Ten Best List
For several weeks now, I've fussed over my Ten Best List because 2004 was, in fact, the richest moviegoing year in years. How to represent the experience of seeing something fascinating-or worth seeing again-just about every week? That's what made the year's rancor (bitterness that masqueraded as discourse around two of the year's biggest moneymakers) almost seem worthwhile. I don't buy that this was the year of documentary; it's the fiction films that were most expressive and memorable.
D.W. Griffith said: "My aim is to make you see." Leigh makes seeing understanding. Vera's confrontation with the law plays out in a harmony of green and blue-her eyes, her sweater, her walls. Everything simplified into pure, clear feeling. This story of moral ignorance stays miraculously unpolemicized.
2. Hero (Zhang Yimou)
Sternberg would approve Tony Leung, Maggie Cheung and Zhang Ziyi traversing the red corridors of a calligraphy school as if coursing the chambers of China's heart, trying to fake out each other's emotional betrayals and political allegiances. Action equals feeling. When the characters fly so do your emotions.
3. Son Frère (Patrice Chéreau)
Artistry lights up this difficult two-brothers story, exulting in several kinds of nakedness-physical, emotional, spiritual, Chéreau's tough sensuality links to mortality. Sentimental in the best sense, it is the rare movie completely without cliché.
4. The Terminal (Steven Spielberg)
A fable about how we are variously human. Spielberg's response to 9/11 was boldly set in an airport. No other serious movie was as amusing.
5. Deserted Station (Alireza Raisian)
Adds momentum to a staid Kiarostami conceit. A sophisticated urban couple learns what it means to be privileged by encountering a small town of deprived children. Raisian's final scene is a compassionate knockout.
6. The Manchurian Candidate (Jonathan Demme)
A remake that is also an improvement. Demme summarized modern political malaise and even included a totally apt homage to Last Year at Marienbad. Missed it? See it again and gasp.
7. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry)
Visual jokester Gondry uses Jim Carrey's surprising sensitivity as the linchpin of dizzying memory games and emotional pyrotechnics.
8. A Thousand Clouds of Peace (Julián Hernandez)
Heartbreak treated as the stuff of pop lyrics opening up the abyss of existentialism. A low-budget tour-de-force with the year's most ravishing b&w photography.
9. Mr. 3000 (Charles Stone III)
Bernie Mac's star turn was the year's best acting in a rare studio entertainment with character depth.
10. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (Wes Anderson)
Rising up the list with every recall, this musical-comedy is an awed, child's-eye view of adulthood.