Critics Lists: Top Ten Films Of The Year (2003)

[DudeAsInCool]

This thread is devoted to top ten lists for film. What was your favorite film this year? What do you want to see...?

Time Magazine's Richard Corliss's Top Picks for 2003

NEW LINE

1) L O R D   O F   T H E   R I N G S :  

T H E   R E T U R N   O F   T H E   K I N G

This is as much a life achievement award — and an expression of gratitude for Peter Jackson's seven-year act of exemplary devotion to his quest — as a declaration that no one made a better movie this year. The New York Film Critics Circle suggested as much when it gave LOTR: ROTK the Best Film prize and no others — not direction or screenplay or cinematography or acting. Perhaps the reviewers were baffled about categories. Gollum, for example: Did Andy Serkis, who enacted the creature's movements, create that brilliant portrait of humanity enslimed by greed? Or was he merely the model for the computer wizards who painted over it? The glory of these three Rings is that they can't be compartmentalized into crafts, or even individual films. They are one grand, serious, mature epic — the finest 9 hour, 18 minute movie ever made — that towers over the competition like Gandalf over the Hobbits.

Review: Seven Holiday Treats (Dec. 15, 2003)

2) ( T I E )   F I N D I N G   N E M O   A N D

L E S   T R I P L E T T E S   D E   B E L L E V I L L E

Each year we ask, "Why do animated movies have so much more craft, wit and heart than live-action films?" This year we ask it twice. The Pixar pixies always fashion funny, poignant stories to match their gorgeous computer images, and in Finding Nemo they hit the jackpot with a lost-child saga told from the searching father's point of view — a serene marine enchantment. That it became the all-time top-grossing animated feature surprised no one. Triplettes, which has earned less than a thousandth of Nemo's U.S. total, is no less beguiling: the delightful, nearly wordless story of an elderly woman's selfless intrigues with her bicycling grandson, some kidnapping mafiosi and three crazy chanteuses. It proves that, no matter what the bosses at Disney and DreamWorks think, traditional animation ain't dead yet.

Nemo Review (May 26, 2003)

Triplettes Review (Nov. 17, 2003)

3) M A S T E R   A N D   C O M M A N D E R

Come back with us to the thrilling days of yesteryear, when movies moved with vigor and purpose, and movie men didn't need the goad of revenge to perform spectacular deeds. Russell Crowe makes for a stalwart Captain Jack Aubrey, but the entire crew of the H.M.S. Surprise is the film's collective hero. Swift, burly, cunning and utterly unfacetious, Master and Commander is the adventure movie of the new millennium.

Profile: The Bold Man and the Sea (Nov. 10, 2003)

4) C I T Y   O F   G O D

"I smoke and snort," boasts one tyro terrorist. "I've killed and robbed. I'm a man." Rarely have the seductive and destructive aspects of machismo been so vividly anatomized as in this adaptation of Paulo Lins' novel about the young (often pre-teen) gangs of the Rio slum called City of God. The directors not only shepherd a huge cast of amateur actors through their remorseless paces but create a high-speed, phantasmagorical cinematic style that never lets up for two hours. The film is disturbing and enthralling — a trip to hell that gives the passengers a great ride.

Review: Gangs of Rio de Janeiro (Jan. 20, 2003)

5) C O L D   M O U N T A I N

Jude Law and Nicole Kidman make a glamorous Tarheel and spinster in this pulsating, rapturous picturizing of the Charles Frazier novel. Director Anthony Minghella splendidly details a notorious Civil War battle, but his feelings about military conflict are clear from the prayer of a young woman (Natalie Portman) who has lost her soldier-husband: "If I had my way, they'd take metal altogether out of the world. Every blade. Every gun." Cold Mountain is the story of hearts stronger than cold steel, and a love that wants to conquer war.

Review: O Lover, Where Art Thou? (Dec. 22, 2003)

6) A L L   T H E   R E A L   G I R L S

David Gordon Green is the Rimbaud of the Sundance set: poetic and perceptive in matters of the heart, fastidious in his visual compositions, attentive to the rhythms of life in real-life small towns that are not subject to the demands of movie melodrama. If that makes All the Real Girls sound like a minimalist bore, then I've criminally undersold the film. Its tale of a ladies' man and a precocious virgin — who, as they gently collide, chart new paths for themselves and each other — makes for a sweet night at the movies. It just happens to be about, not the impossible heroes on the screen, but the quiet couple sitting behind you, engrossed in their own fragile world.

7) K I L L   B I L L ,   V O L .   1

As the world knows, Quentin Tarantino used to work in a Manhattan Beach video store; this is his homage to all the movies that warped his fragile little mind: Hong Kong martial-arts epics and the yakuza sagas of Japan; Italian gialli and Truffaut's The Bride Wore Black. This bride (Uma Thurman) believes that, if revenge is a dish best served cold, she'll gorge on it at an all-you-can-eat sushi bar. Like an Iron Chef, she dices and slices her husband's killers, and anyone who works for them, in scenes of balletic carnography. And she's not nearly finished: Vol. 2 comes out in February. Your stomach should have settled by then.

Review: And Now, Pulp Friction (Oct. 20, 2003)

8) T H E   F O G   O F   W A R

If America is going to rule the world, its leaders should pay attention to the observations of Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson and architect of U.S. Vietnam policy. Probed by expert documentarian Errol Morris, McNamara exposes the myopia in the military and the ethical strategy of powerful men. Bomb Japan to help win World War II? How many will die? Don't ask. (Maybe 500,000.) Pursue the Viet Cong through those verdant jungles, at the cost of 58,214 American lives and how many Vietnamese? Don't tell. (Three million.) McNamara recalls that Curtis LeMay, his boss in the Asian theater, wondered aloud if the winning side could be charged with war crimes, then added, "Maybe we should be." The Fog of War is a demonstration of how ignorant smart men can be.

Review: Seven Holiday Treats (Dec. 15, 2003)

9) D I V I N E   I N T E R V E N T I O N

A helium-filled balloon with Yasser Arafat's face on it floats above a Palestinian checkpoint, and Israeli soldiers debate whether to shoot it down. Five soldiers confront a Palestinian woman reincarnated as a ninja superfighter who levitates, whirls and wins the battle. This is ethnic misery reimagined as puckish fantasy and, almost by default, the best film ever made in Palestine. Elia Suleimann recently won a battle of his own: the Motion Picture Academy, which had rejected Divine Intervention last year (on the grounds that Palestine is not a nation), changed its mind. Suleimann's deliciously dry comedy is now eligible for Best Foreign-Language Film. Review: Ninja Babe in Jerusalem (Feb. 10, 2003)

10) P I R A T E S   O F   T H E   C A R I B B E A N

This one shivered my timbers: a lavishly entertaining movie that's based on the Disney theme park's stodgiest ride, and directed by a fellow (Gore Verbinski) whose four previous projects (Mouse Hunt, The Mexican, The Time Machine and The Ring) offered little hope for a lovely evening. It is, though: an original work in an antique mood, with daredevil plot twists (courtesy of screenwriters Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio) and a gargantuanly mannered performance by Johnny Depp. Snarling and flouncing and decadently attired, Depp is the fop of war. Come to think of it, most of the titles on this list are war movies. Maybe 2003 was the year that cinema stumbled into the international zeitgeist and found that war may be hell, but for moviemakers it's heaven.

Worst Film of the Year:

Profile: A British Star in Full Bloom (Aug. 3, 2003)

M O N A   L I S A   S M I L E

To judge from this appallingly reductive weepie, Wellesley College in 1953 was more close-minded than Selma, Alabama. The posh young ladies looked into their futures and saw not Marie Curie or Clare Boothe Luce or Ivy Baker Priest — she was Eisenhower's Secretary of the Treasury at the time — but Generic Wife of Prominent Gent. This canard is a libel on the millions of postwar middle-class working women (including my mother and her sisters, all teachers) who had some aspirations to do good and do well. The movie, with Julia Roberts as a progressive teacher corralling her own Dead Artists Society, also lies about the place in '50s American culture of Jackson Pollock, whose work shocks some students and faculty when Roberts shows it to them. (Pollock had been an American avant-icon at least since 1949, when LIFE magazine ran a famous story with the headline "Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?") But Mona Lisa Smile is awful for so many reasons beyond its historical irresponsibility. It reduces all supporting characters to stereotypes (this one a society bitch, that one a neurotic Jew, the third a self-deluding nerd). And, like Erin Brockovich, it tries to establish the Julia Roberts character as a saint by painting everyone else as a knave, a fool or a weakling. That's lazy moviemaking that shows a contempt for its audience's intelligence. Other than that, I liked it.

[DudeAsInCool]

I liked Lord of the Rings 3, but I cant say it was the finest Trilogy ever made. For that I'd go to Godfather 1 and 2 (we can forget about the third one lol).

Of this list, City of Gold is the one I want to see...

[method77]

yeah Godfather IS the best trilogy...eer... semi-trilogy ever made :) but since you want this years best films I'd say Dogville, Kill Bill and Lord of the Rings. Confessions of a Dangerous Mind was pretty good also. I'd vote for Politiki Kouzina (greek) but you probably don't know it. Damn good film and damn good soundtrack and from what I hear it might be nominated for best foreign movie in the Oscars

Edited December 22, 2003 by method77

[DudeAsInCool]

yeah Godfather IS the best trilogy...eer... semi-trilogy ever made :) but since you want this years best films I'd say Dogville, Kill Bill and Lord of the Rings. Confessions of a Dangerous Mind was pretty good also. I'd vote for Politiki Kouzina (greek) but you probably don't know it. Damn good film and damn good soundtrack and from what I hear it might be nominated for best foreign movie in the Oscars

M77: I'd vote for Politiki Kouzina (greek) but you probably don't know it.

I have just added it to my list. A friend of mine produced Confessions--various versions were around for years. Chuck Barris used to hang out at UCLA when I was there and try to pick up girls :)

[method77]

have you seen Dogville dude? Directed by Lars Von Trier. He made Dancer in the Dark (Bjork-best leading actress in Cannes)

[Potato]

Haven't seen LOTR yet, but I will......

my list would include finding nemo, lost in translation, american splendor, mystic river.... and i honestly can't think of many more that stood out to me. Oh. Kill Bill. otherwise i saw a lot of crap movies like the new texas chainsaw movie... or the new matrix movie... bleh.

please excuse my lack of punctuation. it is currently dark in my room and i dont have glasses or contacts so i can hardly see what i'm doing.

[DudeAsInCool]

have you seen Dogville dude? Directed by Lars Von Trier. He made Dancer in the Dark (Bjork-best leading actress in Cannes)

Nah. Should have. But I did see his first film and was pretty impressed. Not sure if I buy all his rules for filmmaking, but I do think he's talented... But I will add it to the list :D

[Kooperman]

The most enjoyable film I saw all year was Something's Gotta Give, starring Diane Keaton ( Oscar nominee for sure) and the brilliant Jack Nicholson. Veteran performers gave tremendous life to this one.....can't wait to own the DVD.

[DudeAsInCool]

Entertainment Weekly's Top !0

King of the Movies

Entertainment Weekly lists its faves for 2003.

By Josh Levin

Updated Tuesday, Dec. 23, 2003, at 2:47 PM PT

Entertainment Weekly, Dec. 26 and Jan. 2

Even more kudos for Lord of the Rings: EW names the trilogy's cast and crew "entertainers of the year," and Lisa Schwarzbaum ranks The Return of the King No. 1 on her list of top 10 movies. Owen Gleiberman, though, puts American Splendor, "the most boisterous, tender, and crazily exquisite movie of the year," at the top of his. The magazine's other favorites from 2003: Will Ferrell ("How would I rate my happiness? Gleeful excitement—finished off with a slow wetting of my pants"); The Looney Tunes Golden Collection DVD; Brit-com The Office; the White Stripes' Elephant; and Richard Price's novel Samaritan.

[ASUmusicMAN]

Yeah Kill Bill...definitely the movie i most enjoyed this year

[DudeAsInCool]

David Edelstein/Slate's Top Flicks of the 2003

The 34 Best Movies of 2003

Child spellers, hobbits, and the year in cinema.

By David Edelstein

Posted Wednesday, Dec. 31, 2003, at 12:20 PM PT

This is actually the prelude to Slate's annual "Movie Club," which will formally commence Monday when we return in our new and improved 2004 incarnations (and our hangovers have cleared). Roger Ebert can't participate this year, and we'll miss him a lot, but I'll be happy to welcome, for the first time, the Los Angeles Times critic and columnist Manohla Dargis, who is far more entertaining on the greatness of In the Cut than anything in that grating movie. I'm also excited to welcome back Sarah Kerr (of Vogue), A.O. Scott (of the New York Times), and J. Hoberman (of the Village Voice)—who has an important book out called The Dream Life, which A.O. and I will be discussing in a future Slate "Book Club." (I mention this in advance to explain why J. will probably be more patient with us this year.) He'll have one more constraint: filing while on jury duty. (Note to defense attorneys: Don't impose too artificial a narrative. The more intriguingly nonlinear your explanations, the more he's likely to argue for acquittal.)

Meanwhile: Is there any activity more onanistic for a critic than compiling the year-end 10-best list? True, it's a service to readers who want a handy checklist. But the number 10 means nothing: As the late Stephen Jay Gould pointed out at the turn of the millennium, it has no correlative in nature. And a critic's naked opinion (thumbs up or thumbs down) is the least interesting thing about him or her. You'll learn much more from a lively writer you think is nuts (c.f., Manohla on In the Cut or Elvis Mitchell on the execrable 21 Grams) than from the 10-best list of someone with whom you agree.

But my colleagues and I do this every year because it's fun and makes us feel important. We play high-schoolish games with each other: "You guess my list, and I'll guess yours." We catch up on movies we should have seen nine months earlier. We give our lists to publicists and to columnists—there are more and more of them, it seems—who care less about individual critical voices than about statistics and consensus. We vote for our little awards and hold our breath for the Oscar nominations, which we'll invariably find dumb.

There were too many good movies this year for me to do a proper 10-best list—and not enough great ones. What I mean is, there isn't that much difference between my ninth-favorite movie and my 20th, and any numerical distinction is pretty much whimsical. That's why I've done four 10-best lists for sundry newspaper, Internet, and radio outlets, and no two are the same. And it's why I'm adding a second 10-best list here, because it somehow seems sexier in this context to give movies numbers than to bunch them together on a runners-up list. (I also have a runners-up list, bringing the total to 34.)

1. Spellbound

2. Bus 174

3. Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King

4. In America

5. The Triplets of Belleville

6. Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World

7. The Son

8. The Company

9. Kill Bill, Vol. 1

10. The Dancer Upstairs

That's my list as of Dec. 31, 2003. But any of the movies below could have been there (and, at times, have been):

1. School of Rock

2. Lost in Translation

3. Finding Nemo

4. Capturing the Friedmans

5. The Station Agent

6. Bad Santa

7. The Magdalene Sisters

8. American Splendor

9. The Man Without a Past

10. Lawless Heart

Mystic RiverLet me also mention The Secret Lives of Dentists, Winged Migration, Mystic River, Balseros, The Fog of War, Stuck on You, Elephant, Looney Tunes: Back in Action, Duplex, What Alice Found, Holes, Thirteen, Raising Victor Vargas, and X2. I regret that I haven't yet seen the documentary To Be and To Have, but I'll try to before next week. Also, had it been released this year, my 10-best list might have included Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer, directed by Nick Broomfield and Joan Churchill. It opens the second week in January and should be seen in conjunction with its inferior fictional counterpart, Monster.

It's interesting that my favorite films were documentaries. They had more complex drama, more comedy, more tragedy. But mostly they had more entertainment value.

SpellboundI didn't enjoy a movie this year more than Jeff Blitz's Spellbound. It has everything you want in a movie except sex: killer suspense, heartbreak, history, sociology, and a series of indelible portraits of kids and their parents. On its most basic level, it documents the 1999 nerd Olympics: 9 million nationwide spelling-bee contestants reduced to 249 finalists reduced to one winner. But the contest turns out to have a deeper resonance than if the sport had been merely physical: Among other things, mastery of the English language becomes a means of affirming one's Americanness. The first half introduces the eight protagonists singly in their hometowns. The second half is the bee itself, in Washington, D.C., where Blitz shows them devastatingly knocked off, one by one. There is enormous skill here, but also accidents that seem blessed. I haven't seen anything this year as astonishing as the moment when the Indian-American Neil, his head overstuffed with Latin, French, Spanish, and German (thanks to tutors hired by his fiercely ambitious businessman father), registers nothing but bewilderment when asked to spell "Darjeeling."

I only recently saw the Brazilian documentary Bus 174 and apologize to Slate readers for not having reviewed it in this space. (Fortunately, others, among them A.O., have thumped the tub loud and hard.) There is no more devastating tragedy on our screens right now than this story of a stoned former street kid (whose pregnant mother was murdered before his eyes when he was 5) who takes hostages on a city bus—for no other reason, it seems, than to say, "I exist!" What he does to the people on that bus is horrifying, but what has been (and will be) done to him is much crueler. Bus 174 and Aileen are not bleeding-heart-liberal works: They don't seek to exonerate their protagonists entirely. But they do diagram and illuminate the ways in which inhumanity breeds more inhumanity. (Bus 174 also drives home the emptiness of City of God, another Brazilian movie about poverty and crime: this year's exercise in Trainspotting flash.)

The third hugely impressive documentary this year was Andrew Jarecki's Capturing the Friedmans, which is tantalizing in its ambiguities and in the way—not fully explored, admittedly—that the filmmaker implicates the audience: Do we even have the right to watch this persecuted family's private videos and pass judgment on these people? The DVD, which comes out next month, contains more interviews, as well as a shouting match between the family and local prosecutors at the movie's Great Neck, N.Y., premiere.

Moving on to fictional works: All hail Peter Jackson! I don't know much about Tolkien, but I know great filmmaking. Return of the King begins with a tiny worm being scrutinized by Smeagol (Andy Serkis), who will de-evolve into Gollum. It then goes on to show us hundreds of thousands of Orcs and giant trolls and winged dragons and eight-story elephants. And it has everything in between: From little worms to colossal battlefields, you never lose the human scale, the human pulse. Even with 50 special effects in a shot, the movie feels as alive as any hand-held documentary.

My movie event of the year was watching all three Rings films (the first two in extended cuts) back to back to back at the Loews 42nd Street E-walk on Dec. 16. I was lucky to be there, beside people who'd stood in line for as long as 16 hours to buy tickets and then again for six hours to get good seats. The atmosphere was electric, and the movies looked better this way, flowing easily into one another. Before the third movie started, three hobbits and Gollum showed up to pay tribute to these fans: Frodo kept saying "F---in' A!" and was very sweet in his enthusiasm, and Gollum sang a verse of "My Way" ("And now, the end is near …"). Somewhere in the last hour of our 14-hour marathon (including intermissions), two outsiders wandered into the theater, looked for seats, and sat down on the stairs next to me. They weren't being obnoxious, but I wanted to kill them anyway: They hadn't been on this odyssey with us and were violating a sacred space. When it was all over, many people were crying, and even though it was 1:30 a.m., a lot of my fellow geeks lingered in the theater and on the sidewalk outside.

I was writing a story on all this for the New York Times and was lucky enough to talk to a young woman named Miriam Kriss, who put down her Tolkien book long enough to explain that she was here in tribute to Jackson, "a fan who understood." Then she delivered a rather stunning testament to the fan aesthetic. "The problem with the last George Lucas Star Wars movies is that he's not a fan of his own work," she told me. "You can't be if it's your work. He doesn't understand anymore why we loved Star Wars; he just sits and stares at special effects on his computers. I'd rather see Star Wars movies by people who grew up with Star Wars. A fan would get it."

Kill Bill, Vol. 1I'm not sure I buy as a general rule the idea that fans have more insight than artists who create the work in the first place. But in the case of Star Wars, who can contradict her? And the fan aesthetic has another remarkable testimonial in Kill Bill, Vol. 1. The movie elicited tut-tut reviews from squeamish moralists like David Denby; and, as someone with a hypersensitivity to the romanticizing of vigilantism, I'd have been happy to join in if I hadn't had so great a time. Kill Bill is about nothing except Quentin Tarantino's worship of the violent '60s and '70s films that got him through puberty, but it's too playful in form, too artfully scrambled in syntax, too visually resourceful, too beautiful to resemble the grind-house movies that inspired it. It made me feel the way I sometimes do at a Mark Morris dance piece that reshuffles familiar moves into something new and funny and unexpectedly lyrical. And it literally becomes a dance movie in the final battle, when the lights go out and Uma Thurman and a horde of assassins are suddenly blue silhouettes gyrating against a grid: like An American in Paris with arterial spray.

There is, of course, a real dance picture on my list, and a fabulous one: Robert Altman's The Company. To be honest, I found the non-narrative narrative frustrating in spots and the non-ending ending downright annoying: This is a weird hybrid between an Altman film and a Fred Wiseman vérité documentary. But I liked the atmosphere and loved the ballet. I loved watching Altman, who seems to have the loosest frame in cinema (everything's off-center and in flux and babbling and indirect), triumphantly shoot a form in which every muscle is choreographed. His framing feels just as uninsistent, and yet his camera is always in just the right place to show off these dancers' bodies. Altman was a gun-for-hire on The Company (it's Neve Campbell's project, and she's exciting to watch), but my colleague Charles Taylor of Salon has pointed out that the movie is held together by the director's connection to these dancers through his sense of his own mortality. Their bodies are powerful yet fragile: Every time they land, something could snap—and end their careers. We should cherish Altman, my favorite living director, while we have him.

Two of my other favorites are drawn, not staged. The makers of Finding Nemo must have become intoxicated by their undersea (and aquarium) settings and immersed themselves (so to speak) in the minutiae: You can sense that every frame contains hundreds of decisions about light and color and movement—and, more to the point, they're all inspired decisions! But the great feat of animation is Sylvain Chomet's Triplets of Belleville. It's the story of a grandma whose boy is kidnapped from the Tour de France by French-wine swilling gangsters and taken to a distant metropolis across the ocean, and how she and her train-loving dog fall in with three ancient frog-slurping sisters who used to be nightclub chanteuses—and still are, in a bizarre way. Why is this oddity so powerful? Chomet makes you see the solidity and ephemerality of world at the same instant: the huge, squared calves on the skeletal bicyclists; the sloping shoulders and bony digits—and the life force—of the triplets; the tiny whiskers above the lip of the unflappable grandma. The movie is a Deco hallucination of '20s nightclubs and gangsters and ocean liners—and so peculiarly visceral in its Surrealism that it has the impact of David Lynch at the top of his form.

My choice for directorial debut of the year is John Malkovich, for The Dancer Upstairs, the story of a Central American policeman (the magnificent Javier Bardem) who has to navigate between the brutal left and right wings of his ungovernable country—and his own simmering attraction to his daughter's enigmatic dance instructor. There are times when Malkovich doesn't seem to be telling the story so much as brooding on it; but just when you've resigned yourself to the deliberate pacing, there's an act of brutality so fast and so shocking that you can barely take it in. Malkovich is also brilliant at capturing the feel of a city that's outwardly functioning but palpably on the brink of breaking down. Malkovich is a real movie director: There's more in that weird head than even Charlie Kaufman could have dreamed.

I don't have space (or, rather, Slate doesn't have the bandwidth) to go into depth on the rest of my picks: the happily domesticated gonzo of School of Rock and its hard-R-rated counterpart, Bad Santa (which Sarah Kerr probably hated, as she seems to hate all my more scatological fancies); the gorgeous storytelling of Peter Weir's Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World—a great popcorn adventure, inexplicably (and alarmingly) described as some kind of grown-up art movie by Hollywood executives; Jim Sheridan's celebration of family In America, a fairy tale astride an abyss; and Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's The Son, an exercise in sensory deprivation that heightens the senses we have left—and especially heightens our sense of empathy.

The Son is something of an anti-vigilante picture, and—Kill Bill notwithstanding—I'm heartened by the trend: by Clint Eastwood's melancholy (but maybe overinflated) Mystic River, which ends with an act of misplaced revenge, and by House of Sand and Fog, which shows the tragic consequences of vengeance when the people are neither entirely good nor entirely bad, and when the vigilante is (as any vigilante in the real world will be) unstable and non-omniscient.

Cold MountainI was also heartened by another only-half-successful work, Cold Mountain, which departs from the recent spate of films in which war is ennobling. The film would have been better if it had stayed truer to Charles Frazier's novel, which my wife, Rachel, points out has a theme not dissimilar from last year's The Pianist: the human cost of survival. The novel's Inman is more resigned to killing than the protagonist of the movie, who is something of a chivalric bystander. That's more palatable to mainstream audiences, I guess, but it dilutes the power of the original vision.

It's also useful that this year of war ended with a documentary—Erroll Morris' The Fog of War—that explores the loss of rationalism and moral clarity when humans use weapons of mass destruction on one another.

Let me also put in a word for A. Dean Bell's What Alice Found, a micro-budget indie about a fugitive young woman (Emily Grace) who hitches a ride with an older couple (Judith Ivey and Bill Raymond) in an RV when her car breaks down. The film is patchy and has one perplexing twist, but it has a powerfully humanist vision of people we might normally regard as sordid, and it has haunted me since I saw it. Also, Judith Ivey gives one of my favorite female performances of the year.

Which brings me to my other favorites, in no particular order: Sean Penn and Kevin Bacon in Mystic River, Bill Murray expanding (and deepening) his comic persona in Lost in Translation, and Jack Black grandstanding gloriously in School of Rock. I wrote in Slate that Alec Baldwin's desperate turn in The Cat in the Hat suggested that, as an actor, he was all washed up; then I saw his best performance ever in The Cooler: a transfixing and unpredictable blend of warm and cold, soft and hard, romantic and sadistic. I loved Hope Davis as the bottled-up wife in The Secret Lives of Dentists and as the goddess of all geeks in American Splendor, as well as Patricia Clarkson (could she be in every movie?) in The Station Agent (along with wonderful turns by Peter Dinklage and Bobby Cannavale) and the overrated Pieces of April.

Shattered GlassMore wonders: the Bolger sisters in In America, Peter Sarsgaard in Shattered Glass, Nick Nolte in The Good Thief, Diane Keaton in Something's Gotta Give, Frances McDormand in Laurel Canyon, Catherine O'Hara in A Mighty Wind, Charlize Theron in Monster, Steve Martin in the perplexingly rejected Looney Tunes: Back in Action, Miranda Richardson in Spider, Holly Hunter and Evan Rachel Wood in Thirteen, and Chiwetel Ejiofor in Dirty Pretty Things. A special bouquet to Bill Nighy for his sepulchral charm in the English comedies Lawless Heart and Love Actually and as a convincing lord of the undead in Underworld.

The movies I loathed most: The Cat in the Hat, whose makers should be paraded nude down the street and spat on, and 21 Grams, with its pretentious pretzeled syntax and use of the death of children like an art-house striptease. Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle was not just horrendous, it made me ashamed for having praised the campy charm of the first and encouraging those idiots. If you had told me a year ago that the bummer of 2003 would be the two Matrix sequels, I'd have wanted to kill you. People wanted to kill me for panning them.

My Field of Dead Poets Award is given in honor of two movies released within weeks of each other in 1989. In Field of Dreams, audiences were moved by the guilt of a man who'd rejected his baseball-playing dad along with all the other patriarchal values demonized by the counterculture, and they were touched when he created a field for ghosts to come and play ball. A couple of weeks later, Dead Poets Society made the same mass audience weep for boys driven to despair and suicide by unyielding '50s patriarchs—the very ones that Field of Dreams had tearily welcomed back. One could argue that anyone who applauded both movies in the space of those few days was embracing a sophisticated, dialectical view of the world. Maybe. I would argue that the fans were by and large unconscious of that dialectic and liked both movies because they made them cry.

The Last SamuraiIn that spirit, I give this year's award to The Last Samurai, in which remorseful Native American killer Tom Cruise joins forces with another mystical tribe, the samurai, against the genocidal American capitalist conglomerate that wants to violate a pristine religious culture. The movie celebrates a warlord who would rather die (and sacrifice thousands of his followers) than remove his sword at a conference. What I find interesting is that the hero was cheered by people who in the real world would want to see him executed for treason—just like the poor Marin County sap who got caught with the Taliban. (I also didn't understand Ed Zwick's liberalism in Glory, in which African-Americans celebrated their right to die on the battlefield—not so long after a war in Vietnam in which they got stuck on the front lines while the privileged stayed home.)

Folks, movies can whip you up to root for anything.

To my readers: Let me know if there's anything you want the Movie Club to address.

To my Movie Clubbers: I showed you mine; you show me yours.

To everyone: Have a safe New Year. See you Jan. 5, 2004, in the Movie Club.

[Shawn]

I watch in the neighborhood of 300 movies a year.

Sadly, I haven't seen the last films of the trilogy works - ROTK & Revolutions. Nor have I seen Kill Bill, but after this thread I suppose I'll have to endeavor to see it.

I wait until DVDs come out so I can watch them on my home system. We simply payed too much for it to turn around and go to the theater. LOL.

My top 10 of the year in no order

Die Another Day

Matrix Reloaded

Sum of all Fears

Finding Nemo

The Italian Job

Road to Perdition

28 Days later

The Ring

Tomb Raider 2 - Cradle of life

X2 X-men United

[DudeAsInCool]

I used to live in the theater, but I've been writing all year--maybe you guys will see my movies in 2005! Re: Your list, I liked The Ring--pretty impressive stylistically. Just saw Cold Mt, which I liked quite a bit; I don't understand why the critics are so hard on it. Also, thought the last LOTH edition was pretty good, despite its multiple endings, and overemotional interplay--I did not like the first film, didnt even bother to see the second one. I tend to be pretty picky--the year before the only film I thought was interesting was Y Tu Mama Tambien--if you havent seen it, rent it.

[Shawn]

I used to live in the theater, but I've been writing all year--maybe you guys will see my movies in 2005!

I think I speak for everyone when I say that if you're getting a screenplay onto the big screen, we ALL expect cameos.

[HolyMoly]

Worst Film of the Year: M O N A L I S A S M I L E

Hmm ... I didn't think anything could beat out "Gigli" in that category.

BTW, my favorite trilogy was Star Treks II, III, and IV ... which were, after all, back-to-back adventures star-date-wise. I have all three films on VHS and, using my Dazzle capture device, merged them all into one continuous film - burned to VCDs.

[DudeAsInCool]

BTW, my favorite trilogy was Star Treks II, III, and IV ... which were, after all, back-to-back adventures star-date-wise.  I have all three films on VHS and, using my Dazzle capture device, merged them all into one continuous film - burned to VCDs.

I'm friends with Harve Bennett, the writer producer of 2,3, 4. I think the StarTrek series went down hill after that. The best Trilogy is The Godfather, Parts1 and 2--there are really two parts to Godfather 2 (past and present day), so I count that as a Trilogy (3 isnt worth counting).

[HolyMoly]

I'm friends with Harve Bennett, the writer producer of 2,3, 4.  I think the StarTrek series went down hill after that. The best Trilogy is The Godfather, Parts1 and 2--there are really two parts to Godfather 2 (past and present day), so I count that as a Trilogy (3 isnt worth counting).

I'm a "purist" (grin). If it ain't 3 movies, it ain't a Trilogy. But I must admit to liking the Godfather Epic (I and II). Did you know that back in 1982, they actually took both movies and released a "chronological" Godfather (a 2-VHS tape set)? It was on video shelves for a year or so ... then got yanked when III came out. I'd love to see that come out on DVD but am certain it never will. It included a number of scenes that were "cut" from I and II that explained quite a bit. For example, the scene where Clemenza takes Michael to his friend, the gunsmith ... where he meets, for the very first time, a very young Hyman Roth. All II revealed was that Hyman Roth was a business partner to Vito years earlier. But in fact, the name "Hyman Roth" was a name given to him by Vito because his real name sounded too Jewish (grin) ... and that he was then part of the "familia," not just a partner. In II, the mood indicated Michael at war with a mere business partner of his father. But in the chronological version, the mood indicated Michael was at war with a member of the "family" ... not just business, but an "infamnia" (an unspeakable betrayal). That hightened the tension much more than II did.

P.S. I have I and II on tape. But my local Movie Madness rental store has the chronological 2-tape set. I rented it once and "Xeroxed" it for VCD purposes. But, the tapes are 22 years old and show it (sigh) ... and the VCDs are that much worse for wear (double sigh).

[DudeAsInCool]

NY Times Critics 2003 Wrapup

By A. O. SCOTT

Published: December 28, 2003

It'S time for critics to stop complaining.

I mean this, first of all, in a narrow, calendar-bound sense. It's late December, the season of top 10 lists and awards sweepstakes, during which even the grinchiest and grouchiest reviewers are compelled, by tradition and their editors, to celebrate the glories of the year and, for the most part, to forget about its many disappointments. But the agony of winnowing down the year's achievements to 10 — or 11 or 17 or 30 — should give some of us pause the next time we begin to whine about the sorry state of the culture.

In the case of movies, it's true, 2003 gave us a lot to gripe about — overblown action pictures, witless sequels, pointless remakes, misbegotten literary adaptations, mopey little art films shot in headache-inducing digital video — but these failures reveal less about the state of cinema than about the fate of most creative endeavors, which is to land in the fat, mediocre middle of the artistic bell curve.

To look at the three top 10 film lists displayed in this section — and at the dozens more that sprout from nearly every printed publication and Web site in the land — is to be struck by the sheer variety and vitality of the movies, which, according to some historians, marked their centenary as a narrative art form this year. The number of good motion pictures released this year is less impressive — and harder to agree on — than their diversity. This makes any kind of authoritative summary — always a dubious exercise, if also, for some of us, an obligatory one — especially treacherous. Any generalization seems immediately to generate its opposite, making 2003 the year of "Yes, but."

Couldn't you say that about any year? Yes, but consider the following. It was a year of dreadful, dispiriting sequels, from the unraveling of "The Matrix" trilogy to the uninspired rehashes of "Charlie's Angels" and "Legally Blonde." Yes, but it was also the year in which "X-Men 2" surpassed its clumsy first chapter, and in which "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King" triumphantly surpassed every other recent attempt at franchise filmmaking. Speaking of which, it seems that large-scale, big-budget filmmaking — the kind Hollywood likes to call "epic" — reclaimed some of its traditional vigor and ambition, as well as its claim on the attention of critics and mass audiences alike. Some of the best movies of the year — "Return of the King," "Pirates of the Caribbean," "Master and Commander," "Finding Nemo" — were also among the most expensive and the most popular. Others that did not make the Times critics' lists — "Cold Mountain" and "The Last Samurai," for example — were nonetheless part of an industry-wide attempt to revive old-fashioned Hollywood pomp, sweep and grandeur (and also, in some cases, to take back the Oscars from the art house upstarts in the specialty divisions of the major studios).

Yes, but it was also a year full of wonderful small movies — defined less by their low budgets than by the exquisite intimacy of their storytelling. If Sofia Coppola's "Lost in Translation" was, in essence, a short story with two characters in a single setting, then it was a story told with the sophistication and dexterity of a pop culture-savvy Henry James. There was also the quiet, compassionate precision of Tom McCarthy's "Station Agent" and the meticulous psychological drama of Billy Ray's "Shattered Glass," movies with a cast of several whose modesty brought them close to perfection. And audiences, more than in past years, seemed to respond as much to their whispers as to the big noises of the blockbusters.

More than in past years, movies big and small — from "Mystic River" to "House of Sand and Fog," from "Capturing the Friedmans" to "The Human Stain" — seemed to assume an audience with a high tolerance for misery, as Hollywood overcame its historic allergy to the downbeat. A month into its theatrical release, Danny's Boyle's apocalyptic "28 Days Later" was given an alternative ending, for viewers who found the sort-of-happy original conclusion too uplifting for their tastes. It was, in short, a very good year for death, disease and family tragedy, perhaps because the grief and shock of 9/11 have at last begun to find widespread cultural expression.

But then again (to vary the formula a little), many of the year's best performances were in comic roles: Jamie Lee Curtis in "Freaky Friday" (a notable exception, like "The Italian Job," to the bad remake rule); Bill Murray in "Lost in Translation"; Ellen DeGeneres in "Nemo"; Johnny Depp in "Pirates"; Billy Bob Thornton in "Bad Santa" and everyone with a line of dialogue or a second of screen time in "A Mighty Wind."

And yes, we should not forget the staggering array of documentaries, which could easily have filled a list of their own, as they offered their share of tragedy ("Friedmans," "Bus 174"), excitement ("Spellbound," "Winged Migration") and wrenching ambiguity ("The Fog of War," "My Architect.") Though if it was a great year for documentaries, it was also a very good year for cartoons ("Nemo," "The Triplets of Belleville") and even for movies that appeared to be both documentaries and cartoons, a category that might include "American Splendor" and Satoshi Kon's sublime, little-seen "Millennium Actress."

In the faces of such paradoxical riches, the only proper response is gratitude, and perhaps also a determination to be less ungrateful in the future. That would be a fine basis for a new year's resolution: let's all try to be more optimistic, more supportive, less grumpy in the coming year. Yes, by all means, yes — but we all know how long such resolutions last. And we can be sure that by the time the first summer blockbusters invade the multiplexes — which should be around the middle of March — we'll all have plenty to grouse about. Yes, of course. But when we are tempted to inflate our local discomforts into epic complaints, we should remember 2003, the great year of feeling bad.  

The Movies of the Year

By ELVIS MITCHELL

Published: December 28, 2003

1.'PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN' The exuberantly entertaining action comedy came together because of wildly different talents: Johnny Depp's flair for comedy, the director Gore Verbinski's crack timing and the producer Jerry Bruckheimer's willingness to spend enough doubloons to launch the Spanish Armada.

2. '21 GRAMS' Alejandro González Iñárritu's second film about the devastation dropped by fate on three different people — this time acted with a vibrating delicacy by Benicio del Toro, Sean Penn and Naomi Watts — is, most important, a story about the necessity of intimacy and family.

3. 'THE TRIPLETS OF BELLEVILLE' As films move toward an inevitable international sameness, the last true expression of national individuality can be found in animation. This tart and involving French feature cartoon is one of a kind, and reflects the fluky, jazzy soul of its director, Sylvain Chômet, too.

4. 'ELEPHANT' Gus Van Sant's allusive and elusive tone poem, loosely based on the Columbine murders, is a breathtakingly crafted work — a teenage ant farm by Fassbinder — that refuses to moralize or provide easy, italicized answers.

5. 'CAPTURING THE FRIEDMANS' Andrew Jarecki's nimble nonfiction film looks at both sides of a child molestation investigation and its effect on a household, and becomes a piece about a much bigger subject. It examines not only the slippery nature of truth versus delusion, but the American obsession of detailing our own lives with a camera.

6. 'LOST IN TRANSLATION' This agile and detail-rich comic melodrama is about something not glimpsed in a feature in years: a filmmaker — Sofia Coppola — tumbling head over film stock for the talents of her star, Bill Murray, who plays a lonely actor in Tokyo. His infatuation with Scarlett Johansson, as the neglected young wife of a photographer, is deepened because we see it through his eyes.

7. 'RAISING VICTOR VARGAS' Peter Sollett's lovable first feature, set on the Lower East Side, is a hilarious and low-key look at, of all things, people fighting for turf, though mostly emotional. A teenager, Victor (Victor Rasuk), works hard to win the heart of the tough Judy (Judy Marte), who battles to keep him at bay. And we get to enjoy the film's victories.

8. SPLENDOR' From Cleveland comes the adaptation of Harvey Pekar's autobiographical comics, a picture that's all heart, brains and, yes, spleen. But the directors and screenwriters Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini show how these organs function, as do Paul Giamatti and Hope Davis as the rumpled, combative and finally loving leads.

9. 'THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE RETURN OF THE KING' Peter Jackson comes through with an action epic that closes the trilogy with grace and honest sentiment rather than cheap sentimentality; his love and affinity for Tolkien's material meant that he was able to offer three movies with completely distinct tones.

10. 'THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY' Sergio Leone's massive and magnificently berserk epic western was not only restored to its full length — well, there are undoubtedly more scenes out there — but its delirious power was projected onto screens around the country so everyone could see Leone's influence on filmmakers from Kubrick to Spielberg. The most we can ask for — until the next version shows up.

Movie of the Year By A. O. SCOTT

1. 'MASTER AND COMMANDER: THE FAR SIDE OF THE WORLD' I surprise myself with this choice, but Peter Weir's old-fashioned high-seas adventure surprised me with its energy and sweep. The battle sequences are appropriately rousing and bloody, but the film's greatest accomplishment is its recreation of the hierarchies and rituals of the British Navy during the Napoleonic wars. Russell Crowe plays Jack Aubrey with all the charisma of a 19th-century rock star, and Paul Bettany is terrific as his intellectual pal, Stephen Maturin. The best war movie in a year of war movies, and one of the best ever.

3. 'THE SON' Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's wrenching study of paternal grief is a stripped-down complement to the grand opera of "Mystic River" and a rebuke to Hollywood's habit of equating revenge with redemption. Olivier Gourmet, playing a Belgian carpenter with a sore back and a battered soul, grounds this quiet allegory in the pedestrian rhythms of work and sorrow.

4. 'SPELLBOUND' Jeffrey Blitz's documentary about eight young contestants in the National Spelling Bee is suspenseful, moving, funny and thrilling. In exploring an odd American subculture, it also paints a remarkably detailed picture of modern life in all its glory and eccentricity.

5. 'THE BARBARIAN INVASIONS' Another view of modern life, both eccentric and glorious, from the Québécois director Denys Arcand, whose portrait of a dying Montreal intellectual becomes both an elegy for the dreams of the 60's generation and a biting critique of that generation's failures.

6. 'THE MAN WITHOUT A PAST' Aki Kaurismaki's tale of an amnesiac who finds love and happiness among the homeless of Helsinki is a wry humanist parable shot in clean, midnight-sun colors and accompanied by the best soundtrack of the year. It should do for Finnish rockabilly what "O Brother, Where Art Thou" did for bluegrass.

7. 'THE TRIPLETS OF BELLEVILLE' Dazzling visual nonsense from Sylvain Chômet, whose first feature is a riot of grotesque animation and perverse storytelling, transmitted from a bizarre planet where the laws of physics and the rules of narrative don't quite apply. A planet called France.

8. 'FINDING NEMO' Pixar's latest triumph cleverly preaches to the parents while treating their children to wild and colorful adventure. The film's watery world is animated with state-of-the-art technology, but like all great movies, its real achievements are its vivid characters and its meticulous storytelling.

9. 'BUS 174' This Brazilian documentary, directed by Felipe Lacerda and José Padilha, explores the hijacking of a Rio de Janeiro bus in 2000. Alternating between television coverage and interviews with police, survivors, social scientists and acquaintances of the hijacker, the filmmakers construct a devastating account of the poverty and violence that wrack urban Brazil, and also of the decency that survives in the face of such cruelty.

10. 'A MIGHTY WIND' Christopher Guest's latest fake documentary, which assembles a gaggle of fictitious folkies for a reunion concert, is the best movie about bad music since "Spinal Tap." Eugene Levy and Catherine O'Hara, playing the star-crossed sweethearts Mitch and Mickey, add a note of bittersweet romanticism to the general silliness.

Movies of the Year By STEPHEN HOLDEN

1. 'ANGELS IN AMERICA' So what if the movie of the year is a six-hour, two-part epic for HBO? Mike Nichols's small-screen version of Tony Kushner's incendiary AIDS phantasmagoria is sudsier and not as funny as the original stage production, but its integrity remains intact. Meryl Streep transcends herself as the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg, and Al Pacino's spitting and hissing portrayal of the dying Roy Cohn is so deep it inclines you toward sympathy for the devil. Jeffrey Wright and Mary Louise Parker are nothing less than great.

2. 'MYSTIC RIVER' Clint Eastwood's masterly screen version of a Dennis Lehane novel turns the blood feuds that erupt within a working-class Irish-American enclave of Boston into wrenching Greek tragedy. Sean Penn, awash in tears, and Tim Robbins as his benumbed childhood friend are unforgettable.

3. 'THE FOG OF WAR' Errol Morris's riveting documentary about the former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara is all the more impressive for its utter simplicity. The movie has only one talking head (Mr. McNamara), accompanied by film clips from World War II and Vietnam. It addresses the most serious questions about war and the American character.

4. 'CAPTURING THE FRIEDMANS' Andrew Jarecki's documentary about the destruction of a Long Island family after charges of pedophilia is an agonizing portrait of a dysfunctional family and a disquieting look at the difficulty of determining guilt or innocence in a climate of panic and hysteria.

5. 'LOST IN TRANSLATION' Sofia Coppola emerges as a major filmmaker in this witty depiction of East-West culture shock in contemporary Tokyo. Out of their disorientation, Bill Murray, as a fading Hollywood star filming a Scotch commercial, and Scarlett Johansson, as a photographer's neglected young wife, forge a fragile, wistful connection.

6. 'HOUSE OF SAND AND FOG' Ben Kingsley's volcanic and finally heartbreaking portrayal of a proud Iranian immigrant fighting a real estate battle against a recovering alcoholic (Jennifer Connelly) matches the power of Sean Penn's turn in "Mystic River." Their personal war, which turns into mortal combat, is the sadder for having no heroes or villains.

7. 'THE BARBARIAN INVASIONS' The Canadian director Denys Arcand's sequel to his 1986 film "The Decline of the American Empire" reassembles the same politically engaged, sexually free-spirited academics around the death bed of an intellectual old goat. Their reminiscences are as rich and ruefully amused as the conversations in a Rohmer film, maybe more so.

8. 'AMERICAN SPLENDOR' The makers of this absorbing biography about the comic book writer and sad sack Harvey Pekar pull off a coup by casting the real Mr. Pekar and his wife Joyce to observe the actors (Paul Giamatti and Hope Davis) playing them. This juxtaposition parallels Mr. Pekar's scrupulously accurate and self-lacerating stories of his own experiences.

9. 'THIRTEEN' As 13-year-old girls running wild in Los Angeles, Evan Rachel Wood and Nikki Reed (on whose experiences the movie is based) suggest burgeoning, strip-mall Paris Hiltons. The vertiginous rhythms of Catherine Hardwicke's directorial debut echo the jangling hyperkineticism of puberty unbound. Portraying a mother who watches helplessly, Holly Hunter gives her finest performance in years.

10. 'CITY OF GOD' The anecdotal history of gang warfare in the slums of Rio de Janeiro — seen through the eyes of a journalist who survived — has the verisimilitude of a powerful documentary. Its portrait of the deadly combustibility of pre-pubescent machismo and automatic weapons is scarily convincing.

The Year in Documentaries

The Year in Documentaries

By DAVE KEHR

Published: December 28, 2003

OCUMENTARIES commanded an extraordinary amount of attention this year, from Andrew Jarecki's "Capturing the Friedmans," first shown at at the Sundance Film Festival in January, to Nathaniel Kahn's "My Architect," a surprising commercial success that opened in November at Film Forum in Manhattan and continues to draw large crowds.

But the documentary — or, as it is now fashionable to call it, the nonfiction film — has increasingly become a genre divided against itself.

On one side of the aesthetic gulf are those filmmakers, like France's Nicolas Philibert (whose "To Be and to Have" is in its fourth month at the Cinema Village) and New York's Jennifer Dworkin (whose "Love and Diane" played at Film Forum this spring) who are the heirs of the cinéma vérité movement of the 60's and 70's. These directors use the tiny new video cameras just as their forebears — Jean Rouch, the Maysles Brothers, Frederick Wiseman and many others — used the portable 16-millimeter equipment that had just become available. Their intent is to record reality with as little intervention as possible, to confront the spectator with a more or less unvarnished truth that asks viewers to draw their own conclusions.

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Massing on the other side of the chasm are filmmakers who do not hesitate to use every rhetorical device available to them — voice-over narration, musical accompaniment, distorting lenses, the elaborate visual effects and complex editing patterns made possible by the new digital editing technology — to shape their raw material into an argued, structured piece. Leading this group is Errol Morris, the Boston-based director of "Gates of Heaven" and "The Thin Blue Line," whose film "The Fog of War" opened earlier this month.

Pointing up the idealism of the vérité directors, with their belief that objectivity is still an achievable goal in a post-modern world, the manipulators embrace and emphasize the artificiality of their approach. There is no reality to be seized, they suggest, but only subjectivities to be represented.

The year has seen its share of triumph on both sides. For the realists, there is probably no purer film than Mr. Philibert's, a resolutely low-key study of a gifted grade school teacher working with children in the mountainous region of the Auvergne. As the teacher, Georges Lopez, attends to the needs of his charges, who range in age from 4 to 11, Mr. Philibert looks on with a quiet attentiveness. Though the film does contain a brief interview with the teacher that fills in some details of his past, "To Be and to Have" takes place almost entirely in the present tense, asking us to witness events as they unfold. What we wish to make of them is left up to us, although Mr. Philibert's respect for his subject is always evident.

Compare this to Mr. Morris's film, which presents its subject, Robert S. McNamara, in an anonymous studio. Mr. McNamara speaks straight into the camera, as if he wished to talk directly with his listeners, but Mr. Morris will have none of this. The film is full of interventions, ranging from questions hurled by an unseen person (presumably, Mr. Morris) to elaborate computer animation effects, used at one distracting moment to depict the atomic bombing of Japan. The effect is one of a bizarre struggle between observer and observed, as if the two men were arm-wrestling for authorship rights.

While Mr. McNamara adapts a self-serving pose of perfect candor and aw-shucks guilelessness, Mr. Morris counters with a slyly distanced style, dropping in sarcastic asides (doom-laden music cues or cutaways to apocalyptic newsreel footage) that chisel at Mr. McNamara's authority without overtly challenging anything he has to say.

Though the occasional documentary still appears as photographed on 35-millimeter film — like Jacques Perrin's hit, the nature study "Winged Migration" — video has come to dominate the field. Tape is far cheaper than film, both in the shooting and the processing, which allows vérité filmmakers like Ms. Dworkin, Carles Bosch and José María Doménech ("Balseros") and Rebecca Cammisa and Rob Fruchtman ("Sister Helen") to distill their work from hundreds of hours of videotape, where earlier documentarians (like Robert Flaherty in his pioneering 1922 "Nanook of the North") had to confine their observations to 10-minute takes, which often meant staging events for the camera.

"The Revolution Will Not Be Televised," an amazing insider account of the 2002 attempted coup against the Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, was made possible because an Irish news crew happened to be on the spot, armed with plenty of blank cassettes.

In "Bus 174," a study of a bus hijacking in Rio de Janeiro in 2000, the directors Felipe Lacerda and José Padilha mold their film around the many hours of live coverage shot by local television stations. The banalization of video technology, its spread throughout the culture as a surveillance device (some of the most striking moments in "Bus 174" come from scenes taken by traffic control cameras) and its incorporation into the daily lives of private individuals (thanks to the new, pocked-sized digital video cameras) have created a fresh source for documentary images.

No film has yet made a more dramatic use of home video material than Andrew Jarecki's "Capturing the Friedmans," in which the implosion of a middle-class Long Island family (a father and son have been accused of child molestation) is portrayed through startlingly intimate home videos of family arguments and private breakdowns. A tragic parody of reality TV, "Capturing the Friedmans" is one of the year's documentary hits, taking in $3.7 million at the box office. The film suggests that Americans have become their own Big Brothers, ruthlessly cataloging their own failures and indiscretions. The paranoid future imagined by Fritz Lang in his 1960 "The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse" (the eyes are video cameras hidden in a hotel, which the master criminal Mabuse uses to observe and control his victims) has already arrived and perhaps been surpassed. There is no reason to hide the spying lenses: they are out in the open, acknowledged and even willingly introduced into the most personal spaces.

Nathaniel Kahn's "My Architect" has become a sleeper hit in the weeks since it opened at Film Forum, with the highest opening-week gross in the theater's history. Perhaps its power is due to its unselfconscious combination of the two currently dominant documentary styles: the picture is at once an old-fashioned, PBS-style educational film about the work of the great architect Louis Kahn, and an agonized psychodrama staged by and starring his son, Nathaniel. The manipulated, rhetorical side of the film uses authoritative voice-overs and expert witnesses, old television clips and film of Louis Kahn taken for other documentaries; the open, realist side uses videotape to portray Nathaniel's subjective experience of his father's neglect.

Mr. Kahn does not reconcile the two styles so much as he productively rams them together. The cool, institutional tone of the sections devoted to Louis is undermined by the undisguised amateurishness and awkwardness of the Nathaniel scenes, yielding the sense of a sleek, manufactured reality colliding with a raw and bleeding one. And it is there that the documentary exists in this year of 2003, in the intersection of the made and the found.