Michael Douglas redefined himself playing a pothead novelist-teacher at the end of his rope in Curtis Hanson’s hilarious and melancholy comedy. Subtle, literate and generous toward its misfit characters, this wonderful ensemble piece showed what Hollywood artistry, left to its own devices, could achieve.
In three incredibly rich hours, Taiwan’s Edward Yang unfolds the lives and loves of a middle-class Taipei family, making the quotidian luminous. This intimate, deeply human epic crosses all borders.
Giving Julia Roberts the best role of her career, Steven Soderbergh took a familiar social-problem formula and shook the stuffing out of it. Funny, sexy and rousing, this girl-and-Goliath fable was mainstream Hollywood filmmaking at its most satisfying.
With this first film, a bleak tale of a deprived childhood in the slums of Glasgow, a film-making star was born. Scottish director Lynne Ramsay is the real McCoy: a visionary whose images are so striking and fresh they transform horror into poetry.
In the year’s most trenchant love story (originally titled “Une Liaison pornographique”), a nameless woman (a great Nathalie Baye) and nameless man (Sergi Lopez) meet through a personal ad for an anonymous sexual tryst in a Paris hotel room. It turns into something far more complex, as this riveting film chronicles in stunningly precise emotional detail.
The beguiling Jamie Bell dances his way out of the coal mines in Stephen Daldry’s charming, exuberant quasi musical. This is one “feel good” movie you can actually feel good about feeling good about.
The best American indie movie was Kenneth Lonergan’s beautifully written account of a brother and sister (the extraordinary Mark Ruffalo and Laura Linney) re-encountering each other in upstate New York. Here are “family values” as they’re really lived, expressed through tangled feelings of love, resentment, loyalty and regret.
Soderbergh strikes again: this time with an ambitious, exciting epic about the ravages of drugs on our culture. The huge cast is flawless, led by the mesmerizing Benicio Del Toro as a Tijuana cop trying to hold onto his soul in a ruthless world.
Lyrical, sensual and shattering, Julian Schnabel’s memorial to the late gay Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas (Javier Bardem) is a devastating indictment of the Castro regime, which could tolerate neither Arena’s sexuality nor his creativity. This fever-pitched film takes us places we’ve never been.
Who could have guessed the year’s most exhilarating action film would come from the director of “Sense and Sensibility”? A magical blend of love story, historical epic and martial arts, Ang Lee’s high-flying entertainment was a killer mix of poetry and pizzazz.
All the subjects American movies avoid–blue-collar work, class, capitalism–are explored with documentary-style vividness and heartbreaking force in this French movie about a son who returns to work as a manager in the factory where his father has toiled all his life.
A group sing-along to Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer” summed up the contagious rock-and-roll spirit of Cameron Crowe’s look back at his early days as a precocious music critic. This early-’70s coming-of-age drama was a cinematic love-in.
This smart, tricky British neo film noir from director Mike Hodges and writer Paul Mayersberg mixed gambling, writing and larceny into a fresh criminal cocktail with a potent kick at the end.
Nick Park and Peter Lord’s remix of “The Great Escape”–with Claymation chickens, no less–lit up a bleak summer with its droll English wit and giddy imagination. A chick flick for all ages and, we suspect, for all time.
There’s nothing genteel about Terence Davies’s powerful and painful adaptation of Edith Wharton’s most savage novel. It charts the fall of Lily Bart (a haunting Gillian Anderson), undone by the malice of high society and her own conflicted desires. The movie rarely raises its voice, but you can hear it scream.
BEST ACTORS
Michael Douglas (‘Wonder Boys’)
John Cusack (‘High Fidelity’)
Ed Harris (‘Pollock’)
Geoffrey Rush (‘Quills’)
BEST ACTRESSES
Nathalie Baye (‘An Affair of Love’ and ‘Venus Beauty Institute’)
Julia Roberts (‘Erin Brockovich’)
Marcia Gay Harden (‘Pollock’)
Bjork (‘Dancer in the Dark’)
BEST SUPPORTING ACTORS
Aaron Eckhart (‘Erin Brockovich’)
Jeffrey Wright (‘Shaft’)
Joaquin Phoenix (‘The Yards,’ ‘Gladiator’ and ‘Quills’)
Willem Dafoe (‘Shadow of the Vampire’)
BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESSES
Elaine May (‘Small Time Crooks’)
Frances McDormand (‘Wonder Boys’)
Erika Christensen (‘Traffic’)
Julie Walters (‘Billy Elliot’)
