By Richard T. Jameson
Special to MSN Movies

In 19th-century England, two young magicians fall into such fierce rivalry that their whole lives and identities become consecrated to discovering the most spectacular and mystifying trick with which to out-magic each other. That's the premise of "The Prestige," the new movie from director Christopher Nolan ("Memento," "Batman Begins") and his screenwriter brother, Jonathan. The lifelong rivals are played by Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale (presumably without respective Wolverine nails and Bat-cape), and their associates -- who have a way of becoming collaterally damaged -- include Michael Caine, Scarlett Johansson, David Bowie and Andy Serkis. Maybe you shouldn't sit too close ...

Meanwhile, here are 11 opening attractions to beguile the time -- all (well, most) of them terrific films, and all offering distinctive variations on the nature of rivalry. The contest doesn't have to be a matter of life and death, though in most cases you couldn't tell the rivals that. The tension may arise in the theater, onstage or off. Or a courtroom; or a bedroom. Or in a murky zone, an inner reality patrolled only by the feverish imagination. Let the games begin.

10. "Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby" (2006)
I needed a search engine to remind me who directed "Talladega Nights" (which says something about how much of a movie it is), but that's no reason to scorn its abundance of hilarity -- or to pass up an early opportunity to salute 2006 as The Year of Borat. Will Ferrell (who co-wrote the movie with director Adam McKay, his partner on 2004's "Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy") stars, and gets plenty of laughs as a good ol' boy NASCAR driver so afire with the will to win he has a hard time keeping his clothes on. But for audience fascination, Ricky Bobby loses out to Jean Girrard, the gay, macchiato-sipping, Camus-reading "Frawnch" race-car driver with the temerity to walk into a Talladega bar and change the jukebox from country to jazz while people stare at his 6-foot-7 beanpole frame in appalled wonder. He is, of course, Sacha Baron Cohen, and it was quietly gratifying over the summer to see the trailers being recut to change the come-on from all-Will-Ferrell-all-the-time to a Ferrell-Cohen face off. Come November, Cohen -- as the equal opportunity-offending Kazakh video journalist Borat Sagdiyev -- will claim the hearts and minds of multiplex America. For now, people in bars all over Talladega are trying to outdo one another at pronouncing "Reeky Bubby" the way he does.

9. "Death Race 2000" (1975)
The movies abound in tales of epic races and contests, of which the most classically observed may be Richard Brooks' reverently bleak overland endurance derby "Bite the Bullet" with Gene Hackman and James Coburn. That same year, for schlockmeister-supreme Roger Corman, director Paul Bartel made the outrageously cartoonish "Death Race 2000," which proposed a futuristic road race -- "the greatest sporting event since the days of Spartacus" -- featuring characters named Calamity Jane (Mary Woronov), Machine Gun Joe Viterbo (pre-"Rocky" Sylvester Stallone), Matilda the Hun and Herman the German. They try to out drive one another -- and score points by driving through sundry bystanders -- in a world anticipating the multinational corporate present. The satire is half-baked (it's Corman and Bartel, after all) but tasty in a shameless, fast-food way. David Carradine relishes the Zen-like weirdness of a masked hero named Frankenstein whose Phantom of the Opera-style disfigurement is only cosmetic.

8. "Heat" (1995)
Technically, Vincent Hanna and Neil McCauley are adversaries, not rivals: Hanna is a veteran L.A. detective out to crack a major-crime case; McCauley is the philosopher-king of caper planners. But these guys are a matched set, like the noblest and strongest warriors in some medieval romance that can find its only proper culmination in their final joust. They are also Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, the premier Italian-American acting princes of their generation, together for the first time (the sprawl of decades kept their characters from sharing screen space in "Godfather II"). After playing cat and mouse for a couple of hours of screen time and several electrifying action set pieces, director Michael Mann brings them together for coffee at an all-night roadhouse. It's probably on Parnassus.

7. "Rebecca" (1940)
You want rivalry -- how about a spooky tale whose title character is a woman dead before the movie begins, with an on-screen heroine so charismatically challenged that she lacks a name of her own? A mousy paid companion (Joan Fontaine) to a vulgar dowager meets and is curtly wed by a nobleman (Laurence Olivier) who takes her back to his cliffside mansion overlooking the sea. The second Mrs. de Winter assumes her husband is in permanent mourning for his glamorous first wife, and conducts herself with craven circumspectness. That's fine with the household staff -- especially the daunting Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson), who keeps a virtual shrine to the departed Rebecca, and does everything she can to subvert her successor. This spellbinding mystery is the only Alfred Hitchcock picture (his first in Hollywood) ever to win the Academy Award -- though the Oscar went to producer David O. Selznick, who had bent every effort to match his "Gone With the Wind" of the previous year. Fontaine is superb, but got her just desserts only the following year when she was named Best Actress for Hitchcock's (sans Selznick) "Suspicion."

6. "Atanarjuat -- The Fast Runner" (2001)
Long ago, in what may as well have been a galaxy far, far away, a community of Inuits played out a primal drama of passion, betrayal and compellingly patient justice in a world of ice and snow. There are fathers and brothers, wives and other men's wives, long nights of huddling for warmth and days of searching out scarce food. Puja, a young woman from Oki's clan, inveigles her way into the affections of Atanarjuat, who takes her as a second wife. His first wife, Atuat, accepts the interloper, who soon entices Atanarjuat's brother, Tulimaq, even as Oki begins to covet Atuat. Violence breaks out, an irruption of day lit nightmare, and Atanarjuat flees for his life. The seasons turn; one generation succeeds another, and so it goes. Watching this long, plainspoken yet ineffably mysterious narrative play out (in this breed of storytelling, slow is a virtue), we marvel at the awesome setting and epic imagery worthy of David Lean -- and marvel still more when told it was shot on digital video with an ordinary home video camera.

5. "Adam's Rib" (1949)
Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn play married lawyers Adam and Amanda -- or as they call each other, "Pinky" and "Pinkie." He's prosecuting a young woman (Judy Holliday) for shooting and wounding her philandering husband (Tom Ewell); she's defending the woman as a victim of the patriarchy. As a marital comedy and as smart social satire, George Cukor's "Adam's Rib" is witty, crackling, and peerlessly performed, the classiest star vehicle ever for Hollywood's most esteemed couple. These are rivals as evenly matched as rivals get. And it didn't stop after the cameras shut off. When Garson Kanin -- who wrote the film with his own wife, Ruth Gordon -- suggested that maybe Tracy should let Hepburn have first billing for once, Spence favored him with a scowl and a Kanin-and-Gordon-worthy line: "This is a movie, Junior, not a lifeboat."

4. "The Knack ... and How to Get It" (1965)
There was no fresher, more prodigiously inventive filmmaker at work in 1964-65 than Richard Lester, and "The Knack" completes an effervescent trifecta with the sublime Beatles duo "A Hard Day's Night" and "Help!" Michael Crawford (the once and future Phantom of the Opera) plays Colin, a nebbish driven to frenzies of hallucination by unrequited lust and envy of his upstairs boarder Tolen (Ray Brooks), who apparently can have any young woman in London. When Nancy (Rita Tushingham), an elfin out-of-town girl, turns up on the doorstep looking for a room, Colin and a fey bohemian named Tom (Donal Donnally) set about a frenetic campaign to keep her out of Tolen's bed. Literally glowing in the black-and-white cinematography by David Watkin, "The Knack" is a divine comedy, the sweetest imaginable distillation of the "Swinging London" scene, with a pixilated visual playfulness harkening back to Buster Keaton and a hilarious Greek chorus of adult Londoners (Lester among them) grumping about the "mods and rockers" taking over the town. No one was more amazed than Lester when the modest production took top honors at the Cannes Film Festival.

3. "Red Dust" (1932) and "Mogambo" (1953)
These movies share a screenwriter and basic storyline, and both boast Clark Gable at, respectively, the black-and-white beginning and pretty much the Technicolor end of his MGM stardom. The King has no rival, either as the boss of a rubber plantation in steamy Burma or as a great white hunter heading up an animal-catching operation in Africa. Rivalry is left to the women who enter his world and his life: a good-time gal (Jean Harlow/Ava Gardner) with whom he has an uncomplicated affair, and a vulnerable young wife (Mary Astor/Grace Kelly) whose feckless husband brings her to the back of beyond and neglects her so that she has every opportunity to find their he-man host distracting. Both films are robust entertainments; both feature career-best performances by leading ladies celebrated for their lusty on- and off-screen personalities. If you can see only one (and really, why?), make it John Ford's "Mogambo." It lacks the august reputation of Ford's more personal projects, but few films better showcase his job-of-work virtues as movie man par excellence -- or his subtlety as a director of actresses: both Gardner (never more appealing) and Kelly were justly Oscar-nominated.

2. "Dead Ringers" (1988)
When Jeremy Irons collected his well-deserved Academy Award for "Reversal of Fortune," he pointedly thanked David Cronenberg. Cronenberg had nothing to do with "Reversal," but two years earlier he had directed this movie, for which the actor had deserved the award even more, and by 1990 everyone in Hollywood knew it. (Irons hadn't even been nominated for "Dead Ringers," but the New York Film Critics did the right thing.) The film, which marked a new threshold of stylistic mastery for Cronenberg, concerned twin gynecological surgeons with brilliant medical careers -- and a distinctly creepy bond that extended to, but did not stop at, secretly sharing the sexual favors of their patients. Irons was astonishing playing off himself in "moving split" shots that enabled the pair to be on screen simultaneously; even more amazingly, if only one brother entered a scene, you knew immediately which one it was. The first focus for their emerging rivalry is a movie actress (Geneviève Bujold) seduced by the suave Elliot but drawn to love shy, recessive Beverly (yes, that is usually a female name). But that's only the beginning of a descent into love/hate, jealousy and converging identities that finally finds the fullest, freakiest expression you dread it might.

1. "All About Eve" (1950)
The young woman "wears a cheap trench coat, low-heeled shoes, a rain hat stuck on the back of her head ... her large, luminous eyes seem to glow in the strange half-light." That's how Joseph L. Mankiewicz's screenplay describes Eve Harrington (Anne Baxter), discovered in the alley outside the Broadway theater where her idol Margo Channing's latest hit play is running. The moment is a flashback, the first of many designed to tell us "all about Eve" who, we already know from the first five minutes of the movie, will become a celebrated actress herself. The trick -- hers and the film's -- is that she's a Machiavellian player from the get-go, evolving from adoring waif to Margo's trusted helpmate, then "reluctant" understudy and, finally, full-fledged rival for Margo's favorite playwright (Hugh Marlowe), director-lover (Gary Merrill), and claim to the biggest, brightest marquee on Broadway. Her rapaciousness will triumph because, as George Burns once observed, "Sincerity is everything. If you can fake that, you've got it made." It's only fitting that as real-life rivals, Baxter and Bette Davis (Margo) split the "Eve" vote and made best actress one of the few awards the Oscar-sweeping movie lost.

What is your favorite movie rivalry? Write us at heymsn@microsoft.com

Richard T. Jameson has been editor of Movietone News (1971-81) and Film Comment (1990-2000) magazines, as well as Seattle's Queen Anne News (2003-present). He has been a member of the National Society of Film Critics since 1980.