The second filmmaker from Flint, Mich., to make a splash this year is Kerry Conran, whose feature debut is both loving homage to early 20th-century pop culture and a state-of-the-art CGI milestone. Other than the actors, their costumes, and a few props, everything in "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" is digital illusion, and the effects are often exhilarating. Setting his story in the very forward-looking year of 1939, Conran creates a noirish comic-book world of derring-do and Machine Age design.

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