The Bank Job delivers all the pleasures expected from a crime-heist picture. Dense with duplicity and colored in many shades of gray, The Bank Job concerns a motley gang tunneling into a bank vault. They work with an elaborate plan they won’t be able to fully execute because criminal masterminds are scarce. Moreover, the crooks are pawns in a larger scheme whose purposes they discover only after the final turnoff has been passed. The road they are on will lead to a pileup.

You don’t have to seek out classic films at museums or small cinemas anymore. Nowadays they are accessible to anyone whose cable package includes the movie channel TCM. And many great and not-great older movies have been issued on DVD. With the easy availability of old film, why would anyone launch a vintage film series at a public venue in 2008? “It’s for the shared experience,” explains Dan Guenzel, co-founder of the Focus Film Society. “If you watch a Harold Lloyd comedy by yourself on DVD, you smile. If you see it in a theater with other people, you are shaking with laughter. It’s an entirely different experience.”

Mafioso, a gorgeously shot black-and-white 1962 mafia film with a dark sense of humor, screens at the UWM Union Theatre at 7 and 9 p.m. tonight. The film follows a factory foreman who, after receiving a favor from the local don, is asked to perform a hit for mafia. As the slightly absurd plot suggests, Mafioso is . . .

The world in those days was almost empty of humanity; a place of wideopen spaces tenanted by small bands of hunters and gatherers and settled villages where agriculture had been discovered. The woolly mammoth roamed the plains and other large creatures now extinct may have persisted into the dawn of Homo sapiens. This is the world of 10,000 B.C., a muddled extravaganza from Roland Emmerich, director of Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow. At first the story concerns a tribe whose existence is threatened by climate change. Will the mammoths that sustained their way of life for longer than anyone’s memory ever return? The suspense evaporates when the beasts arrive within a few scenes. The plot then takes an abrupt turn when slave-raiding horsemen attack and carry off half the tribe. A small band of warriors pursues the raiders and their captives to what seems to be the end of the Earth.

Before Marie Antoinette was re-imagined as a New Order-loving, Jason Schwartzman-marrying Sofia Coppola protagonist, she was played with more subtlety—and a lot more glamour— by Norma Shearer in a 1938 blockbuster epic film adaptation. Marie Antoinette was the most expensive film MGM had ever produced, but audiences were captivated by the extensive sets, and the film raked up four Academy Award nominations, including a best actress nod for Shearer.

The Shepherd Express has long been producing Milwaukee's official guide books, including an annual Milwaukee City Guide and the official guides to Summerfest and the Milwaukee International Film Festival. This year, the Shepherd Express is proud to be producing the official comprehensive State Fair guide, as well.

The Milwaukee Public Museum’s Humphrey IMAX Dome Theater wraps up its run of the stunning, 45-minute documentary The Alps, with its final screenings today and tomorrow at 4:30 p.m. The film follows an American climber as he treads the legendary (and scenic) Swiss mountains, and introduces viewers to some . . .

With his grim visage, tight lips and square jaw, Salomon (“Sally”) Sorowitsch resembles at times a cartoon crook from Dick Tracy. Sally lives up to his appearance. No petty criminal, but rather an artist, he was Berlin’s “King of Counterfeiters,” replicating paper currency, identification cards, passports and “Aryan documentation” for Jews—all for a fee. According to The Counterfeiters, which is based on a true story of a Nazi plan to bring down the economies of their wartime enemies, Sally continued his operation for three years into the Third Reich. Finally arrested by Herzog, a jocular detective with the Berlin fraud squad, Sally’s Jewish identity could no longer be concealed in the dark corners of the underworld.

Naomi Watts is radiant as Ann Farber and Tim Roth is soft-spoken to the verge of inaudibility as her husband, George. They are an affluent couple on the way to their weekend home in the Hamptons, a gated getaway lodge that Martha Stewart would love. They’re listening to opera on their car CD player. Abruptly, the soundtrack switches to an outburst of shrieking death metal by John Zorn. It’s a tip-off: Something wicked coming their way will disrupt their cultivated holiday. And so it goes with Funny Games, Austrian director Michael Haneke’s Americanized remake of his own 1997 film.

The title of Michael Glawogger’s chilling 2005 documentary Workingman’s Death is meant to be taken literally: It’s not about the death of the working class, but rather some of the world’s most dangerous—and deadliest—jobs. Without narration, Glawogger films workers in a Inodnesian sulfur mine . . .