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It seems implausible now, but fame did not come to Jack Nicholson quickly. In 1969, after a decade of trying to break through as a movie star, the 32-year-old was slowly acclimating himself to the idea of giving up the stage and working behind the camera.

“Noah,” starring Russell Crowe and a Pentateuchal God punishing the wicked with about 45 minutes of world-destroying CGI, opens today. While you could go blow money on this floating mess of animalia, we recommend you skip it, and watch a better Biblical movie – “The 10 Commandments” (1956), directed by the King of Spectacle Films, Cecil B. DeMille.  “Commandments” retells the Biblical tale of Moses, from his float down a river, to becoming a prince of Egypt, to his successful career as a prophet. It’s a film worthy of the record-breaking $13.5M budget it eventually received. It was to be DeMille’s magnum opus, and he treated it as such. When studio bean-counters complained about spiraling costs, DeMille asked if he should stop filming and make “The Five Commandments” instead.

The Olympics finally wrapped last week with a blowout Closing Ceremony in Sochi that featured a hellish, 3-story animatronic bear that Putin probably designed for the upcoming attack on Ukranian freedom fighters.  Amongst the thrills and spills that come part and parcel with humans travelling at unholy speeds atop icy surfaces, we had the usual whining from ice dancers and figure skaters over anonymous judges’ scoring, some truly amazing tumbling and spinning from the more amicable (and fun) crowd of skiiers and snowboarders, and those weird moments that happen once every four years where we suddenly care deeply about non-sports like curling.

“Tax Day” falls on the 15th of April (or the next-closest Monday) every year. Without fail, we procrastinating Americans scramble to beg, borrow, or steal enough money to keep the tariff thugs at bay – all of this resulting in thousands of Americans becoming Rand Paul admirers for a day or two. So yes, today is the last day to file your taxes and pay your bill (or get your refund, should you be so lucky). If you’re learning about this from a movie website, we’ll assume you’re either blissfully adolescent and blind to the joy of tax-time (just you wait), or you’re reading this from your floating tax haven off the coast of Aruba (we’re not praying you get eaten by a shark, we swear). We’ll skip the jokes about Montana Separatists and Libertarian fantasies, and instead get right to four of the best movies whose plots or characters revolve around the only thing more inevitable than death or Spider-Man reboots: taxes.

Not surprisingly, people frequently ask me, “What’s your favorite movie?” It sounds like a reasonable question, but actually it’s maddening for the simple reason that there are so many fabulous movies that attain the same superior level of quality, but are wildly different. That said, if someone forced me to compile a “Top Ten” list, Billy Wilder’s “The Apartment” would definitely make the cut. While I’d watch it most anytime, it is for me the ultimate New Year’s Eve film.

I found it interesting (if not particularly surprising) that the top box office performers of the last several decades have tended to be longer movies. Scanning over tent-pole movies released since the millennium, blockbusters like the “Lord Of The Rings” series clock in at about three hours per installment, while “Avatar” and “The Dark Knight Rises” run well over the two and a half hour mark. Other more recent superhero franchises show the same trend. Examples: “The Avengers” (143 mins.), “Captain America” (136 mins.), and “The Amazing Spiderman” (142 mins.) Then there’s the talented but increasingly self-indulgent Quentin Tarantino, whose pictures most always go on and on. Most recently, “Inglorious Basterds” (153 mins.) and “Django Unchained” (165 mins.) prove my point. 

Movies with similar titles often show up next to each other on the shelf, or line up in a search, but are usually very different animals—animals you don’t want to get mixed up.