We know what we want from a gangster film. We want characters who are half living "wanted" posters, half speeding pawns of destiny. We want faces of magnetic immutability (Bogart or Cagney) atop bodies that charge around a city while antagonists give chase. These antic antiheroes, we want to feel, are halfway to immortality - licked by hell's flames or last-chance-redeemable to the other place - while their pursuers are condemned to the circular, eternal mundanity of virtue.

Michael Mann's Public Enemies is original because everyone, outlaw and enforcer, criminal and cop, looks and behaves the same. The movie is cast with age-defying pretty boys - Johnny Depp as John Dillinger, Christian Bale as his FBI nemesis Melvyn Purvis, Billy Crudup as a young, matinee-idol J. Edgar Hoover (there's novelty) - flung into the perpetuum mobile of Chicago in its crime heyday. These human particles speeding around destiny's white-knuckle collider are recorded in high-definition video (as in Mann's Collateral ), a visual format whose queasy, murky immediacy - its lack of a protecting veil of visual grandeur - makes the film resemble something from the 50-year-old golden age of live TV drama.