Yeah, film is hard to beat for dynamic range. One of the advantages of digital, though, is that dynamic range scales with print size. If you shoot for large prints (30x20), you have to get clean shadows, so you let highlights blow out. But if you shoot for wallet-size or web images, you can let the shadows get very noisy, because the noise will not be visibile in the final output image. Film, on the other hand, does not have linear response, so it's not possible to use this little trick.