Movie press conferences in Japan are often pretty inane affairs, with vague questions about on-set "happenings" and zany ones along the lines of, "If you had superpowers like your character, what would you use them for?" Uh, world peace maybe?

These events aren't always good at soliciting intelligent answers from Hollywood's finest, but they are quite effective in another regard: The turnout at a press conference is the surest indicator of who's hot and who's not. Judging from the crush at his appearance before the media for "Public Enemies" at Roppongi Hills last week, no one is hotter than Johnny Depp.

True, no one swooned or squealed; the promoters have gotten better at keeping the groupies out. But all eyes were glued to the 46-year-old actor, who gives a hardboiled performance in the film as real-life 1930s bank robber John Dillinger, a desperado who became The United States' most-wanted criminal before being shot to death by FBI agents outside Chicago's Biograph Theater in 1934.