One of the joys of reviewing movies is the chance, every so often, to see a restored classic on the big screen. In 2006, I had the opportunity to see the restored cut of Alfred E. Green's nasty pre-code classic Baby Face (1933), with Barbara Stanwyck in all her glory. Better still, I saw Bernardo Bertolucci's The Conformist (1970) for the first time (both films screened at San Francisco's Balboa Theater). The Balboa also showed a recently uncovered war film, Stuart Cooper's Overlord (1975), a film with a simplicity and power lacking in most of the year's new pictures.

The great Rialto Pictures, the leading distributor of restored classics, gave us Jean-Pierre Melville's masterpiece Army of Shadows (1969); since it had never before opened in the United States, it has turned up on several critics' ten best lists for 2006. Also from Rialto we got Carol Reed and Graham Greene's The Fallen Idol (1948) and Christian-Jaque's silly swashbuckler Fanfan la Tulipe (1952). And to far greater publicity, Sony Pictures Classics re-released a bundle of Pedro Almodovar films, including Matador (1986), Law of Desire (1987), Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988), The Flower of My Secret (1995), Live Flesh (1997), All About My Mother (1999), Talk to Her (2002) and Bad Education (2004); I took advantage of the chance to see a few of these on the big screen. And each of them played on 400 screens or less.

Not always, but often, a re-release comes timed for a film's anniversary, and so I've made up a fantasy list of re-releases I'd like to see in 2007.

Finally doing something about the lack of pre-code films available on DVD (or, for that matter, in any other medium) Warner Bros. is teaming up with Turner Classic Movies to release what they swear will be be a series of films from that period. The first such set -- TCM Archives: Forbidden Hollywood Collection Volume 1 -- is due out December 5, and the films included in volume one are anything to go on, this series is going to be one to look out for. Included in the set are the Barbara Stanwyck-starrer Baby Face (including both the edited and recently discovered original versions), Red-Headed Woman (starring Jean Harlow) and James Whale's Waterloo Bridge. All three films were released in 1932 or 1933, shortly before the Production Code went into effect, and are striking illustrations of just how different (part of) Hollywood was before Will Hays and his friends came along.

The only problem with the set so far is that for some reason they squeeze all four films onto two discs, with Waterloo Bridge and Red-Headed Woman on one, and the two version of Baby Face (plus the film's theatrical trailer) on the other.

Nothing restores my faith in the future of America than the yearly announcement of additions to the National Film Registry. In 50 years, some lucky high school student will gaze opon the archives of "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant films" set aside for preservation at a rate of 25 per year, see that the The Rocky Horror Picture Show has been placed on the same level as Casablanca, and instantly start making assumptions about the 20th century that I can't even fathom.

This year's list of inductees is typically quixotic, with Toy Story joining the ranks of government-approved film history alongside The French Connection, Hoop Dreams, Fast Times at Ridgemont High and, most interestingly, Baby Face. The ultimate example of Pre-Code scandalousness, Face stars Barbara Stanwyck as a tough gal who escapes her father's speakeasy/brothel to sleep her way to the top of the corporate ladder – only to trade a suitcase full of diamonds to be with the man she loves. Daryl Zanuck, Baby's producer, left Warner Brothers over Harry Warner's refusal to release the film uncut; he went on to start what would become 20th Century Fox.

The full list of this year's inductees is after the jump.