The Year in Film

PAUL MALCOLM

10 BEST

About Schmidt(USA, Alexander Payne)

All About Lily Chou-Chou(Japan, Shunji Iwai)

Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner(Canada, Zacharias Kunuk)

Far From Heaven(USA, Todd Haynes)

Jackass: The Movie(USA, Jeff Tremaine)

Life and Debt(USA, Stephanie Black)

Lilo & Stitch(USA, Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders)

Punch-Drunk Love(USA, Paul Thomas Anderson)

Sunshine State(USA, John Sayles)

Y Tu Mamá También(USA/Mexico, Alfonso Cuarón)

MOST OVERRATED: Bowling for Columbine(Canada/USA/Germany, Michael Moore)

MOST UNDERRATED: Jackass: The Movie(USA, Jeff Tremaine)

FESTIVAL FAVORITE: Oasis (South Korea, Lee Chang-dong) It's hard to say what makes Oasis a tougher sell: the director's harrowing depiction of a brutish ex-con's attempted rape of a young woman with cerebral palsy, or the deeply felt, beautifully human love story it initiates. Regardless, Lee refuses to shrink from ugliness or feed his audience empty sentiment in a masterful melodrama about two outcasts who ultimately find in each other the self-worth they're denied in a harsh, exploitative society.

PERSISTENCE OF VISION: Director Alejandro González Iñárritu (Amores Perros) contributed the most visually stunning segment to a compilation of filmmaker responses to 9/11 titled 11'09"01. A crescendo of chaos and horror built on images and sounds from that morning, it begins with a pitch-black screen that pulses with the intermittent progress of a body falling through space.

MARK OLSEN

10 BEST

Bloody Sunday (U.K./Ireland, Paul Greengrass)

Far From Heaven (USA, Todd Haynes)

Gangs of New York (USA/Italy/Germany/U.K./Netherlands, Martin Scorsese)

The Good Girl (USA/Germany/Netherlands, Miguel Arteta)

Invincible (USA/U.K./Germany/Ireland, Werner Herzog)

Lovely & Amazing (USA, Nicole Holofcener)

Morvern Callar (U.K., Lynne Ramsay)

Punch-Drunk Love (USA, Paul Thomas Anderson)

The Quiet American (USA/Germany, Phillip Noyce)

What Time Is It There? (France/Taiwan, Tsai Ming-liang)

MOST OVERRATED: Bowling For Columbine (Canada/USA/Germany, Michael Moore)

MOST UNDERRATED: The Rules of Attraction (USA/Germany, Roger Avary)

FESTIVAL FAVORITE: The debut feature from Canadian writer-directors Steven Clark and Matt Bissonnette, Looking for Leonard is a loving and amiable throwback to the heroic age of American independent cinema. Full of offbeat characters and a caper plot that's more or less forgotten, the film is just the kind of left-field surprise this festival attendee is always looking for.

PERSISTENCE OF VISION: A gang known as the Dead Rabbits assembles for battle at the beginning of Gangs of New York, as martial drumbeats push the tension and a Steadicam follows them through a series of catacombs. It is classic Scorsese — too intense, bottled up and on the brink of eruption — and, after a brief pause for conversation, Brendan Gleeson kicks open a door that leads from their dim, cramped quarters out into an unbelievably vast, snow-covered town square. In a breathtaking move, the camera then pushes on through the door and surveys the surroundings, yanking the viewer backward in time.

RON STRINGER

10 BEST

About Schmidt(USA, Alexander Payne)

Adaptation (USA, Spike Jonze)

Catch Me If You Can(USA, Steven Spielberg)

I'm Going Home (France/Portugal, Manoel de Oliveira)

In Praise of Love (France/Switzerland, Jean-Luc Godard)

Ivansxtc (USA/U.K., Bernard Rose)

The Piano Teacher(France/Austria, Michael Haneke)

Punch-Drunk Love (USA, Paul Thomas Anderson)

Time Out (France, Laurent Cantet)

Y Tu Mamá También (USA/Mexico, Alfonso Cuarón)

MOST OVERRATED: El Crimen del Padre Amaro(Mexico/Spain/Argentina/France, Carlos Carrera)

MOST UNDERRATED: Reign of Fire(U.K./Ireland/USA, Rob Bowman)

FESTIVAL FAVORITE: Werckmeister Harmonies(Hungary, Ágnes Hranitzky, Béla Tarr) Saw this on its second, and final, night at LACMA and kicked myself repeatedly for not having arranged things so I could see it again, right away. God as beached whale. Satan as shadow puppet and sideshow impresario. The saddest movie of the new millennium . . .

PERSISTENCE OF VISION: . . . sadder even than the last scene of The Piano Teacher, when Isabelle Huppert, realizing in the moments before her big piano recital that whatever power she may have had over her lover, her mother and her students — to say nothing of her own life — has evaporated, stabs herself with the kitchen knife she had intended as an instrument of vengeance and slips out of the concert hall.

CHUCK WILSON

10 BEST

1. Dahmer(USA, David Jacobson)

2. Y Tu Mamá También(USA/Mexico, Alfonso Cuarón)

3. Roger Dodger(USA, Dylan Kidd)

4. The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys (USA, Peter Care)

5. Femme Fatale(USA/France/Germany, Brian DePalma)

6. The Pianist (U.K./France/Germany/ Poland/Netherlands, Roman Polanski)

7. Signs(USA, M. Night Shyamalan)

8. Time Out(France, Laurent Cantet)

9. The Cockettes(USA, Bill Weber and David Weissman)

10. Bartleby (USA, Jonathan Parker)

MOST OVERRATED: 8 Mile(USA, Curtis Hanson)

MOST UNDERRATED: City by the Sea(USA, Michael Caton-Jones)

FESTIVAL FAVORITE: In Doug Sadler's Riders(USA), Alex (Bodine Alexander) tries to protect her little sister from their mother's controlling new boyfriend (Don Harvey). The sisters run away to New Orleans, only to discover that strangers can be just as unnerving as the adversary back home.

PERSISTENCE OF VISION: Near the end of David Jacobson's Dahmer, the young serial killer played so brilliantly by Jeremy Renner slices open the stomach of the dead guy in his bed and inserts first his hand and then his forearm into the body. Jacobson has staged the film's most explicit moment as a fantasy sequence, so there's no gore, which allows us to take in the details: the half-lit room, washed in red, as if a scarf has been thrown over a lampshade, and the look of wonder on Dahmer's face, an expression that's stunningly familiar, for this, you realize, is a love scene.