10. ELF – In a year of heavy movies, it just didn’t get any stupider than this… or any funnier. I liked Old School… didn’t love it. And there is nothing about Elf that screams “MASTERPIECE!!!!” But it is a fine example of simple, happy filmmaking that somehow has a place a little closer to my heart than Finding Nemo, a legitimate masterwork in animation. On every other level, Finding Nemo is a better film. But I choose to honor a kind of filmmaking whose virtues are simple. Like Will Ferrell, it loves itself and everything around it.

How is it possible to make a film that is so lacking in cynicism? The influence of the last great “duh” film, The Jerk, is in evidence. In that film, Steve Martin’s unflagging, unwinking commitment to Navin R. Johnson’s naivety carried the day. Here, it is Ferrell. But lots of credit is due to the screenwriter, David Berenbaum, and director Jon Favreau for keeping it simple. There are some major glitches in storytelling… so be it. This silly ride has more honest heart than the overarching, self-important, manipulative Love Actually could ever hope for. Richard Curtis had it at one point… when Hugh Grant first quoted “I think I love you,” it had that feel of silly spontaneity. But the 20th time you tell that same joke, you can enjoy the joke in and of itself, but you lose some of that love.

9. AMERICAN SPLENDOR – A real treat, Shari Spinger Berman and Robert Pulcini go far, far, far out on the limb – another country mile further than Burstein & Morgan had to go for The Kid Stays In The Picture – and do so much more than survive. Somehow, R. Crumb and his world has become the Algonquin Roundtable of modern lore, somehow spurring the movement of non-fiction crossover in smarter and more interesting ways than every before. These are the films of the Everyartist, burdened by living the life of the mind (the Coen Bros. started this ball rolling with their writer’s block comedy, Barton Fink) and yet still dealing with the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.

Paul Giamatti’s performance is remarkable, managing to bring Harvey Pekar, who is already available as himself for the viewer, to life and to also bring his honing of a character to bear in his performance. In many ways, it is the comic flip side to Charlize Theron’s performance in Monster, though his performance is too dark to be funny and at times, Ms. Theron’s performance has enough lightness to make Wournos more than a dramatic caricature.

Hope Davis’ version of Joyce Brabner is a comic delight albeit, not as perfect a reflection of the real Joyce. And it is almost impossible to decide whether Toby Radloff or Judah Friedlander as Toby Radloff is more funny and compelling. But it’s the conception of the film by Pulcini and Berman that makes American Splendor stand out as a work of fiction, truth, injustice and the American weight. There will be nothing else like this ever, though the spirit may sustain for these young directors, much as it has for Terry Zwigoff, who started down a similar road and ended up with a different, but also clear, voice.

8. BIG FISH – Tim Burton grows up. It was always there. His visual skills are, as always, beyond. But here he serves a greater intimacy than he has ever delivered before. Of all the “year-end” titles, this may be the one that would have best been served by an early release date, as this is a film that is likely to grow in our esteem as time passes, instead of the other way around.

There are a lot of subtleties that grow - much like the tree of the 1-sheet - as you think back on the story. For instance, at some point one realizes that Ewan McGregor is not playing the younger Edward Bloom, but rather the vision of a young Edward Bloom that Edward Bloom has always brought to life in stories. The distinction may seem nit-picky, but the entire movie is about perception and or choices of perception. Burton keeps that theme going, even after the point where you think he is showing all of his cards, blurring storytelling and reality in the minds of those who don’t believe in Big Fish.

And then, there is the question that is rarely broached in the midst of thinking of all the glorious froo-froo… what is the “big fish” of the title? As with all great movies, there are many answers… including your own.

7. PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN – Maybe you thought I got it out of my system with Elf, but Pirates of the Caribbean brings something quite different to this year’s big table… size. In a time of epics, Pirates of the Caribbean managed to bring together real humans, CG fun, outsized proportion and pitch-perfect performances across the board. Keira Knightley can’t really act? No problem! She can bring a corset to life. Grimacing pirates and arch soldiers are too obvious? How about Laurel & Hardy-style duos on both the pirate and soldier side?

Of course, the key to this whole shebang is Johnny Depp, delivering a performance that manages to be both camp and function, the surreal and the utterly believable. As wonderful as Bill Murray and Sean Penn were, Depp gave the greatest movie star performance of this year… the one that people will be referencing for years to come, stumbling into a Depp-by-way-of-Keith-Richards swagger without even realizing they are doing it half the time. He was, indeed, the worst pirate and the best pirate anyone has ever seen.

A little lost in the hoopla is some great work by Geoffrey Rush, who also relaxes into his swagger with a glee that reminds us of why we love popcorn. He is this year’s Alan Rickman to Bruce Willis… only this year’s Bruce Willis turned out to be more than a movie star. There… he sucked up Rush’s spotlight again.

It is rare when you see a CG action thing and the parts that are too long are the action sequences. Gore Verbinski, Jerry Bruckheimer and Russio & Elliot put themselves out on the yardarm and delivered post-retro fireworks that all the world could see… twice.

6. MY FLESH & BLOOD – This was a year of great documentaries, but this one was the biggest because it loves the smallest. The story of Susan Tom and her family is almost beyond comprehension… and I’ve watched them play it out a few times now. In a world of cynicism and questioning – which Capturing The Friedmans so brilliantly shows us – Jonathan Karsh’s film serves as an overwhelming reminder that simple truth and love are complicated enough and far more fulfilling.

Audiences understandably enjoy watching things that allow them to judge others from the comfort of the 15th row. Sometimes they like “for the grace of God” experiences. But My Flesh & Blood gives you the comfort on neither. Susan Tom and her kids are human, but they are doing something beyond our normal sense of what we are capable of doing. But neither Susan nor the kids ever give you the feel that any of this was foisted upon them. Whether it is Susan’s choice to form a family of disabled kids or the kids’ choice to be relentlessly able, the film makes you, as an outsider, unlucky, not lucky… unlucky not to be a part of the lives of a family that harbors so much love. There is darkness to be sure. Lots of it. There are things you get used to seeing and things you can never get used to seeing. But this family is now a part of my life, through this film, forever.

5. HOUSE OF SAND & FOG – The ultimate internal movie, American Division, of 2003, this movie is so much about each of us that it is too easy to look away. Every character is awash in contradictions, fighting – or not – for their life. How can a house on a hill be the fulcrum of life and death? How can a woman as beautiful as Jennifer Connelly sleep in her car? How can smart people do such dumb things?

It happens every day, doesn’t it?

The road to clarity is paved with all kinds of unexpected stumbling blocks. Dr. Kubler-Ross should get royalty payments for this year at the cinema. Anger, denial, bargaining, depression, acceptance. Kubler-Ross was much like Sun Tzu, writing on one subject – death – but offering a system for processing life’s experiences that seems to reach well beyond that subject. In this case, Jennifer Connelly’s Kathy Nicola is trying to process the loss of her father, further intensified by the loss of her marriage, and is lingering in deep depression as the movie starts. The same is true of Ben Kingsley’s Colonel Behrani. But Behrani is a man of action and has been through a thousand deaths. Nicola is stumbling, alone, through her process. The two fill one another’s needs, though neither knows it. The process will be tragic. But it will not be denied.

A powerful debut for Vadim Perelman… perhaps too powerful.

4. IRREVERSIBLE – Gaspar Noe reaches his hand into the cavity of his viewers’ chests and grips our hearts, the beat of panic throbbing minute after minute after minute. It is, in some ways, an exercise in sadism. But like the beach attack in Saving Private Ryan, the intensity is jarring to the soul and forces the viewer to see the movie… and everything else in the world… through different eyes.

Is it an achievement to make a film with the most horrifying murder and the most harrowing rape in cinematic history? Not on its own. But the banal context is what makes both events so powerful. The rape sequence, in particular, has echoes of the shower murder in Psycho and the chainsaw in DePalma’s Scarface, in which the audience’s sense of what they are seeing is more profound than what is actually being shown. But even more so here, where Noe leaves the ever-moving camera in one place for the duration of the rape, forcing the viewer to watch helplessly, with much the same effect as Van Sant’s Elephant. If there is a “most horrifying” moment in the film, it is not the direct violence, but the person who stumbles into the tunnel where the rape is taking place, watches for a moment, then leaves without taking any action. He, at the opposite end of the tunnel as the audience, is our representative. And not only does he show our forced indifference, but he leaves us alone again with this unspeakable violence.

The dizzying concoction of living in a moment that feels right or wrong and then being thrust “forward” to the source of the decision that created that moment leaves the viewer in a constant state of unbalance. But the good part of that is that it forces us to wrestle for equilibrium. This is not the confrontive experience that everyone wants from a night at the movies, but it is one of the kinds of theatrical experiences that I relish greatly… perhaps because I get to have it so infrequently.

3. LOST IN TRANSLATION – A bittersweet poem about our vulnerability to love in a too defined universe, I fell in love with this movie early and often. Rarely do you come out of a film feeling like you got everything there was to get from a character and the experience with a film. But here, we got that from both the Bill Murray and the Scarlet Johansson characters. And that that is a tribute to Sofia Coppola, who found a way to balance it all out on a tight shooting schedule with a crew that mostly didn’t speak her language.

Perhaps more than any other film on this list, Lost In Translation is not meant to be too closely examined. It is a feeling. It is not a story movie. It’s not about “what happens.”

It is about the breaths that take place between what happens.

2. CITY OF GOD – Fernando Meirelles, with a strong assist with the actors from co-director Katia Lund, has made a ghetto epic worthy of Leone, Coppola or Malick, though in visual ways that none of those directors ever considered. The film is less arch than Leone, less coy than Coppola and as loud as Malick is quiet.

The film has managed to get to #12 in this year’s MCN critics’ chart, despite being released twice, essentially, by Miramax. Roger Ebert, for instance, had the film as his #1 last year, despite Miramax’s instructions that it was a 2003 title and didn’t vote for it this year, as many critics, I’m sure, did not. And yet, it has had a hard time in the “serious critics” establishment. Missing out on the New York Film Festival two years ago clearly changed Harvey Weinstein’s sense of what was possible for the film and changed its course dramatically in this country. Likewise, the disregard shown to Hero, also because of test screening issues that are simply not relevant, has left that remarkable achievement lying fallow on the sidelines of American movie history.

No description of any one moment or one character or one storyline can do this film justice. All the side stories are great. The actors are all non-actors, trained by Lund and others in a school for six months before auditioning for the movie. There was a short and a documentary by Meirelles and Lund, respectively, before this film was made. Meirelles is no kid, now 48 years old. But none of them really matter when assessing the movie itself.

Words cannot do it justice. It must be seen and far better to be seen on a big screen.

1. IN AMERICA – I feel in love at first sight with Jim Sheridan’s fifth film. It probably helped that I was already a fan of his daughter, Kirsten Sheridan’s, never-seen-in-America coming-of-age movie, Disco Pigs. There was a sense of magic in Kirsten’s vision that I didn’t expect from Jim, in light of his earlier work. But whether it was the collaboration with Kirsten and Naomi on the screenplay or an artist simply coming to a moment where he was ready to be even more daring than ever, this film was an injection right to my heart as I first saw it in a Toronto multiplex 16 months ago.

Sheridan’s view of New York is very much, in spirit, my view of New York. It is magical. It is horrible. It is insanely safe and unbelievably dangerous. You get used to the transvestites and the crowds and the dirt on the street and the chance that anything could happen in an instant. New York is the American dream and the American nightmare.

Woven into the tale of immigration is the story of a family that is together, but broken by loss. My family’s story is different, but in so many ways the same. I think we all have loss, whether in reflection of an event like 9/11 or a family member or loved one who holds a piece of us that we know has become infected, but that we can’t give up on. And while we each live our lives out, in our own private myopia, even those right around us are having their own life experiences that we should see and contribute to… but they float by. Sheridan’s movie family opens like a flower when the troubles come, which finally gives the strength to their titular center, which has folded up into himself, to open up as well.

It’s been a very dark year at the movies. And no movie has managed as well as In America to look right at the darkness, but not to be dragged into it. Death leads to life and vice versa. There is no escaping it. But here, two things keep the universe from deteriorating… love and stubbornness.

Looking back over my Top Ten, I am struck by all the death. Only three of the ten films does not feature the death of a major character. And Harvey Pekar makes you feel like he’d rather be dead… but not really… if you could just get his wife Joyce to leave him alone for a week or two!

But even more so, each of these films is a road movie, as the characters, real and imagined, move through their lives, looking for something that is just out of reach. Sometimes, they get there. Sometimes, they don’t. The only arrogance in these films – from the leading characters – is in Irreversible… and boy do they pay for it… and then they don’t. (You’ll have to see it to know what I mean.)

Yeah… if these were the only 10 films I was allowed to take to the desert island, I’d be okay for a while. And if Captain Jack was there with me, I wouldn’t be stuck for long. If Buddy was there, being stuck on an island would be fun. If Edward Bloom was there, I’d never turn on the TV. And if Susan Tom and Sarah (Samantha Morton) were there, we’d have a house, a day care and a working kitchen set up in a week or so.

There was an abundance of riches this year. Maybe there was no singular event at the movies that brought the world together. Maybe disappointments overwhelmed the positives. But isn’t that the lesson? Isn’t that our journey?

The Runners Up

Monday - December 29 - The Movies You Didn't See, But Should Have
Tuesday, December 30 - The Ten Worst Films Of 2002
Wednesday, December 31 - The Best Films Of 2002
Thursday, January 1 – New Year’s Resolutions
Thursday, January 1 – @MCN – 20 Weeks To Oscar, 9 Weeks To Go
Monday, January 5 – THB Returns To The Daily Schedule

MCN will be updated daily through the holidays.