"You're an awfully hard man to like, Hitler." Few serious films could survive a line like that. Max certainly doesn't. Written by the Oscar-nominated screenwriter Menno Meyjes (The Color Purple), who makes his debut as a director, the film is not a comedy. The young Adolf Hitler, played by Noah Taylor, is not the Führer of Mel Brooks' The Producers — a Hitler with a song in his heart — but the painter who might have made it if Max Rothman (John Cusack, trying hard to no avail), a Jewish gallery owner in Munich circa 1918, had given him a real shot.

Meyjes clearly saw the fictional Max debating modern art with this homeless Hitler as a chance to reveal the human side of a monster. It's a big idea, but the film itself is small and shriveled.

“Everyday People”

"Everyday People" managed to trailblaze in two different ways -- it was one of the first pop hits to deal with the subject of racial harmony, and it utilized Larry Graham's "slap" technique on the bass guitar, which would soon be copied by countless other bassists. Graham once said about his pulsating style, "I'd never done that before … that's where the freedom of creativity came in for the band, that we'd be allowed to do that." In 1978, the song's line "Different strokes for different folks" would be borrowed for the title of the hit television show Diff'rent Strokes.