My Guilty Pleasure: 2004’s “Collateral,” starring Tom Cruise and Jamie Foxx.

I am not a Cruise fan, with the exception of his dancing movie mogul in “Tropic Thunder,” which was a generous and self-effacing performance.

But in this film, he is a slick assassin–remindful of an older film, 1973’s “Day of the Jackal,” with Edward Fox–and you almost but not quite wind up rooting for Cruise. just as you did for Fox, out to assassinate French President Charles de Gaulle.

Cruise’s character has a laundry list of mob informants to murder before the Big Boss’s case goes to trial. He kidnaps taxi driver Jamie Foxx to drive him around El Lay, and along the way, you visit a South Central walk-up apartment, a slick high-rise office building, an L.A. County Morgue, a Black jazz club, a Latino dance hall and an Asian disco.

It’s like a tour, deep in the night, of modern L.A.

Jamie Foxx, the taxi driver, is Everyman, and one of the victims on Cruise’s hit list, Jada Pinkett Smith, is smart and beautiful. Beyond beautiful. Foxx has a crush on her. Me, too. She is luminous.

She’s not my favorite character. That honor goes to Mark Ruffalo, who’s reimagined himself from the rumpled (“Columbo” comes to mind) San Francisco detective in “Zodiac”–another favorite of mine–to an LAPD narcotics detective, street-smart, courageous and with dress and hairstyle that identifies him as a cholo.

It’s identified as “neo-noir.” I can’t argue with that.