74. Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles - Hmm, I don't know ... it just didn't click for me.
73. A Knight's Tale - Amiable and unnecessary.
72. A Beautiful Mind - I admire Russell Crowe for trying hard. I'm disturbed that this is how Ron Howard imagines grad students behave around each other .
71. Tell Me Something - (Korea) This policier has some nice creepy touches, then the plot twists around itself so much that its bones are snapped, its muscles torn, and it drops to the ground as a pile of mush.
70. Planet of the Apes
69. Pearl Harbor
68. Someone Like You - Didn't need its "high" concept (Ashley Judd writes a Venus/Mars column with a particular model of gender relations). A regular movie about two people who are amused by their differences and then stumble into love would have been just fine.
67. Startup.com
66. Jurassic Park III - I saw this with no sound. I think that made it more suspenseful. A couple of the pterodactyl attacks are genuinely harrowing.
65. Blow - Subject of movie (and author of narrative) congratulates himself for liking his daughter.
64. Christmas in August - (Korea) Mellow movie about a nice meter maid and a nice photo shop guy who like each other.
63. From Hell
62. Hannibal
61. Attack the Gas Station - (Korea) Comedy in which four tough youths forcefully take command of a gas station, Breakfast-Club-style. Those in the audience who understood Korean thought it was hilarious.
60. Human Resources - (France) A young man starts as a management intern at the company where his father works on the factory floor. Stress ensues.
59. Code Unknown - (France)
58. The Devil's Backbone - (Spain)
57. Down from the Mountain - Pleasant concert performed by those who appear on the O Brother Where Art Thou soundtrack.
56. The Forsaken - Gen Y vampire flick. Go for Kerr Smith, but stay for Brendan Fehr.
55. Chopper - (Australia)
54. Heartbreakers - One's a hag, and the other one's a slag, but together they're magic. OK, no, Jennifer Love Hewitt sucks at playing sullen, but Sigourney Weaver is kind of ... wonderful. Then again, I saw it on a plane. I hear they pump extra oxygen into those things.
53. The Isle - (Korea) Men come to the lake to the fish. She rows them out to the little colored fishing huts which float thereon. She doesn't speak. Sometimes she does things with fishhooks.
52. The Score - A more effective piece of Norton porn than Rounders or Keeping the Faith.
51. Last Resort - (England)
50. Jin-Roh : The Wolf Brigade - (Japan) Anime. A near future of SWAT teams and organized resisters, fighting it out on the streets and in the sewers. A melancholy cop kills a young woman from the resistance and gets a second chance with her twin.
49. Shrek
48. Joint Security Area - (Korea) Tension in the Demilitarized Zone. One night, bullets fly. An investigation into what happened. Well-photographed.
47. 101 Reykjavik - (Iceland) An extremely appropriate milieu for a slacker flick. Victoria Abril has been desiccated.
46. In The Bedroom
45. Kandahar - (Iran & Afghanistan) A woman crosses the Iranian border to go to Kandahar to help her sister. She has American dollars and she benefits from the compassion of a couple English speakers she meets on the way. It might not be enough.
44. The Others
43. The Day I Became a Woman - (Iran) Three short movies. In the middle one, dozens of overdressed young women speed along on bicycles through a generally treeless and otherwise uninhabited park by the sea. Gears, spokes, chains and the wind. Then men come on horses to make things worse.
42. The Man Who Wasn't There
41. The Exhibited - (Denmark) In a many-roomed building in Copenhagen, Lars von Trier stages a play. Each actor, armed with a character but no script, is free to move from room to room. In each room shines a colored light. In New Mexico, a camera is aimed down at an ant colony. Grids of ground by the ant colony are assigned to rooms in Copenhagen. When an ant passes through a grid, the light in its associated Copenhagen room changes color. The actors are given instructions on the effect of each color on their character. Another Danish director decides to film the play.
40. Monster's Ball
39. Little Otik - (Czechland) A tree is fashioned into a baby. The treebaby is a monster. Impressively gross.
38. The Anniversary Party
37. Intimacy
36. Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back
35. Barking Dogs Never Bite - (Korea) Cute melancholy comedy set in an apartment complex and bathed in yellow. Sung Jae Lee is hot!
34. Legally Blonde
33. Gosford Park - Cadre of British thespians demonstrate their precision acting skills. Impressive as an air show.
32. Hedwig and the Angry Inch
31. Dead or Alive - (Japan) A tough-cop-fights-flavorful-gangsters movie from the man who brought you Audition, Takashi Miike. Kickass beginning. Potentially boring middle. Thoroughly kickass ending.
30. The Circle - (Iran) In the city, several women, who've already been through way too much shit, get delivered more shit.
29. Monsters, Inc.
28. The Eyes of the Spider - (Japan) One of many uncanny, graceful and oblique genre flicks directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa that were unfurled last year at the Screening Room. A man takes revenge for the wrongs done to his daughter, then hangs out with some kooky criminals.
27. Zoolander - That Hansel is so HOT! 26. Donnie Darko
25. Platform - (China) Troop of traveling young performers get Westernized and grow older. The rigor and patience you might expect from a mainland drama, combined with a tectonically solid fruitiness.
24. Audition - (Japan)
23. Moulin Rouge
22. The Low Down - (England) A rigorous and moving slacker drama starring Aidan Gillen (Buddy Boy, Queer as Folk).
21. Seance - (Japan) Another one by Kiyoshi Kurosawa. Apparently, a reworking of Seance on a Wet Afternoon. A psychic/waitress, whose grace and whose powers should be enough to build a good life with, draws some bad luck and makes a couple bad decisions, and thus all is fucked. Koji Yakusho (Shall We Dance, The Eel) plays her sound engineer husband.
20. A.I. - Freakin' parents ... once they're done being distant (William Hurt), and done being hostile (Frances O'Connor), and done treating us much shittier than our bratty brothers (Sam Robards), they take us out to the woods and leave us to die. I love my Mommy!
19. Amelie
18. Mysterious Object at Noon - (Thailand) Half of the movie is the narrative, beginning with a young tutor and her handicapped student, then shifting in form and direction, at the mercy of the changing cast of narrators who are the other half of the movie. Both halves are in nice, grainy black and white.
17. Tuvalu - (Europe) A decaying bathhouse in a waste of a town. What little dialogue there is, tends to be in a generalized Eurospeak. Denis Lavant gets to move a lot. If you've seen the last three minutes of Beau Travail, you'll know that this is a good thing.
16. Gohatto - (Japan) Roeper thought it was unswallowable that all these samurai were lusting after the hot new androgynous samurai-in-training. The only thing I found hard to believe was that they didn't seem to notice his much hotter buddy, Tadanobu Asano.
15. Memento Mori - (Korea) A fevered and mostly rigorous lesbian schoolgirl ghost story.
14. The Serpent's Path - (Japan) Kiyoshi Kurosawa takes the main actor and character from Eyes of the Spider, and plants him in an alternate creepy, violent milieu with a golf course, a crippled villainess, and a child math prodigy.
13. The Royal Tenenbaums
12. The Fellowship of the Ring - Wow. And they haven't even gotten yet to Morrrrrdorrrr.
11. Werckmeister Harmonies - (Hungary) Bela Tarr's follow-up to Satantango. Late, in the cold night, a young man is walking through the dingy streets of a nowhere town. An enormous truck rolls by. Powerful slumbering forces each open one eye. Things get worse.
10. Mulholland Drive - OK, Coco!
9. Charisma - (Japan) Another one by Kiyoshi Kurosawa. This time, there's an evil tree. Some want to uproot the tree. Others want to preserve it. Forces are marshalled. In a comfortable living room, in stockingfeet, a scientist takes notes on her experiments, while her young sister reads magazines.
8. The American Astronaut - A beautiful, campy black-and-white space musical.
7. In The Mood For Love - Her dresses, yes, but also, his ties!
6. Memento
5. Ghost World - Enid's indestructible grace and considerable powers should be enough to build a good life with, but with a little bad luck, and a couple bad decisions, all is fucked ... wait, I used this description already.
4. Cure - (Japan) This creepy Kiyoshi Kurosawa policier may feature the laziest villain there ever was. Nice use of sweaters and beaches.
3. The Heart of the World - Guy Maddin's six minutes of white-hot CINEMA!
2. Eureka - (Japan) Cicadas click. A bus is hijacked. Bus driver Koji Yakusho survives. So do some other people. More stuff happens. The sound editing is astonishing.
1. Waking Life - A perfect technique to snuff out the churlish demands of narrative. And beautiful, too. Float in the white globule of human existence for a while.
