When I was an undergrad, I took a psychology class in which the professor described various types of creativity. One of them was the creative act of taking things already in existence and reorganizing, reordering, recreating them to make something new. By extension, Alan Moore is a creative genius. Moore, a writer who specializes in comics, is responsible for Watchmen (DC Comics), the superhero comic that reinvented the genre; From Hell (Eddie Campbell Comics), a graphic-novel investigation into the mystery of the identity of Jack the Ripper; Promethea (America’s Best Comics), a comic series imagining of why a particular iconic character has appeared in various pop and high culture forms over the ages; and the comic series The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (ABC).

I saw Intacto (Lions Gate) at the Vancouver International Film Festival in 2002 and loved it. The film is about an underground ring of gamblers who bet on people’s luck.

The Pianist (TVA/Lions Gate), the Roman Polanski film that took Oscars for directing, acting (Adrien Brody) and adapted screenplay (Ronald Harwood) in 2003, is one of Polanski’s finest films. It is the true story of how Wladyslaw Szpilman, a Jewish man, survived the Nazi occupation of Warsaw.

Now that Buffy is over, Whedon has but one TV program to work on: Angel. Which is all the more sad because he had created the best thing to hit television in years: Firefly. That show starred Nathan Fillion (born in Edmonton) as Captain Malcolm Reynolds, and Jewel Staite (from White Rock) played another series lead.

Republic Pictures was an independent genre film studio active in the 1940s and ’50s, specializing in westerns and action-adventure serials—the movies kids went to see on Saturday afternoons. But while the movies the studio released were B films on first release, a number of them have become classics to contemporary audiences.

Last fall, production for the film X-Men 2 set up in Vancouver, and as we await the theatrical release of the movie, the studio has issued a new DVD version of the first film. X-Men 1.5 (20th Century Fox) includes a new cut of the original film (which, by the way, was shot in and around Toronto), into which deleted scenes have been integrated.

I really want to love Kathryn Bigelow films. She’s a talented director and has never failed to take on challenging projects. She’s a talented director and has never failed to take on challenging projects. My problem with her directing is that she is often heavy-handed in her treatment of material. Her film The Weight of Water, just released on DVD (TVA/Lion’s Gate) is no exception.

The most comprehensive DVD (and the most fun) to hit my machine lately is the special edition release of Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. There are so many reasons to have this DVD in your library I hardly know where to start.

Beat (2000) stars Canada’s own Kiefer Sutherland (who recently got his groove back in the Fox series 24) in an amazing performance as William Burroughs in the early days—before he truly started writing and before he shot his wife Joan during a botched reenactment of the William Tell story.

Brotherhood of the Wolf, the highest grossing film in the history of French cinema, is a surprise. I thought it was going to be a werewolf movie, which would have been fine, but it is an action-packed tale of political intrigue set during the reign of Louis XV.