The Screengrab

Opening this Friday, Neil Burger's The Lucky Ones is a bit of a gamble as a follow-up to The Illusionist.  Following the plight of three soldiers recently returned from Iraq (played by Tim Robbins, Michael Pena and Rachel McAdams), it quickly turns into a sort of social statement-cum-sign o' the times story as they find themselves on a road trip together across the country.  It's hard to predict how The Lucky Ones will be received; Iraq movies are always a crapshoot, and the movie's curious blend of comedy and drama may not fit in with the subject matter.  But it's always fun to see a new road movie, especially this late in the year when the possibility taking real-world road trips becomes more and more daunting.  Road pictures have a long and storied history in Hollywood, and filmmakers have managed to fold everything from bone-chilling noir to high-concept comedy to existential drama into the format.  America is especially adept at making road pictures, not only because of the grand canvas that is the national geography, but because of our total immersion in car culture.  Here's five of our favorites.

DETOUR (1945)

Film noir, despite its association with the urban environment, was never afraid to take its show on the road as long as there was a nice juicy crime at the center of the story, and Detour serves up a doozy.  A grade-z Poverty Row picture made for the cost of Clark Gable's lunch, Detour nonetheless proved to be one of the most effective noir films of its day, thanks to its relentless, grubby energy.  Tom Neal, who starts the picture looking like he's had his insides scooped out and just gets worse from there, plays a sad-sack piano player who just wants to get to the west coast so he can be united with his former flame.  But along the way he gets framed for murder after running afoul of Ann Savage in one of the most terrifying femme fatale roles of all time.  A terrific, unsparingly bleak little film that proves a little can go a long way.

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Death Defying Acts opens in limited release this weekend, and so far, it hasn't generated much advance buzz.  It's hard to figure out why:  It comes on the heels of other successful movies involving magicians, including The Prestige and The Illusionist;  it's a romance-driven period piece (which should attract women), but it features a murder mystery, psychics, and famed escape artist Harry Houdini (for the fellas); it's got an all-star cast led by perennial heartthrobs Guy Pearce and Catherine Zeta-Jones; and it's directed by none other than girl-geek icon Gillian Anderson.  Maybe people are confused by the premise:  in Death Defying Acts features Zeta-Jones as a spiritualist out to run a con on the master magician.  We haven't seen it yet, so we're not sure if Zeta-Jones' powers are portrayed as being authentic, but in real life, Houdini was a relentless skeptic who didn't believe in any aspect of the paranormal, and who, in fact, went out of his way to disprove all claims of the supernatural as buncombe.  Regardless, Hollywood has always been a sucker for a good psychic yarn, which probably explains why goofy New Age religions tend to take root in southern California before hitting the rest of the country.  For today's Take Five, we bring you a handful of fine films about psychics -- and not a single one starring Shirley MacLaine.

THE SHINING (1980)

Nobody does psychic powers like Stephen King, and nobody realizes those psychic powers on screen better than Stanley Kubrick does in this horror classic.  One of the most effective ideas Kubrick had was to de-emphasize Danny's psychic abilities, to tone down the paranormal aspects of the story (such as the hedge topiary coming to life) in order to play up the much more compelling dramatic element of a family in isolation slowly falling apart.  Not that the terrifying paranormal elements aren't there:  few moments in contemporary horror are creepier than seeing Danny go into a drooling fit, or the bizarre images he sees in the abandoned rooms of the Outlook Hotel -- but by keeping them ambiguous, by allowing the suggestion that none of it is real, that it's all just possibly the byproduct of an epileptic vision or a mind damaged by loneliness and alcohol -- the whole thing is made more compelling and upsetting than if the paranormal elements were made explicit.  

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