The first must-see release of 2004 is almost forty years old: Gillo Pontecorvo's legendary re-telling of the struggle for Algerian independence from France is a timelessly powerful film.

In the labyrinthine alleys of the Casbah, resistance is fermenting against the French occupation. Hit-and-fade assassinations and drive-bys quickly escalate into full-scale urban guerilla warfare as the French send the military to quench the uprising with curfews, barbed wire, and checkpoints.

"The Battle of Algiers" works both as astutely observed political history and as nail-biting entertainment. Pontecorvo turns a sequence in which women leave the Casbah to deliver bombs to French cafes into an extraordinarily suspenseful set piece.

Much has been made of the Pentagon's recent screenings of "The Battle of Algiers." The parallels to the American occupation of Iraq are obvious--a superior military force facing determined insurgents while the generals play the press with clever wisecracks. But as Stuart Klawans pointed out in the New York Times, it might not be possible to draw easy lessons from the film that can be applied to the current situation. If "The Battle of Algiers" has any message at all, it may be the old truths that violence tends to escalate, that liberation happens in ways that may be impossible to predict, and that one person's terrorist is another's freedom fighter.

The real reason to watch this new print of "The Battle of Algiers" is the quality of Pontecorvo's filmmaking. A pioneer of the fake documentary, he uses non-professional actors, daring camera moves and grandly staged crowd scenes to put us in the middle of the action with unmatched intensity.