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.
( 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
