Harold and Maude starts out with a hanging and ends with a car driving over a cliff, none of which disqualifies its status as a comedy. Our first clue to not assume the worst, after the opening credit sequence where the young Harold carefully strings himself up, comes when his mother barely allows her chat on the phone to be interrupted by the discovery her son is dangling from the rafters. Harold, clearly raised in great wealth and apparently loaded with free time, idles his days by mastering the art of staging fake suicides (as a subsequent faux wrist-slitting tableau in the tub reiterates), a skill neither appreciated nor taken seriously by his mother to mean anything important.

Harold, though barely out of his teens, is clearly obsessed with death, visiting funerals and driving a hearse in between floating face down in the pool (also ignored by mom as she swims laps) and self-immolation in the back yard. Though we're hardly led to believe he is truly suicidal, surely he's trying to express some dark outlook on life, and the best his self-absorbed mother can do is send him to a shrink and insist he get married. (When she brings home a questionnaire from a computerized dating service and immediately starts completing it according to her own opinions, you realize Harold hasn't always had parents who look beyond their own interests, and you can hardly blame him for turning out a little morbid.)

But while Harold sabotages his computerized dates with even more elaborate deaths (to his mother's resigned distaste), he runs into another haunter of funerals, a free-spirited and flirtatious septuagenarian named Maude, who "borrows" the priest's car to get home afterwards. Maude soon fascinates Harold with her vivaciousness and invites him to hang out at her train-car residence with all its suggestive art and turn-of-the-century bohemian playthings. (Though the film refuses to psychoanalyze Harold, a sequence where he tries to stick his head inside one of Maude's vaginal sculptures is tellingly Freudian.) They become fast friends, joining forces on adventures such as transplanting withering trees from downtown sidewalks to the forest (and "borrowing" the motorcycle of the cop who tries to detain them).

There's no real sense of consequence to any of their escapades, which is what keeps the film distinctly within the comedic camp, even when Harold's family attempts to derail his fun by enlisting him into the armed forces. It all supports Maude's philosophy to simply "L-I-V-E, live!", a welcome change from Harold's previous flirtations with the alternative. But this 1971 film is more than some hippie-esque free-to-be-you-and-me tract - director Hal Ashby has such an eye for detail that each scene becomes self-sufficiently pleasurable unto itself. Harold transforming a new Jaguar into a miniature hearse, Maude throwing a gift into the lake ("so I'll always know where it is"), another computer date trying to theatrically outdo Harold at hara-kiri, his armless general uncle's salute with the help of strings and pulleys, and Harold's inexplicably dressing exactly like his psychiatrist, it all ensures the film's place in history, such that the realization that Maude deflowers Harold is almost inconsequential. And an eye for detail is crucial for the viewer as well, or you might miss the split-second revelation about Maude that sends the story careening toward its surprise ending. When Harold finally confronts the loss accompanying a real death, the mockery of his suicides probably loses its appeal.

No less filled with reminders of human mortality, Rififi hearkens back to an age when even career thieves wore hats and ties, never opting for more comfortable apparel even when chopping through the floor for hours during a nighttime jewel heist. Jules Dassin's restored 1955 thriller is populated with two kinds of people, both of which dress impeccably: the "good" thieves who are inordinately professional in their methods, completely trusting of each other, loathe to physically harm others, and ultimately turn their winnings over to their loved ones; and the "bad" guys, who abide by no code of honor, have little respect for human life, and won't hesitate to horn in on the "good" guys' fortunes. Though the film's claim to fame is its meticulously staged central robbery sequence (potentially as instructional for aspiring criminals as a bomb recipe on the WWW), viewers were already wise enough to know nothing is ever so simple - as one character summarizes, "The heist was easy, the clean up is murder."

The "good" guys consist of Tony "le Stephanois," aging and vaguely consumptive, who went to jail for five years to protect his friend and colleague Jo, and lost his girl in the process. Jo "le Suedois" (Carl Mohner, the hunkiest actor in the international cinema since George O'Brien in Murnau's Sunrise) appears to have the most conventional life of the bunch, with a happy wife and son, and upon Tony's release, suggests one more big caper to set their fortunes right. They subsequently recruit two Italians for their formidable skills, Mario Farrati (strangely without a nickname) and Cesar "le Milanais" (played by Dassin himself, under the alias Perlo Vita), whose weakness for women is equally notorious (foreshadowing, anyone?). Together they spend a good chunk of the film strategizing and composing a timetable, going so far as to purchase a security system identical to their target jewelry store's to devise a way to silence it. It's all admirably professional and painstaking, enough to cast them as sufficiently sympathetic - why shouldn't such hardworking people be allowed to succeed?

It's love for their families that keeps the quartet in crime, and ultimately it's love that complicates the aftermath beyond repair. Their transformation from the envy of the criminal underworld to victims of that world's scavengers does nothing to diminish their heroic status, and as the body count starts to rise we find ourselves hoping for the best. All the chaos gives us views of Paris' underside that we enjoy even more in black and white (which simplifies and transforms the everyday into a much more aesthetically arresting visual field) and for being in an age of filmmaking when all the main characters hang out at a nightclub where the headline singer performs the film's title song. (Makes you wish Tom Hanks would've broken out into a song like "Cast away, cast away, I'm angling for another Oscar® today" while killing time on that island.)

Tony, ever the honorable one, insists on no guns during the actual heist, but guns become necessary in their wake when the safety of Jo's family comes into question as their enemies demand they share their loot. In the end it's all about trusting and fighting for your loved ones, and finding out who truly deserves your loyalty. What proves shocking is how the money ultimately becomes incidental and the fruits of their labors vanish because they care about each other. The more literal translation of the film's French title is "on the rough and tumble among men," and it becomes clear that love is one of the rougher contributing factor to their tumbles.

Film re-releases like those definitely show they don't make movies like they used to, but sometimes it's equally true that they're making films today that they never thought of before. Case in point is a film destined to make history's top ten teen flicks, Bring It On. Exemplary of both the weaknesses and particular joys of that genre, we're presented with yet another high school comedy set in an affluent California district, but this time venturing into filmically unchartered territory - the distinctly American subculture of competitive cheerleading. If you haven't been watching ESPN for the past decade, cheerleaders (or "cheer teams") don't just hoot-n-holler-n-gyrate with pom-poms at the sidelines of sports events anymore - they are the event. Teams today concoct full-blown MTV-esque performances and travel across the country to be judged and win trophies. (Leave it to American high schools to turn everything into a competition.)

If Clueless, the last great teen flick, clued us in to how materialistic our nation's children are becoming, Bring It On is an even starker wake-up call: irony is now teenagers' main mode of communication. No one has anything nice to say to anybody anymore, and sarcastic barbs completely dominate discourse. That everyone is so creatively destructive in conversation brilliantly contrasts the sincerity of the "cheer-ocracy" whose raison d'etre is to be supportive. It's a Jekyll-Hyde switch today's adolescents seem capable of schizophrenically undergoing hundreds of times a day: nice to nasty in 0.34 seconds.

It's good to know some things never change, though: guy cheerleaders, no matter how obnoxiously and hornily heterosexual, will never shake the stigma of being perceived as fags, even if your cheer team is infinitely better than the football team it cheers for. (And yet, cheer teams never seem to lack for male members.) The film refuses to shrink from most any potential target for satire: even our heroine Torrance (Kirsten Dunst), when meeting a cute new male student on the first day of class, shows her age and breadth of taste when she points to his Clash t-shirt and asks, "is that your band?" Equally priceless is the broad spectrum of humanity portrayed when auditions are held to replace an injured teammate: we're treated to an endless side-splitting barrage of misfits, from tramps who seem to moonlight at strip clubs to ballet dancers to show choir poofters. Luckily they select Missy (Eliza Dushku, the film's major find), a punky transfer student looking for an alternative to her former school's gymnastics team. Missy acts as our proxy throughout the film, intially skeptical that cheerleading could be anything but degrading and juvenile, but ultimately converted by its enthusiasm. The infectiousness of their performances may be nigh-impossible to explain and easy to derogate, but it sure is fun to watch.

With Rancho Carne High School's first problem solved, we are confronted with the next quandary which threatens to tear their world apart: the Toros learn they've won the national championship for the past five years on routines plagiarized from an inner-city Los Angeles cheer squad that was always too poor to find exposure beyond their own school. "My entire cheerleading career is a lie!" laments Torrance, who inherited the team's captainship from the now-graduated thief of the East Compton Clover's ideas. If this doesn't sound serious enough, Torrance suspects her boyfriend, a year older and now in college, is being unfaithful, she's falling for Missy's brother Cliff (he of the Clash tee), and now the Clovers have learned Rancho Carne is ripping them off and plan to enter regional competition for the first time and kick the Toro's cheery butts. Whoever said kids today don't have problems?

Thankfully the scriptwriters recognized that none of this is particularly earth-shattering, and keep the comedy coming at a good clip. It's during Bring It On's few dramatic moments (hey, you have to move the plot forward every now and then) that the film feels perfectly unexceptional, but they pass quickly enough so we can be treated to cute moments like Torrance flirting with Cliff while practicing exemplary dental hygiene, or the Toros' hired-at-the-last-minute choreographer instructing them in the art of "spirit fingers," or watching them crash and burn at regionals, making it to nationals only on the basis of their past laurels, and dreading the final showdown with the Clovers, who tore through the initial competition like hell in skirts.

Comedy, yes, social analysis, yes, but have I mentioned the many cheer performances which boggle the mind through the film? Even the witty script and cogent acting is ultimately secondary to the gymnastic feats we are treated to from start to finish, whose energy will not fail to convert you as it did Missy, an even more cynical Cliff, and the most resistant of all, Torrance's kid brother. (The sport's level of physical danger is readily communicated as well, which makes the performances all the more impressive.) Bring It On will rank with the best adolescent sports movies in its celebration of American youth's physical prowess and courageous spirit - thank God it never once tries to state such a moral outright. Everything might work out in the end, but not too implausibly cleanly, and the self-mockery never lets up even into the closing credits. As long as America's around, there will always be cheerleaders, and there will always be a Hollywood, and we should be glad someone got the combination right.