Dick Tracy

The movie is a visual marvel, anticipating films like Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow and 300 by creating a stylized and synthetic world for the flesh-and-blood actors to inhabit. Here it's a screenful of bright solid-color sets, cars, and costumes (replicating how vintage newspapers only had a limited palette of color inks), clearly artificial skylines, and villainous characters encased in grotesque makeup appliances, distorting their faces into the caricatures that Gould drew.

But if you took away the dazzling eye candy, would Beatty's Dick Tracy still be entertaining? Not as much. The dialog is full of cleverness (the way Big Boy misquotes great thinkers and leaders especially), but the plot is like a deliberately generic cops-vs.-crooks potboiler, confusing in its convolutions, with a last-minute-twist mystery villain added to an already-overstuffed bunch of rogues (Pruneface, Flattop, Littleface, Mumbles), many of whom seem to have been thought up, just like Star Wars crowd-shot aliens, to sell a few more action figures. But all those creeps do distract us from one fact: Tracy is a pretty colorless character himself, except for his iconic yellow trench coat and hat.