, have entered the lexicon.

• Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home – The next-best film in the series makes the list for two wonderful scenes. The crew of the Enterprise comes back to mid-1980s Earth to save the future planet from destruction by a whale-loving alien. At one point, engineer Scotty confronts a Macintosh and tries to talk to it. Someone points out he should use the mouse, which he then picks up and says into it: “Computer!” Next is the scene in which Spock gives the Vulcan death grip to a rude, boombox-toting punk on a bus. Audiences still cheer that scene.

• Serenity – Even if you’ve never watched the Firefly TV series, you owe it to yourself to see Serenity. It’s easily the best Star Trek movie that’s not a Star Trek movie, and you don’t need to be versed in the characters to get what’s going on. In fact, even if you didn’t follow the series, you’ll still weep when one of the major characters dies. This movie is smart, funny and hits the right balance between serious action and fun camp.

• Dark City — There are those who hint, eyebrows arched, that The Matrix got its best ideas from Dark City, even though the latter was released just one year before the former. A city is reworked each night, people’s memories are rewritten and those who begin to guess the truth are reprogrammed. This film owes a lot visually to earlier works, such as the films of Fritz Lang, F.W. Murnau and Robert Wiene.

• 12 Monkeys — A Terry Gilliam/Bruce Willis pairing, 12 Monkeys is a little less serious in its dystopian vision. Willis travels back in time in an attempt to prevent a virus from ravaging the future. The film is worth it for Brad Pitt’s best performance ever, as a crazed environmental terrorist. A review at the Internet Movie Database offers a grammatically garbled warning to take to heart, though: “. . .this movie needs your attention the forthcoming two hours and you better not miss some minutes for getting a coke as there is a danger you can’t follow.” I think I agree . . .

• Shaun of the Dead — This is both the best parody of a zombie movie ever made, and the best zombie movie ever made. All zombie movies are political commentary — the masses are mindless and dangerous, yada yada — but few of them have as much fun with it as this one. In Shaun of the Dead, the heroes are misfits and geeks who bust through the conventions of zombie filmdom. It will be hard to make a zombie movie with a straight face from here on out.

• Darkman – Sam Raimi does a comic book movie, pre-Spider-Man. It’s an updated version of Batman with a darker heart and more attitude, in which a scientist is horribly disfigured by thugs and uses his brains to outwit their brawn to wreak vengeance. In other words, geeks harassed in high school by jocks for being science nerds will relate.

• Army of Darkness — More Sam Raimi, this time capping off his Evil Dead series with a more mainstream and approachable film. Bruce Campbell, arguably the king of geek actors, reprises his Ash role as he’s sucked back in time to the Middle Ages. Ash is both brilliant and brilliantly dumb, playing a geek who succeeds in spite of himself. Best scenes — Ash assembles a replacement for the arm he hacked off in Evil Dead II, and he does battle with a demon in the aisles of an “S-Mart”.

• War Games – Possibly the first film to give mainstream audiences a taste of hacker culture — sanitized though it was — War Games is both a period piece and a source of geek lexicon. The term wardialing, the practice of dialing random phone numbers until you find a modem to connect to, came from this film. That later morphed in to wardriving – cruising the streets in search of unsecured Wi-Fi networks. Geeks will also have a great time watching for the techno-mistakes, which are legion.

• Monty Python and the Holy Grail – I occasionally run into geeks who say, “I’ve never seen Monty Python and the Holy Grail, but I feel like I have.” I think it’s fair to argue that the Pythons invented geek humor, and this movie is its pinnacle. Note to serious geeks: You shouldn’t just have seen this movie, you should pwn it.

• Office Space — No film has captured what it’s like to work at an “enlightened” high-tech workplace as has Office Space, which bombed when first released but has become a cult hit on DVD. Who among us hasn’t wanted to smash the office fax machine with a baseball bat while profane hip hop plays in the background?

• Repo Man – Directed by Alex Cox, this movie is best known for having been produced by former Monkee Mike Nesmith (the smart, talented one). Emilio Estevez plays a punk who takes a job as a repo man. “Repo man is intense,” Harry Dean Stanton tells him, and that’s an understatement. Geek alienation and the blanding down of mainstream society are the themes here. Those who missed the 1980s may not get the references to black-and-white generics — Estevez dines from a can marked simply “Food” — but a little history lesson never hurt anyone.

Final Destination 2 – Evan’s death
Plenty of great deaths in this film franchise, but this one’s the best because of the joy of the tension that builds up, and the fun to be had with the will he, won’t he? Will it be him tripping up on the toys in the hallway, the magnet in the microwave, the flaming pan? We’re even teased when the ladder comes flying towards him and stops, you think he’s going to be alright then splat! Ho ho, death what a card you are! Death, lol. Also lots of eye references throughout the scene, the iMac, doll’s eye is trod on, eye on the fridge spelt out in magnets.

Enter the Ninja – Villian’s death
Look at this, just look at it! That’s the way to die. Take a ninja star to the stomach and then overact like Al Pacino on coke. Then for a final flourish show us the double palms as a final ‘”meh” to a world you couldn’t quite understand or weren’t willing to comprehend.

Jaws – Quint’s death
Ah, my personal fav. After his great speech about delivering the Hiroshima bomb (“Eleven hundred men went into the water. Vessel went down in 12 minutes. Didn’t see the first shark for about a half-hour. Tiger. 13-footer.”), he then goes and dies like a man being dragged into purgatory to be consumed for all eternity by vicious man-eating sharks. Blood spilling out of his mouth like a gushing river of death. This is an epically grand way to go. Something like this can really ruin a man’s day.

Bambi – Bambi’s mother dies
Don’t look back. Keep running Bambi, keep running!!! Dear god this couldn’t be a more traumatic experience, I cried tears of venison over this when I first watched it, I was 25. It’s devastating stuff, when Bambi turns around and…*sniff*…his cries for mother fall to the uncaring ground just like those snowflakes. WHY-HY-HY!!! I felt like Charlton Heston at the end of Planet of the Apes. It’s a hymn to loss, a lament to the cold cruel hands of death that snatch away our beloveds. But don’t let it depress you.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer – Paul Reubens’ death
The film is about as good as being bitten by the undead and then getting a stake driven through your heart, but this death by ruler is great. You can always rely on Paul Reubens in a movie. Sarcastic vampires making a meal out of dying can only be a good thing. Vampires usually make a meal out of dying, but it’s not usually their death.

Casino – Frank & Nicky’s Santoro’s deaths
You’re in a cornfield, badabing! Tough guy, you and your f#cking brada! Jeez, don’t fuck with the mob or they’ll baseball bat you a newbie, while you watch your bro’s eyes explode like crushed grapes, before you’re buried alive. Good times. Pesci’s character was based on real-life thug Anthony “The Ant” Spilotro, him and his brother Michael met a similar fate.

Scanners – Exploding head
Heads exploding like a cheap microwaved dinner, they were all the rage back in the 80s, everybody was at it. This was what started that craze. But beware of its lingering effect, say if you’re walking along the street and you hear an intense high-pitched sound coming from behind like the THX crescendo then you might want to think about quickening your pace a little. Just a thought.

Platoon – Elias death scene
Adagio for Strings, falling to your knees and throwing your arms in the air pleading to a non-existent god who doesn’t care, it’s an iconic shot and exposes that common existential fear of being shot at by the Vietcong while your supposed buddies fly off in a helicopter to leave you to die squealing like a diseased pig. A biblical name deserves a biblical death.

Robocop – Toxic waste
Out he comes from the back of that van like a toxic water ride and suddenly he’s gone from being the guy who says the cool line, “I guess you think you’re pretty smart, huh? Think you can outsmart a bullet?” to Sloth from the Goonies in seconds. Pretty smart. And then you he gets splattered as easily as an overripe avocado.

American History X – Curb stomp
Neo-Nazis, they certainly are a nasty bunch. This guy gets his fill of yummy curby crunchy goodness, and seeing those teeth scrap against the curb, it might as well be a 1000 nails being scraped down a 1000 blackboards. If you’re watching this scene with someone who winces at Tom and Jerry, then make sure you have a pillow ready for them to hide behind.

Cube – Sliced and diced
How annoying would this be, you hear a whooshing sound fly past you and for a brief nanosecond you think “I’m still alive!!” and then slowly, horribly, blood seeps from your cheeks and, by god, you’ve been cubed like some cheap animal being prepared for a curry. Somebody clean that mess up before health and safety see it.

The Godfather – Sonny’s death
Plenty to be proud of in this death. He takes an impressive amount of lead, probably simultaneously dying of multiple ruptured organs and lead-poisoning. He’s so tough that in the autopsy there will be two causes of death.

Live and Let Die – Exploding Dr. Kananga
Roger Moore, a man who could get out-acted by a rotting plank of wood. What a legend. What I like about this death is the realism; if you’re going to kill someone by inflating them then I want them to float up to the ceiling before they pop like a human balloon, just like they would in real life. That’s what the Bond films were all about really, the laws of physics.

Raiders of the Lost Ark – Melting Nazis
Ah, a classic death, well three classic deaths. Death by melting caused by the holy madness escaping from the Ark of the Covenant. That ghost woman goes from hot to freakishly scary so quickly when I watched it as a child I thought my time was up. But then the Nazis’ heads start melting like an ice-cream in the Sun and that ghost seemed like the sweet vision of a great Goddess smiling at me and beckoning me to bed. Another great Indy death is the uber-aging Nazi from Crusade.

Psycho – Shower scene
The very first slasher movie with a death scene that shocked audiences so much we’d only be able to replicate it now if we sliced people open with sharpened children and then raped an animal while aborting a foetus with our teeth and then eating it with some drowned puppies while dressed up as the twin towers and screaming, “JIHAD!!” at the top of our voices. And even then our modern sensibilities are so hardy we’ll barely wince, or probably just shrug and say, “Meh”.

Alien – Chest bustering alien
OM NOM NOM NOM. OM NOM-splurge! Holy f#ck-Christ that is some life-threatening indigestion. Sometimes I get such bad heartburn I too think something will soon erupt from my chest in a torrent of cartilage, gristle, burst lung and plenty of spouting blood, but then I eat an antacid. Not so easy for poor John Hurt. Classic scene, even if the little alien that scurries away looks a bit silly these days.

300 – Death of Leonidas
THIS. IS. THE DEATH OF LEONIDAS!!!! Going down in a hail of arrows is so ancient world old school cool, such a noble way to go. It was the way to do it back then, now it’s all about getting blown up by a roadside bomb. But B.C. if your dead corpse didn’t have the same amount of arrows in you as years you’d been alive then by the immortal gods of a distant land you can forget a decent burial, you f#cking pansy.

The Meaning of Life – Exploding Mr Creosote
Eating yourself to death and then exploding. What more can be said. Look out for an awesome comedy jump from John Cleese to escape the oncoming flesh and fat.

Dr. Strangelove – Slim Pickens’ death
Well if you’re going to go, might as well do it rodeo-riding a nuke whilst screaming manically, like an unhinged loon fresh from escaping the asylum.

Assault on Precinct 13 – Little girl ice-cream van
Worth waiting for this, a true shocker, little girl buying an ice-cream. Shoot her in the f#cking chest goddammit! BLAM! Ha! Nothing like a child dying from a blast to the chest to make me think about putting it on a list. All she wanted was a f#cking ice-cream. Hey little girl you got red on you, looks like you spilt a bit of strawberry sauce down yourself, oh, oh right, that’s not sauce…

Total Recall – Cohaagen’s bulging head
This is impressive, those eyes popping out like a pair of birds from a cuckoo clock telling you it’s one minute to death. Dramatic, ridiculous, bulging, everything a good death should be.

Apocalypse Now – Death of Kurtz
“Even the jungle wanted him dead, and that’s who he really took his orders from anyway” Badass line. What on earth could they be trying to say with the juxtaposition of Kurtz and the sacrifice of an ox? Slices straight through me. Symbolism, huh. But one thing I do know is that Marlon Brando knows how to die, first as Don Corleone falling over like a dead elephant in a vineyard and now this. Always with the drama.

Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls – Racoon cliffhanger death
A brilliant parody of a great opening to a movie. Look at the racoon’s little eyes as he falls to his doom. Take a good look at those terrified eyes, because those eyes will visit you every night in your dreams for the rest of your life.

Terminator 2: Judgement Day – Arnie’s death
No Arnie, don’t go! Don’t leave uuuus! Oh OK then if you must as long as I get a cheesy thumbs up as you sink into that molten lava. You can almost smell the Monterey Jack, but by the end of the movie I demanded a decent Arnie send off. Now I like to have this part of the movie on some crackers after a lovely meal, maybe with a glass of port. Here’s a little Arnie joke: Last Easter Arnie didn’t get any Easter eggs and his wife said to him, “I suppose you hate Easter now, because you didn’t get any eggs.” Arnie looked at her, smiled, and said, “Not at all, I still love Easter baby!”

The Untouchables – Baseball to the head
The team, the team. I love this guy who gets battered about the head until a thick pool of viscous blood comes oozing onto the table like the creeping onset of an untimely death. He’s looking about nodding happily to himself thinking, “Yeah you bozos, don’t piss Al off” and then with a swing of that bat down he goes. So if a man is menacingly pacing behind you when you’re noming down on your dinner, make your excuses and leave. Say you’ve got a date at a speakeasy or something.

Day of the Dead – Death of Captain Rhodes
Being shot down by a zombie has got to hurt your pride. I mean, how the hell do they aim? Anyway, after that humiliation you then have to suffer the indecency of being ripped in half by your undead compatriots. I mean, who doesn’t want to go out like that?

Well most of those were pretty gruesome, I didn’t mean them to be but I’m a sick f#ck I need help what do you want me to do? Death stalks us, be brave.

The thrills are certainly there in the sensationally choreographed prison break that opens the movie under a bright blue Midwestern sky that stretches across the wide screen like a cathedral ceiling. Dappled by fluffy white clouds, it is the kind of sky that tends to show up as a backdrop in paintings of the Madonna and Child, but here offers a sharp contrast to the long-distance image of Dillinger and his friend Red (Jason Clarke), quickly striding toward an enormous, looming prison. Mr. Mann goes in closer once the men enter the prison, where they help disarm the guards, and he pulls back again for the long view as Dillinger fires on the prison with a machine gun while the escapees make a run for the getaway car.

By force of Hollywood habit, you might expect that this vision of the suddenly lone gunman would serve as a prelude to another exciting joy ride about living fast and dying young. Instead it’s followed by a striking short scene of a wounded escapee being dragged alongside the speeding car while Dillinger and another man struggle to pull him up. In the most startling shot, Mr. Mann places the camera right next to the fallen man, pointing it up at Dillinger’s dark, ominous figure as he almost blots out that blue sky. Dillinger holds on until the man’s grip wilts, the dead body slipping away in one direction as the car races off in the other. Laying the blame elsewhere, he next tosses another man out of the moving car.

This, then, is Mr. Mann’s Dillinger: brave enough to stand his ground, loyal, ruthless. There’s a hint of the demonic in this portrait, particularly when the outlaw is gliding through a bank, his long, dark coat fanning around him and a tommy gun in one hand. This is the stuff of legends, of shoot-’em-ups and matinee gangsters with jaunty smiles. Mr. Mann loves this apparition of calculated bravura and initially he frames the first few heists as seamlessly choreographed set pieces. During the first robbery he shows Dillinger and two accomplices from high overhead, the camera peering straight down as the men fan across a black-and-white bank floor like MGM dancers. When Dillinger leaps across a railing, he soars.

It’s a seductive moment — the bad man seems to be defying gravity, not just the law — and much like the other action scenes, it gives the movie a jolt. It also, perhaps in homage, mirrors a similar shot of the escaping serial killer in David Fincher’s “Seven.” Like Mr. Fincher, Mr. Mann makes big-budget art movies that because of their complex pleasures and ambiguities, don’t always hit the box office sweet spot (“Seven” and “Collateral,” Mr. Mann’s movie with Tom Cruise, being exceptions). Despite Mr. Mann’s mainstream bona fides, notably with the 1980s hit TV show “Miami Vice,” and preference for muscular cinematic genres, there’s something resolutely noncommercial about his movies. Among other things, they’re deeply serious (at times to the edge of parody), which is why they rarely pop.

And “Public Enemies” is nothing if not serious, a vividly realistic if fictionalized portrait of a country deep in depression and jumping with bad men. The story centers on two dramatic antagonists, Dillinger and Melvin Purvis (a remote Christian Bale), the F.B.I. agent who doggedly, if often ineptly, led the hunt for America’s most wanted. At first the bureau’s young chief, J. Edgar Hoover (a terrific Billy Crudup, his neck thickened and delivery clipped), ignored Dillinger, deeming him a state problem. Hoover would have been spared embarrassment if the outlaw had remained out of federal jurisdiction because, when the chase was on, it was with agents who didn’t know how to conduct a stakeout or properly fire their guns.

Like Dillinger, Hoover cultivated a public profile that looked good on paper and later up on the screen. They had a lot of competition. Bonnie and Clyde were running wild, as were Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson and other hoods with marquee-ready stories, some of whom make appearances here. Banks made for easy targets, logistically and otherwise, and, as the writer Bryan Burrough points out in a book about America’s inaugural war on crime, these outlaws took advantage of the public’s hatred of those recently failed institutions. Dillinger raided bank vaults and staged prison breaks to increasing approval. He shot one man to death, though didn’t always own up to the killing. It was bad for his image.

He became another kind of America’s most wanted: a star. “Get me the money, Honey,” he instructed one female teller with his crooked smile. The press raised his profile with screaming headlines, and the comic Will Rogers joked about the ineptitude of the authorities. (They were going to shoot Dillinger, Rogers joked, but “another bunch of folks came out ahead; so they shot them instead.”) Mr. Mann, working with incidents drawn from Mr. Burrough’s “Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the F.B.I., 1933-34,” underscores the celebrity angle. But that’s only part of the big picture sketched out in his ambitious screenplay, written with Ronan Bennett and Ann Biderman, which also makes room for a love story amid the blazing guns and tabloid glory.

The relationship between Dillinger and a hatcheck girl named Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard, holding her own in this man’s world) eats up considerable time, sometimes winningly, though both actors are better when they’re apart. When not in pirate drag, Mr. Depp can be a recessive, even inscrutable screen presence, which is crucial to his strengths and performative limits. He’s a cool cat, to be sure: veiled and often most memorable when he’s staring into space while the camera soaks in his subdued but potent physical charms. He might have made a great silent star, as earlier roles suggest. Part of his initial appeal was that he seemed almost Garboesque in a movie world that increasingly makes no room for sacred idols.

Mr. Depp looks good as Dillinger — few contemporary actors can wear a fedora as persuasively — but the performance sneaks up on you, inching into your system scene by scene. The same holds true of “Public Enemies,” which looks and plays like no other American gangster film I can think of and very much like a Michael Mann movie, with its emphasis on men at work, its darkly moody passages, eruptions of violence and pictorial beauty. Mr. Mann’s digital manipulations, in particular, which encompass almost pure abstraction and interludes of hyper-realism, is worthy of longer exegesis, one that explores how this still-unfamiliar format is changing the movies: it allows, among other things, filmmakers to capture the eerie brightness of nighttime as never before.

“Public Enemies” doesn’t look like the usual gangster picture, not only because it’s been shot in digital, but also because Mr. Mann is searching for a new kind of gangster story to fit the times, one that makes room for greater ambivalence, and lawmen and outlaws who are closer to one another in temperament and deed. If he doesn’t fully succeed, it’s because he knows that the gangster’s rakish smile is at once a fiction of cinema and one of its great, irresistible lies. During the big finish, Dillinger grins wryly at a black-and-white Hollywood picture with Clark Gable as the kind of gangster who could only have been invented by the movies, a gangster who is as false as the bullets that finally stopped Dillinger were real.

“Public Enemies” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Bloody gun violence.

Public Enemies

Opens on Wednesday nationwide.

Directed by Michael Mann; written by Mr. Mann, Ronan Bennett and Ann Biderman, based on the book by Bryan Burrough; director of photography, Dante Spinotti; edited by Paul Rubell and Jeffrey Ford; music by Elliot Goldenthal; production designer, Nathan Crowley; produced by Mr. Mann and Kevin Misher; released by Universal Pictures. Running time: 2 hours 13 minutes.

WITH: Johnny Depp (John Dillinger), Christian Bale (Melvin Purvis), Marion Cotillard (Billie Frechette), Billy Crudup (J. Edgar Hoover), Stephen Dorff (Homer Van Meter), Jason Clarke (Red Hamilton) and Stephen Lang (Charles Winstead).