Like his lavishly praised Heat, Michael Mann's hypnotic, Depression-era crime thriller is structured around the deep, thrilling bond between two men kept apart by their polarizing callings — cop and criminal. His account of the last 13 months of John Dillinger's short, bad life plays out against a backdrop of momentous social change. The Great Depression, which impoverished vast swatches of middle-class America; Prohibition, which helped engender contempt for government institutions; the corporatization of organized crime, a direct result of the bootlegging networks spawned by the Volstead Act; and the rise of the Bureau of Investigation, the country's first interstate law enforcement agency even before the "Federal" was added to its name.

1933: Recently released from Indiana State Prison, having served an eight-and-a-half year stretch for local robbing a grocer, 30-year-old John Dillinger (Depp) and his associate, John "Red" Hamilton (Clarke), orchestrate a stunning jailbreak that frees eight men. One dies during the breakout, the rest become the core of the so-called "terror gang," which robbed banks throughout the midwest. Much of the public despised banks — when they collapsed they wiped out people's life savings in an instant, when they prospered they foreclosed on homes, farms and small businesses, ruthlessly disenfranchising good little worker bees, which is why bank robbers enjoyed a cachet not accorded kidnappers, con men and small-time stick up artists. And Dillinger, the wayward son of a widowed, small town shopkeeper-turned-farmer, instinctively understood how to play to the crowd.

Handsome in the style of the young Howard Hughes, Dillinger swept into banks in his elegantly cut clothes, bounding gracefully over counters and railings, brandishing a Thompson sub-machine gun while reassuring the regular folks in their threadnare but scrupulously clean clothes that he wasn't there for their money, just the banks'. He took hostages and used them as human shields, positioning them on the getaway car's running boards so no trigger-happy local cop would dare take a shot. But he also let them go, unharmed, unmolested and bursting with stories of the gentleman bandit. Dillinger wasn't a gentleman, but he wasn't a mad dog like George "Baby Face" Nelson (Graham); he lacked the sinister looks of Alvin "Creepy" Karpis (Ribisi) and knew the value of spin, which he worked it until it worked for him.

G-Man Melvin Purvis (Bale though truth be told he looked more like the pugnacious, pint-sized James Cagney) was an idealistic former lawyer who joined the fledgling bureau in 1927 and brought down some of the Depression era's most famous outlaws, including "Pretty Boy" Floyd (Tatum) and Arthur "Doc" Barker. Purvis headed up J. Edgar Hoover's (Crudup) Dillinger task force, a team whose legend subsequently outstripped the sad truth that its operations included such flat-out tactical and public relations disasters as the ill-planned raid on Little Bohemia, a rural Wisconsin lodge where the Dillinger gang was lying low; the operation left a civilian and an FBI agent dead, two other civilians wounded and the gang still at large. But like Dillinger, Purvis understood that getting the job done was only part of his mandate; the other was to solidify and burnish the image of Hoover's still-vulnerable agency, to make the Bureau's lawmen look as bold, dashing and dangerously cool as the Dillingers of a world where image was rapidly taking precedence over reality.

Public Enemies lacks the ingratiating appeal of Bonnie and Clyde, which hitched the Barrow gang's exploits to 1960s anti-establishmentarianism. Public Enemies is theatrical without being glamorous: Dillinger and Purvis are always on, playing for the cameras even when the cameras aren't there. It's hard not to detect an echo of Nicholas Roeg and Douglas Cammell's deeply subversive Performance (1970), which painstakingly lays bare the sexual insecurity and deep-rooted need for an audience that underlies so much of gangster/gangsta' identity.

Dillinger's romance with coat-check girl Billie Frechette (Cotillard), whose half Native-American ancestry largely negated her striking good looks in the reflexively racist America of her day, is the film's weakest element; adding another 15 minutes worth of scenes might have clarified the relationship but would also have pushed the running time close to the two-and-a-half hour mark, near-certain commercial death for a mainstream American film unconnected to a franchise with a fanatical fan base. And though Public Enemies takes its share of dramatic liberties with history, some of its most suspiciously au courant-seeming details are a matter of historical record: The feisty lady sheriff (Taylor) from whose jail Dillinger escapes with a wooden gun; the African-American prisoner (Bentt) who joined Dillinger in the notorious breakout; and the Bureau of Investigation's Gitmo-worthy tactics in pursuit of the Dillinger gang are all well documented.

It's a pity director McG appears to have been operating under the impression that the Terminator franchise is about metal. Sure, the scary machines are the hook. But The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day hold up to repeat viewings because they're about people trying to prevail over an inhumanly efficient and remorseless enemy without sacrificing their own humanity in the process. Relegating that struggle to the background reduces Terminator Salvation to a grim, gloomy and shockingly dull variation on Tranformers, all cool mechanical tricks and no heart.

2018: Judgment Day — when global-defense system Skynet achieved consciousness and unleashed hell on its hubristic creators — has come and gone. The world belongs to machines, and Skynet's implacable minions are systematically exterminating the scattered remnants of humanity.

Prepared from childhood to become the charismatic leader who spearheads the war against the machines, John Connor (Bale) is suspended between destiny and doubt. He's risen through the ranks of the resistance but still takes orders from old-school generals Ashdown (Ironside) and Losenko (Gvera); his samizdat radio broadcasts kindle hope in the hopeless, but he's not yet ready to assume the mantle of messiah. Connor's hand is forced by road warrior Marcus Wright (Australian actor Worthington), the battered stranger who rescues seasoned resistance fighter Blair Williams (Bloodgood, of TV's Journeyman) from the scum of the future Earth and brings her safely home to Connor's base camp.

The discovery that Marcus isn't the man he thought he was — in fact, he's not a man at all — efficiently (if inelegantly) dredges up all the philosophical questions that drive speculative stories about artificial intelligence, and throws Connor into the inevitable crisis of faith that just as inevitably makes him into the man he's supposed to be. All of which should be riveting drama and isn't, in large part because the characters voices are drowned out by the noise of chase sequences, firefights and rock 'em sock 'em robotics.

The trouble with Terminator Salvation comes down to this: If you don't get a major pang when you realize that the earnest, gawky teenager (Yeltsin) Marcus befriends in the rubble of Los Angeles is Kyle Reese — the Kyle Reese who will become John Connor's trusted right hand, fall hopelessly in love with a snapshot of Connor's late mother, Sarah, and volunteer for a suicide mission through time to save her from the T-800 terminator sent to make sure Connor is never born and become Connor's father in the process — then there's a yawning void where its emotional center should be.

Back in 1984, The Terminator was an unexpected thrill, a little science-fiction movie that blew past every obstacle — low budget, inexperienced director, B-movie cast — to achieve a kind of genre-movie perfection. It's an action movie with killer robots wrapped around a doomed romance and juiced with just enough pulp grandiosity to make the big questions go down like butter. Which is why superficially similar films like Def-Con 4 (1985) vanished without leaving so much as a ripple and Terminator lives on.