2002
The Most Overused Word on this Page is:
Montage
(Note: This Top ten list reflects an opinion from 2002, any and all changes not only are assured -
but are necessary to the process. They will reflect changed attitudes since 2002 and can be found, if in existence, here)

“The people of Hollywood have always sought to re-create the world in their own image, but they had absolutely no taste.”

01. The Pianist

The most honest and truly compelling reaction I’ve had to a film all year, probably due in large part to Polanski’s duly rigid credo of anti-sentimentalism. Brody, playing a human rat on the run, so tirelessly survives, (using mostly luck) , and assumes a deterioration that must be seen to be believed. Inside this protagonist, Polanski finds a colossal intimacy, a singular, unbiased point-of-view. I’m not sure it resonated with most critics just how unique and masterful this technique is. It’s almost never done without some level of crude inadequacy. It’s almost never without the goop, or without silly excesses of irony and nearly never arrives without some level of valiant metonymy. Polanski so fiercely counters these usual detractors, invoking an immediacy not felt since the docu-drama stylings of Schindler’s List. There is the closeness of personal, familial reactions to Holocaust components (the armbands, the amount of money Jews were allowed to keep inside their home, the 'No Jews allowed' decrees, the relocation to the ghettos) but later, staging an overwhelming gap between past, present and future (told using carefully placed ellipses), Polanski commands a visual emptiness, a mass world of crumbled brick and stone that aches with loneliness, an empty detention area, a lonely piano - and the quiet, the constant, self enforced quiet Brody must exercise in the many flats the resistance hides him in. In a stark and shatteringly realistic canvas, the director, still in personal exile himself (he lost his mother in a concentration camp), crafts his best picture in years, using his own personal demons to mix the paint.

02. Gangs of New York

It is…more than a cast of larger-than-life characters (Day-Lewis topping tons of previously dubbed career-high roles with his Bill "The Butcher" Cutting); more than a dirt-floor, dirt-poor chapter in history previously unrelated to the populace; more than a reconstructed lost city in turmoil and change; more than the success of Scorcese's spaghetti western stylings - - -  this is the kind of rousing filmmaking that's been taken for granted for too long. Only Scorcese could make a film where the main characters are meant to stand as metaphors for past and present ideals, and get away with debasing that very idea in the name of entertainment. Only Scorcese could cull a good
performance out of Cameron Diaz. It's a trademark of quality that's been all but shut out both this year and of late. Staggeringly honest cliche time: They just don't make em' like they used to.

A haunting, befuddlingly successful imagining of the vice of indulgence that's often so funny, and so admirably brilliant, you forget that what you're watching the main character do is usually both frowned upon and, thought of as a transparent “easy way out”; It’s a ballsy move of complete and utter self. It works so well because Kaufman knows he's ventured into deep waters and, instead of acknowledging it, he merely begins splattering the wall with the colors of complicity and confusion. This satire has all the labyrinthine madness and zany energy of the writer's previous outing with director Spike Jonze, Being John Malkovich (It oughta, it's partly about Kaufman's fictitious struggle to follow up that film). All of the actors (Cage and Streep, but especially Cooper) not only seem to get it, but seem deliciously at home in this unique world. Done with fish.

Boasting an eerie Texas Chainsaw Massacre-esque soundscape, as viewed
through a War of the Worlds filter, Shyamalan casts a mellow dread, not unlike the
post-rapture tone of Romero's Night of the Living Dead. Evincing none of his real life
pretension or previous on-screen repetition, Shymalan defies my usual cross-genre gripe by mixing funny and scary with equally impressive gusto. The grounded, eerily natural way the tirelessly endearing Hess family deals with their strife - both internal and
external - invests in the movie an air that could accurately be described as grave. The most important thing about Signs, a film I became very excited about re-experiencing, is that you can freakin' eat popcorn to it - and it is easily the most fun I've had at a
summertime movie in forever.

Using the term "beautifully off-the-wall" makes me feel a little bit queasy, but, here goes: Categorically avant-garde, Anderson's fourth film is flat-out exhilarating. There's the usual giddy, intoxicating thrill of a PT Anderson film, of seeing greatness for the first time - and recognizing it, but Punch-Drunk Love is an experience, a film that you should treasure upon first viewing, because everything that happens is neither predictable nor tired.  Adam Sandler isn't embarassing in his vanguard appearance (he's the same guy, basically, only disturbing rather than funny) as Barry Egan, a man so unlike the world he inhabits and so disconnected from traditional society that he is blunt to the point of rudeness. I'd be lying if I said it was anything but the filmmaking that blew me away, but Anderson’s celebrates these characters. He celebrates the awkward rush of Egan, as he falls in love (with Emily Watson, the straight woman in
this comedy of sorts). The first ten minutes are quite easily the best thing put on film this
year.

Peter Jackson keeps time beautifully, cementing both focus (it's pure, unadulterated,
exciting fun) and balance (interlocking story lines charged with effortless momentum and intimacy), and establishing an otherwise astounding keenness in observation of Frodo's deterioration, Sam's strength, Aragon's heroism, Gandalf's partiality, Sauroman's helplessness and, of course, Gollum's foulness, all of which are crystal clear in their clarity and breathtaking in their rendering. In the end, though, it's all about the battle of Helms Deep, an unending barrage of surprises and spectacle that is so full to the brim with old-fashioned bravado, it will leave you exhausted with anticipation for installment number three.

I didn't apologize for putting Signs up here and I won't come anywhere near doing likewise for this film which is so ridiculed in so many places that, if I can help it, I try to avoid even mentioning that I've seen it (five times). The sort of imaginative consistency that comes only from Lucas and remains perhaps the only vision unclouded by the interest of his audience, these stories are like silent films, telling the story visually, with dialogue and special effects used as music. They give a sense of what's going on without continuity because they jump quite a bit, moving faster than most films, as scenes are purposefully engineered to lack beginnings or endings. Viewers can cull logic through repeat viewings using first act confrontations as teasers for third act climaxes. Though I did finally come to terms with how painfully flat – and outside the realm of the patented wooden Lucas style - the exchanges between Anakin and Padme really are. There's a huge number of great scenes (way more than most modern films), and AOTC is decidedly more ambitious than Episode I.  In spots, it divvies out rewards bang-bang-bang, connecting the saga so thoroughly as to add another dimension of enjoyment to this massive science fiction puzzle. It's a masterfully consistent and beautifully interesting world of fantasy that no other franchise has yet to even dare to match.

How to spin a yarn of redemption without warranting comparison to a blunt object? The entire film bathed in sobriety - it's like a two hour funeral - or, more specifically, a two hour eulogy for a decided fate everybody keeps trying to beat. 25th Hour contains what is perhaps the most vivid simulacrum of pure self pity I’ve seen (short of the collected racial epithets montage in Do the Right Thing, the joint in Lee’s repertoire this film is most comparable to): It’s a scene where Norton’s inner voice is glimpsed in a men’s room mirror, rattling hither and thither with all of American’s favorite stereotypes and simple gripes, a shocking sequence that gives the movie a social jolt, leaving no question from that point forward, that the film is making a broader point than that of the haunting tale of Monty’s last day without fear of forced sodomy. Norton gives his best performance to date. His range and the competent control thereof are on display - but most prevalent is his silent intensity, his power, his command, the total suspicion of security he has gleaned from his character's career choice (drug dealer), a near-erupting sense of self-control, the irony of which is his sentence - the thing he cannot change - to which he seems to be quietly challenging by mid-film, meeting it with a drunken grimace that’s desperately failing to mask some rather serious pain. It’s about accepting responsibility, and what a potent medicine the final “what if” montage is: A winking eye warning shrewdly, like a clear-headed elder, against taking the easy way out. (Would be wrong, methinks, not to mention the clarity with which Lee postures his post-911 characters, all of which jitter in a state of shocked alertness that’s most likely an byproduct of the acceptance that a city's security has been – and could, in the future, be - breached).

Okay, we're talking pure subjectivity: I'm rabidly anti-gun. And Michael Moore's Bowling For Columbine is total and complete propoganda from the word go. Don't trust me (really, don't), because I wept openly, sobbing even, at several portions of the film. Call me hypersensitive if you must, but can we possibly agree that while Columbine purports to squeeze a huge issue into a device that’s pop filmmaking at best - - - at worst, all it really depicts is Moore doing a lot of really courageous things in the name of his own beliefs. I'm not going to step out on a limb and say that's unheard of,
or admirable, but....

Never more true than here, is French director Eric Rohmer's uncanny ability to take a film that's predominantly dialogue (sometimes all dialogue) and make it as entertaining as a two-and-a-half hour montage. The Lady and the Duke isn't merely a historical document that feels like it's taking place in the eighteenth century, it's ditigally stylized to mimic the world of paintings that depict the French Revolution in all it's wicked glory. I like the quiet, distant way it unfolds, as if telling a story through cinematography would be an unforgivable sin, and telling it through characters is the kind of sturdy, solid foundation abandoned in these smash-cut times. Lucy Russell, a British actress, gives a panicked, desperate, and very strong performance in French, as she finds herself in a series of predicaments due to her class, her status and her inability to conform.

A ten way tie for eleventh place in a state of grand-jury prize madness (alphabetically, son):

The polar opposite of Michael Moore's decidedly biased Bowling for Columbine, Daughter From Danang is one of the most objective documentaries about culture and identity I’ve seen, layers peeling so smoothly that we don’t feel it shrinking our comfort zone, thrusting us into life at its most emotionally complex. The protagonist, Heidi, having staged a reunion with her birth mother in Vietnam, finds that she is expected to support her mother's family financially, from the U.S. The cringe-worthy moment sets off the bottled pain, revealing just how strangely similar Heidi is to mama-san (in another scene, they both pretend to forgive each other with the same reserved smugness). The film’s anti-denouement, if you will (the last third of it) - is so completely absorbing, so intellectually challenging, so universal, so didactic and so overwhelming, we begin feeling thankful that it won’t affect us directly if we aren’t able to sort out all the emotional baggage that Heidi’s finally claimed.

Most remarkable is the stunning re-creation, including the sharp technicolor and constant, unnecessary crane shots. That the film never feels quite modern is perhaps the most important achievement of all. The multi-thematic verve of underlying passions suppressed by social constraint, which is genuinely unnerving at times, often goes even further: Because the time period is so vivid, Far From Heaven feels satisfying like the Douglas Sirk movies it apes. Sirk's playful, mise-en-scene driven filmmaking is supplanted by a kind of anti-naturalism - a look of perfection to a fault: Haynes seems to be doing everything shy of buying up billboard space to ensure we know this is an homage, except synchronizing his social taboos with a relevant social message. Julianne Moore is terrifically charming, subservient yet uncharacteristically interesting, while her outed husband, played by Dennis Quaid, is reticent and tortured (and often comically strident). The best performance in the movie, however, belongs to Dennis Haysbert, who plays the kind but real neighbor who befriends Moore, possessing a grace that feels almost physically soothing.

Under what looks like a decade of dust, Paxton creates an unpredictable, edgy character we never feel quite comfortable rooting for. Toss-up, though, whether it’s his menacing presence that’s so eerie, or the fact that he spends so much of the movie snapping people's heads open with an axe as his children look on in awe. The first of two good, scary films released this year that reminded me of episodes of The X-Files (the other being The Mothman Prophecies).

So gushingly arty, and beautifully free-spirited, it's Salma Hayek's most visible and memorable performance to date  Taymor is a major talent, who gives her film a free-flowing vision of a woman's struggle to make both good and bad choices, and to define herself as an independent artist who can love. Read that last part again. That's just plain rare.

It's like an after school special played as satire. It's like a teen flick bathed in the attention to detail and sensibility usually reserved for Merchant and Ivory. It's like Beauty and the Beast with no agenda. It's like a movie Todd Solondz might make if he'd grow the hell up. It's, like, surprisingly remarkable. What sets Pumpkin so daringly apart from the rest of the drivel starring young adults these days is its tone: Blunt sincerity that is only allowed to come out corn ball. Watching a sorority girl melt away her upbeat bubble of security, exposing her - for what appears the first time, literally – to a painful, cold reality where we can almost taste the horrible plastic of her world (so much so, that the arc is transferred to us and it becomes a bitter epiphany).

What's entrancing about The Son's Room is director Nanni Moretti's performance
in front of the camera. Effortlessly belying an almost unearthly calmness (and still
channeling a personable sense of stability), he moves in and out of his role as therapist,
parent, husband and observer with a versatility that's totally and completely believable. I found myself crying at some of the more original bits: The coffin being sealed in front of the family, the mother's loud sobs as she gradually begins to register closure after the
funeral, and the constant replaying of the last few events of the boy's life before he left
his family to go diving. Then the secret girlfriend shows up and the film turns creepy.
This spry, out-of-nowhere turn of events, wherein the family chauffers the girl and her
new boyfriend to the French border, peppered with the Brian Eno song “By this River”
(used as a theme that defines passion via teenage ears and won't be leaving your head
anytime soon) - this is the piece of The Son's Room that really makes it special (like
Moretti’s Caro Diaro, the last film he made that was released here in the states).

Using another young female protagonist who strolls into an endlessly ambitious museum of animation,  Miyazaki's film is an imagination machine – and it’s full of inimitable wonder. There’s plenty of jaw droppers: Sen, proving herself to her spirit employers by expertly accommodating a stink spirit; Sen's dealings with tiny pieces of coal dust (reminiscent of the dust bunnies in Miyazaki's My Neighbor Totoro) and the eight legged man who commandeers them (and runs the spirit city); Even the scene that feels like it's own short film, when Sen, a witch's pet heads (don't ask) and her gigantic baby (who has been turned into what looks like a miniature Totoro, himself), set out to
return a stolen stamp and rescue a boy who has been turned into a.....and it goes on like this. These brief descriptions of the characters - without so much as context – should paint the picture. Everything that happens in the movie is out-and-out clever. A pleasing collection of Miyazaki doodles.

The whole of it bathed in a certain quality and texture of shadow, Unfaithful teases the sensuality out of its collection of sins with the power of a stiff drink. The basis of which is that both Lane and Gere are so fashionably ordinary, yet so casually - seemingly - happy until a slam-banging affair (a strikingly palpable fantasy which takes place in a variety of public and private places) cuts into the middle of this (categorically speaking) fable. Lane’s PRESENCE, something she just never seemed to be interested in displaying in other films, drives this, the best female performance I've seen all year. The practical actions and reactions, a deceptively interested general restraint on the homefront contrasted with a sexy, uninhibited bedroom fury feel right at home inserted into a film populated by people who readily indulge their animalistic sexual desires in order to work out their entitlement issues. It feels like an A-list (or, mature, like In the Bedroom, maybe) entry of counterculture porn for people who love to gossip about broken marriages. And that piano rendition of Radiohead’s “Exit Music (For a Film)” certainly doesn’t dock it any merit. (Also, thanks to the alternate ending on the DVD, I can rest easily knowing the film was approved by my friendly neighborhood test audience.)

Enough, Insomnia, Johnny Q. (as they call it at my video store), Panic Room

Changing Lanes

The subtext of humanity is nudged below a series of grave practical jokes Affleck (as the victimized saint) and Jackson (a recently sober/separated father or two) play on each other. The message is wrapped up with a bow and served to us at the end with almost no connection to the day’s events – unless you count pure exhaustion.

Minority Report

In my Impostor review, I was all, “I know they keep using Philip K. Dick as source material - I'm just not sure why”. My revelation is never more relevant than here, where Tom Cruise keeps perpetually repeating the title of the film (as if, should he say it enough times, he'll be exonerated all wrong), and things are, as ever, not what they seem in the human/robot technology jumble. For instance, we’re invited to watch a director who seems tired of his usual “filmmaking as a balance
of slim intellect and mammoth commercial sensibility”, and, instead, tries to ape Kubrick on speed. This is why I haven’t rushed out to see Catch Me If You Can.

My Big Fat Greek Wedding

So harmless you might catch yourself sighing - loudly. It's kind of a bad sign when a writer uses Greek culture as a derogatory stereotype left on repeat to such an extent that even its "They'll be there no matter what" insight feels disturbingly false. It's nothing more than a series of tiny conflicts resolved in five minute increments. The title tells us the ending. If watching everything up to (and including) that point isn't stimulating - why not just watch another episode of A Wedding Story on TLC?

Men in Black II

Only Mr. Charles Odell summed up my own thoughts to a T, when he wrote that Sonnenfeld's film has been "Proudly brought to you by Sprint, offering the latest technologies to enable everyone involved to telecommute on this production".

Kung Pow's very ambition is to ape the atrocity of dubbed kung fu movies - which gives it the distinctive air that any wrong it may do will somehow be assimilated into it's pre-justified sense of satire. Nice try, Oedekerk.

It couldn't draw a parallel between its own thoroughly uninteresting re-imagining and the camp genius of Hanna Barbera if it were given a million scooby snacks as incentive.

40 Days and 40 Nights

With a cast recycled from way too many teen farces, this story of a boy who gives up sex for the requisite Lenten duration turns into a sub American Pie string of eye-bulgingly forced sex jokes.

Brimming with tons of random, plot-alienating events, occurring almost on top of one another, it's still nothing more than simplistic formula cues and look-at-me sight gags which, let's face it, aren't very funny (no matter what the upstanding source material is).

Far too literal (read: coherent), absolutely dull version of a really, really funny play. Every joke in the film is put on such a pedestal that it fails to live up to the momentary expectation Parker gives it. He fails to realize, of course, that the play works its own magic.

Casting Qualls as a character meant to become ordinary is so far out of the realm of his "range", it's almost as insulting as the rest of the cast, who carry on like their reading their scripts on camera. Don’t even get me started on the asides.

The Sum of All Fears -

Watching these heavy-dangling world events play out amidst one-liners and horribly forced action sequences never reaches a harmonious context to marry the quips to the docudrama. True, Affleck can't carry a regular film but, to his discredit, he can’t even carry one that actively feels like bad television.

This Rock-Hopkins experiment goes so awry that even the filmmakers know they've got nothing, covering their bases in expectation that filmgoers will tell their friends: “It's worth it to hear Anthony Hopkins tell Chris Rock to, ‘Get in the car, bitch.’” That scene is safely placed thirty seconds from the closing credits.

A Walk to Remember -

The antiquated characters, obtuse situations (who looks through telescopes anymore?) and borderline propaganda message set me wrong from the start. Most after-school specials aired on Disney are racier, more accurate and more effective. Most of them tend to take place on planet Earth, as well.

Sooner or later, someone's going to get up the cajones to mention to Gibson and Co. that there is no place for convention in a proficient, modern war film. (This one's a string of military clichés, rendered with confusion and restraint.)

1. Crocodile Hunter: Collision Course

The only movie this year that I turned off. Not only did I come to the conclusion that I can't stand Steve Irwin (making me as rare as the dodo egg), but that I was genuinely offended that this rush to give him a movie deal resulted in a film this unimaginative, a film so conniving as to be blatantly incoherent. Essentially, it's concocted of scenes where Steve dissects the reptile world and, interspersed, is a separate, completely independent plot line with sequences of a strange satellite that’s fallen from the sky – or something. I'm told these plots cross eventually. Had I stuck around to find out, the result would almost certainly have cured me of movies for good.

If I were to point out that the first act doesn't have a single scene that leads fluidly into the next scene, that a mis-timed road movie is the second act and that a string of abrupt, undeserved narrative shifts (think: deciphering the content that slips by as you channel surf) stands in for a third act, you'd probably say to me, "Why bother?" Yet another reason test screenings don't work. (My evaluation card was so scathingly scrawled, it was practically smoking).

Arnie’s latest act of implausibility is as hopelessly dated as Commando (1985) - only it was made just last year. Hoping to escape from the excruciatingly obvious
Arnie-against-innumerable-faceless-baddies plotline with a title ripped from the Oklahoma Bombing headlines - this revenge yarn pits the muscle man against South
American drug dealers who act as if they are extras in a South American exploitation film.

This is less a film than a montage of people trading sensitive information for, among other things, a lot of bruises. Dozens of films are starting to look and feel like a thin riff on this haphazard, cinematic rug pulling that dictates that a surprise ending be mandatory. Even Morgan Freeman's excessive use of the term "wild card" and his heroic, third act leap from the wagon can’t slow the annoyance of this two hour cliché.

Costner's performance suits the narrow misadventures which befall him and, for that, I was willing to laugh through most of this expensive TV Drama that makes no attempt made to disguise how outlandish and goopy it's being. The last five minutes, however, prove that this is no laughing matter. This is a warn everybody you know matter.

This is an inconsistent and confusing film where Snipes seems to dip in and out of character. The action sequences are heavily digitized - but for no particular purpose, it seeems (they're boring as a dog's butt, too). Goyer seems to have written an unofficial sequel, the kind that's usually released decades later and takes the sort of liberties with characters which are taken here.

Slackers feels like its aching for a sincere moment but instead, it is (properly) trapped inside a parody's body. While it strives ambitiously to be arty (it even lifts the font Wes Anderson made cool in his opening titles), it's actually something of an unfathomable, unholy feat: It's an American Pie knock-off.

Though an almost banished-to-cable movie is the right place for both Klein and LL Cool J, the characters are as indistinguishable from one another as the shots which make up the Rollerball sequences. The whole ordeal feels like a string of subplots that add up to something less than a story – shot and staged by a second unit director.

If only the Katakuris could engage in one activity that didn’t seem hopelessly staged to garner laughs, Miike’s film might not fall somewhere between a being a horrendous musical where every number is identical and a hypothetical television sitcom where the same thing happens to the same characters every week.

The flying digi-dragons seem foreboding until contrasted with the grounded, rubber dragon models which are so campy, you can’t possibly curb your giggling while characters sulk and shiver and trade dragon-tooth necklaces in hushed tones. The real problem, though, is the exceedingly simplistic and anti-climactic resolution to a problem that's the focus of the whole film.

Nicholas Nickleby

Bloody Sunday

Devils on the Doorstep, An Amazing Couple, Irreversible, Intacto, Invincible (or, as I call them, the three 'I's), Home Movie, Morvern Callar, Heaven,  The Kid Stays in the Picture, The Grey Zone, Mostly Martha, Rabbit-Proof Fence, Secretary, City of God, The Quiet American, Standing in the Shadows of Motown, and The Man From Elysian Fields.

Actor: Adrien Brody, The Pianist; Edward Norton, 25th Hour, Daniel Day-Lewis, Gangs of New York, Nicholas Cage, Adaptation, Hugh Grant, About a Boy.

Actress (keeping in mind that I haven’t seen The Hours): Isabelle Huppert, The Piano Teacher, Meryl Streep, Adaptation, Julianne Moore, Far From Heaven, Diane Lane, Unfaithful, Salma Hayek, Frida.

Supporting Actress: Hilary Swank, Insomnia, Emily Mortimer, Lovely and Amazing (special note almost exclusively added for the "body flaws" sequence), Maribel Verdu, Y Tu Mama Tambien, Toni Collette, About a Boy, Kirsten Dunst, The Cat's Meow, Hope Davis, About Schmidt.

Supporting Actor: Dennis Haysbert, Far From Heaven, Edward Hermann, The Cat's Meow, Bill Cobbs, Sunshine State,  Peter Saarsgard, The Salton Sea or K-19: The Widowmaker, Chris Cooper, Adaptation, Kenneth Branagh, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Jude Law, Road to Perdition,

Cinematography: The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (or, the next best thing to a blinker in the upper right hand corner that read: SWEEPING!), Punch-Drunk Love (much like the film, I had absolutely no idea what crazy camera move was coming 'round each beat), The Count of Monte Cristo (the coolest episode of Masterpiece Theater ever), I Am Trying to Break Your Heart (Sam Jones photographs in full motion!), Y Tu Mama Tambien (lost in a green, grainy dream, God thy name be Lubezki).

Music: (Shameless to further promote I Am Trying to Break Your Heart merely because I've had the album it shamelessly promotes out of my sight for exactly thirteen whole seconds since I've purchased it, BUT...), Obvious choices like Adaptation, Gangs of New York and The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, but then, there's less obvious choices, like, for instance ... right, fuckwit year for music for sure. Here's some fine use of songs, though: Brian Eno's "By This River" in The Son's Room; "Long Way Home", written for Big Bad Love by Tom Waits; Scotland, PA and Gangster No. 1, whose use of period music wasn't out-and-out obvious, a rarity these days...(Alright, I friggin' admit it, I didn't entirely dislike "Lose Yourself", played safely over the end credits of the otherwise unsubstantial 8 Mile).

Art Direction: Frida (yes, it could have been screened as a cinematic Pottery Barn-esque catalog); Gangs of New York (for tre obvious reasons); Far From Heaven, The Lady and the Duke,
Road to Perdition.

- opening ten minutes, harmonium, Punch-Drunk Love
- piano solo, empty house, German officer, The Pianist
- restaurant confrontation, About a Boy
- the elf, mounting a horse in the coolest way, in Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
- the ‘Done with Fish’ speech in Adaptation
- the draft riot montage in Gangs of New York
- the argument between the articulate, Christian security officer and three teen atheists in Hell House
- the knife-point photo session in a private hotel room in One Hour Photo
- The Brazilian home video in Signs
- unknowingly greedy mother and emotionally wounded daughter spar in Daughter From Danang
- either of the big montages (self-pity in a mirror, or “what if….?”) in 25th Hour
- hiding the governor of Tuileries in The Lady and the Duke (did that remind anyone else of
        “hiding Ashley Wilkes” in Gone With the Wind?)
- any scene with Jude Law in Road to Perdition
- I hate to be just like everybody else, but: the Yoda/Count Dooku light-saber battle in
        Attack of the Clones is still, more than a dozen times later, totally exhilarating
- Emily Mortimer’s “flaws of the body” scene in Lovely & Amazing
- Vincent D’Onfrio restaging the JFK assassination using pigeons and BB guns in The Salton Sea
- Cinematic ejaculations that relieved two huge, wan build-ups: the last boxing match in
        Undisputed and the freestyle rap battle in 8 Mile
- Richard Gere’s late night phone conversation with Indrid Cold in The Mothman Prophecies
- Tim Blake Nelson’s house, and everything that happens there, in The Good Girl
- Crushed glass in your pocket, anyone? (The Piano Teacher)
-After a movie’s (The Big One) worth of disappointment, Michael Moore finally gets his way
        by walking in the front door of a corporate headquarters (K-Mart, in this instance) and
        demanding a confrontation, in Bowling for Columbine

George Washington, Haxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages, Jules and Jim, Kicking and Screaming, Kwaidan, Last Year at Marienbad, The Parallex View, Rififi, The Shop Around the Corner, and...

...last, but not least, Songs from the Second Floor, which I’ve seen critics put on their lists for the last three years. I’ve decided to base its year upon when it was first screened in North America, at the Toronto Film Festival in September of 2000. Realizing it was released in a number of theaters this year, but none were even remotely close to me. I bought it off of e-bay (for an obscene amount of money). Here’s hoping Criterion can get on the ball with this thing
 

[Just about everything that happens in Andersson's masterwork takes place on the same plane of timely and uninhabitable thanklessness we face in a universal line-up of drone tasks experienced by most of the population of the world. Its so close in proximity, in terms of exaggerated pictures of our own, hurtful trends - and yet  it's so beautifully illogical (which is, I believe, where we meet up with the point). Songs From the Second Floor is a contained, physical manifestation of abstract commentary that names hypocrisy as the cruel, unavoidable side effect of being human. Magnified in its vision, it is short and segmented - yet wholly epic in ambition. At once an absurdist perception and a scathing critique, one finds equally rewarding and disturbing portions of both solace and doom. A remarkable work of symbolic significance - it's an important, one-of-a-kind film that is simultaneously defining and removed, funny and scary, haunting and tragic, and beautiful and moving.

Beloved is the man who sits down.]