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SHREK
It's the donkey, dummy. He's a needy nuisance, a sweet-souled cynic, a brave coward, a bouncy optimist. In Eddie Murphy's brilliant vocal characterization, he's just the guy to lift Mike Myers' eponymous ogre out of his slough of despondency and serve as long-eared Cupid in his romance with Cameron Diaz's princess. The movie runs on his delightful spirit—and runs right past an adult's expectations for animation. We usually hope not to get too restless as we indulge the kids in their cinematic treats. But this pretty, fractured fairy tale offers us real wit—including some nice, satirical hits on the Disney tradition—while still giving the wee ones plenty of broad, silly fun. |
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BLACK HAWK DOWN
This is big-time, big-budget moviemaking at its best. A hugely complex re-creation of a 1993 special forces fire fight in Somalia, it is masterfully orchestrated by director Ridley Scott. Brutal, bloody, breathless in pace, it shows us modern warfare's newest, ugliest face and finally becomes, like all great war movies, an antiwar movie—at least in the beholder's savaged eye. |
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IN THE BEDROOM
A promising youth is stupidly murdered in a small New England town, and his parents (superbly played by Tom Wilkinson and Sissy Spacek) grapple with how their silences and evasions contributed to the crime. And with how to achieve the vengeance their troubled souls require. Director Todd Field builds patiently toward a melodramatic conclusion that's as plausible as his sympathetic evisceration of middle-class life is compelling. |
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AMORES PERROS
Director Alejandro Gonzáles Iñárritu makes the year's most exciting debut in a movie that intricately intertwines three stories about the lives of the people—and their distinctly anti-Disney dogs—involved in a car crash. Bleakly funny, his film is a deeply unsettling portrait of dangerous, beautiful Mexico City and of the human nature that shares its traits. |
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THE DEEP END
It's a great twist—a woman (Tilda Swinton, right) and her blackmailer (Goran Visnjic) fall in love. She's trying to protect her son from extortion, but she can't protect herself from the soulful, vulnerable man who wants her cash. The result, co-directed by Scott McGehee and David Siegel, is an elegant, romantically doomy movie that rises well above its precipitating gimmick. |
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LANTANA
A woman disappears after her car breaks down. A troubled cop (Anthony LaPaglia) investigates. He's soon caught up in a mystery that is less a twisting line than a series of surprisingly interlinked, steadily shrinking circles. Director Ray Lawrence and a great cast always remember that the enigmas of the human heart provide our most entrancing puzzles. |
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FAITHLESS
This is Ingmar Bergman's third retelling of an autobiographical fragment about one of his failed, youthful love affairs. But this time he's added a darker layer of melodrama to his screenplay; Liv Ullmann has burnished her direction with a forgiving glow, and in Lena Endre the two have found a perfect new generation Bergman heroine—beautiful, strong and rueful. |
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WITH A FRIEND LIKE HARRY
A man who claims to be an old school pal encounters a luckless writer and his fractious family on a French highway. He sets about bettering their fortunes—an activity that requires a number of capital crimes.
Director Dominik Moll exceeds Hitchcock in wry and energetic perversity in this dryly delicious movie. |
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ALI
Michael Mann takes a slice out of the boxing champion's life. It's the best part—when he was stripped of his title for refusing to join the Army in the Vietnam era, then won it (and our hearts) back. One of the rare biopics that lets us make up our own minds about the subject, this is a smart movie, crafty and handsomely crafted. |
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LIAM
In Depression-era England, a father loses his shipyard job, drifts into native fascism and, finally, into a tragic embrace of terrorism. Meantime his adorable young son (Anthony Barrows) struggles, with no less intensity, with the issues of growing up. Director Stephen Frears resists moralizing Dad's story or sentimentalizing the son's. The result is a tough, touching, instructive portrait of an almost lost world. |
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THE WORST | MOULIN ROUGE
In a year of much pretentious piffle, the over-rich cake is taken by Baz Luhrmann's musical. Trying to disguise its narrative vacuity with sentiment, slam cuts and anachronistic songs, this movie made my tortured viscera beg for mercy. |
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KANDAHAR
Before Sept. 11, few knew of Kandahar; few cared about the ravages of civil war and Taliban rule in Afghanistan. Now the world sees the news value in Mohsen Makhmalbaf's tale of a woman crossing the desert incognito to find her sister. Even without the headlines, this Iranian film boasts a visual and emotional magnificence. It has a painter's acute eye for beauty within horror: the gorgeous colors of the burkas that imprison Afghan women; the handsome face of a child in a Taliban school as he expertly assembles a Kalashnikov rifle; the vision of one-legged men scrambling to retrieve prostheses dropped in parachutes from a plane. This is scoop journalism and heartbreaking poetry. |
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MOULIN ROUGE
A never-prettier Nicole Kidman entrances hunkily soulful Ewan McGregor in an orgasmic swirl of color, design and pop music from mad Aussie Baz Luhrmann. In the age of Media Cool, this recklessly romantic burst of kinetic excess offended nice sensibilities even as it launched other viewers into rapture. I'm with the rapt. The movie asks, Moulin Rouge-ez avec moi ce soir? I say, Sure. All night long. |
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Black Hawk Down
Ridley Scott's harrowing replay of a 1993 Somalian debacle for U.S. troops is pure cinema in action. In nearly two hours of relentless warfare (think of Saving Private Ryan without the slow bits), it shows how a director can marshal images and sounds, biography and geography, to create emotion pictures. With Gladiator, Hannibal and now this ultimate war movie, Ridley's on a roll. |
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IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE
So many affairs are like the one endured here by Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung: furtive, guilty, leaving the ache of remorse. Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai keeps the camera close to his actors—so close you can feel their heat and pain. Everyone is gorgeous and grieving in this threnody to erotic loss. |
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MULHOLLAND DR.
David Lynch made the first 90 min. of this sexy thriller as a TV movie. When it didn't sell, Lynch added a coda that sends his characters into the weirdest Wonderland, as if Twin Peaks were to morph into Blue Velvet. It's not all intelligible, but it's always fabulous. Like the Coen brothers' excellent The Man Who Wasn't There, Lynch's laugh-scream of a movie dwells lusciously in the Kingdom of Noir. It ransacks old-movie style to create an avant-movie nightmare. |
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MONSTERS, Inc.
It was a swell year for computer-generated cartoons. Shrek and Monsters, Inc. each had heart, spot-on gags and $200 million-plus domestic grosses. But if my desert island had a giant movie theater (or a DVD player), I'd choose the latest miracle from director Pete Docter and the Pixar crowd. This is a buddy movie and a daddy movie, about two creatures who inadvertently adopt a nosy little girl. It's got pictorial dazzle and an uncommon generosity of spirit, and it ends with the sweetest, rightest shot of the movie year. |
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movie 7
Merci, French directors, for reminding audiences that sex, with its negotiations and lies, its beauty and messiness, its graphic, clumsy imagery, is a crucial part of the human drama. The best of a new bunch of dark, sometimes explicit French films about sex is Catherine Breillat's fable of two sisters, 12 and 15, who are rivals and comrades. Breillat juggles coming-of-age comedy with horror-tragedy in a film that lingers in the mind like the memory of a first, fatal affair. |
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THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING
It's a fantasy based on a famous series of novels ... a film of eye-popping grandeur and sumptuous production values ... and, unlike the recent Harry Potter event, it's a good movie too. In the first of a Tolkien film trilogy, director Peter Jackson lays out the Middle Earth adventure with epic brio. This solid, often stirring version stops just this side of enthrallment. But then, the grand journey has just begun. |
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AMéLIE FROM MONTMARTRE
A shy girl with a runaway imagination (Audrey Tautou) forces magic on all those in her Paris neighborhood. Jean-Pierre Jeunet's scurrying narrative and cinematic gamesmanship (a style that could be called faux Truffaut) may at times weary viewers used to Hollywood's burlier, spell-it-all-out mode. But give me, any day, a film that offers a groaning banquet table of invention and enchantment—and a showcase for world-class beguiler Tautou. |
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GHOST WORLD
An Amélie with attitude, teen Enid (the frighteningly assured Thora Birch) adopts orphan things and people in order to make fun of them. This daringly undarling comedy, from director Terry Zwigoff and comix writer Daniel Clowes, shows just how furtive and morose an ordeal growing up can be. It's a Heathers for the 9/11 Generation. |
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THE WORST | LARA CROFT: TOMB RAIDER
Wearing a D cup and a scowl, Angelina Jolie might seem the ideal action babe. But she's just Stallone with bigger pectorals, and she has the action hero's sadly familiar urge: to save part of the world and blow the rest up. After Sept. 11, is she an anachronism or a harbinger of Hollywood's next wave of righteous belligerence?
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