Let us hearken back to a time when gangs ruled the world. Gangs sizing each other up, puffed with pride, wagging their weaponry, painstakingly stylized in diction and dress. There were the Bowery Boys and the Forty Thieves, the Plug Uglies and the Dead Rabbits, the riders of Rohan and the Uruk-hai, the hobbits, the elves, the ents. And when Bill the Butcher and his crew finally faced the drooling host of Saruman the White at Helm's Deep (you know, in the Sixth Ward, where Isengard meets Broadway) and Frodo Baggins crossed swords with Leonardo DiCaprio, what a reckoning was there!

As if in answer to a special, seasonal wistfulness silently voiced by the moviegoing public, the film industry seems to hit us each fall with a couple of hero-centered megafilms. Die Another Day is the latest James Bond flick, and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets is the second movie made from the world-beating series of books by J.K. Rowling. Both the heroes are dark, English and privately educated, and both the films are sumptuous: From the blistering action sequences (Bond in his car, Potter on his broomstick) to the thespian blue bloods hired to add class (Bond has Judi Dench, Potter has Maggie Smith), the pulse and glamour of molten Hollywood bullion are overpowering.