VIDEO: Five Of The Best Opening Credits In Recent Film

Two films that are being released this week — David Fincher's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Steven Spielberg's The Adventures of Tintin — have gotten largely positive reviews all around, but they are both notable for another reason: they boast stellar opening credit sequences.

Tintin's, which you can see here, is a smoothly animated cartoon by James Curran, who used images from the children's books upon which the film is based. Dragon Tattoo, "The Feel-Bad Movie Of Christmas," as it was promoted, laces a series of oozing, slick black shapes with Trent Reznor and Karen O's cover of Led Zeppelin's "Immigrant Song." Fincher said it represented "the primordial tar pit of [character Lisbeth Salander's] subconscious," according to Movies.com.

These outstanding opening sequences, which are themselves works of art that rival the fims' more sustained achievements, got us thinking about other recent films that have featured incredible credit rolls. Here are three more:

1. Catch Me If You Can, 2002. Here's another Spielberg film with an unforgettable, animated opening. Made by Parisian animators Kuntzel+Deygas, the reel mimics the fast-paced pursuit of con artist Frank Abagnale Jr. (played in the film by Leonardo DiCaprio) with a dizzying score by John Williams.

2. Casino Royale, 2006. Featuring digitized silhouettes of star Daniel Craig and a kaleidoscopic pattern of bleeding decks of hearts, the opening sequence to the Bond reboot, designed by Daniel Kleinman, was inspired by the original cover of the 1953 book by Ian Fleming. Chris Cornell's "You Know My Name" may seem a somewhat literal choice for a Bond opening, but it strikes the right note.

3. Lord of War, 2005. Now a largely forgotten artifact from the depths of the Bush era, Andrew Niccol's film stars Nicolas Cage as an illegal arms dealer who is being hunted by an Interpol agent. The opening sequence, however — designed by French visual effects specialist Yann Blondel and set to Buffalo Springfield’s anti-war anthem “For What It’s Worth” — still seems as fresh as the morning dew. Embedding is disabled, but you can see the video here.