Don’t look now, but Judd Apatow is taking over.

In the 12-month period ending this summer, he will have been a force behind six feature films, all of them hits or likely to be. If you could buy stock in the guy, he’d be the best investment around.

Jules Dassin, the blacklisted leftist American filmmaker who passed away overseas recently, directed what has long been widely regarded as the archetypal heist movie, Rififi, in Paris in 1955. It’s got one of the truly bravura displays of technique in popular-film history: The more-than-20-minute long, dialogue-free portrayal of the robbery of a French jewelry store. This extended sequence has often been described as an example of “pure cinema,” and while purity and cinema seem unlikely bedfellows to me, there’s no gainsaying Dassin’s pulsing, tensely economical achievement in it.