[pwk]

I agree, this is compelling for a lot of the same reasons as the anagrams problem. I spent weeks playing with anagram code at one point, and like you I felt an immediate compulsion to start writing code for Sling Blade Runner. So far my (ruby) code just does the obvious: builds the graph connecting up the movies and then uses brute force to find all chains of length two, then three, etc. Bogs down at chain length of about 11. Added some quick and dirty optimizations and pruning heuristics, and I'm geting chains in the mid-hundreds. I think this approach can be extended further, but isn't particularly clever :-/.