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.

I like Christmas movies as much as the next guy, but when they're bad, they're really bad, as in Christmas with the Kranks or Deck the Halls. Most times I prefer a different kind of experience. Sometimes a movie simply set during the holiday season can weave Christmas into its storyline without making an overt holiday statement, and these can evoke a warmth and nostalgia -- or sometimes the opposite -- of their own.

1. The Shop Around the Corner (1940, Ernst Lubitsch)
Lubitsch rarely balanced comedy and pathos so beautifully as in this movie about a busy Hungarian department store during the month before Christmas. Hardly anyone mentions the holiday until the final scenes, but the hope and despair that the season can bring hovers everywhere. Jimmy Stewart plays a clerk having an anonymous pen-pal love affair with a girl (Margaret Sullavan) -- who happens to be working right next to him in the shop, unbeknownst to either of them. The entire cast is remarkable, from Frank Morgan as the shop's owner to William Tracy as the delivery boy. Unhappily, Nora Ephron remade this in 1998 as You've Got Mail.