The Untouchables (2004)

If 90 percent of successful direction really is the right casting, Brian De Palma could've slept through the making of The Untouchables. Needed: clean-cut fresh face to play idealistic crusader. Try this Kevin Costner kid. A streetwise Irish cop? Get me Sean Connery. Chicago's most notorious gangster? Give Robert De Niro a ring. Bang, bang, bang. And let's not forget Andy Garcia and Charles Martin Smith. But De Palma's fingerprints are still all over this stylishly violent, David Mamet-scripted urban Western. The Prohibition-era sets are epic, the actors are outfitted in Armani, and the action (Al Capone's firing technique makes Donald Trump look like a cream puff) is just as riveting 17 years later.

EXTRAS Five featurettes should have been rolled into one, but De Palma gabs about how they nearly cast Mel Gibson and Bob Hoskins as the film's adversaries, and how Garcia was initially tapped to play thug Frank Nitti.

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