Usual rules: Anything I saw for the first time between January 1 and December 31, 2004 qualifies.
1. Bright Future (Kiyoshi Kurosawa 2003) - Just imagine if Laurence Sterne had made a film about ghosts, fathers, crime, cities, jellyfish and Che t-shirts.
2. Unknown Pleasures (Jia Jhang-ke 2002) - I’ve never much cared for neo-realism as either theory or art but its re-invention over the past decade in such unlikely places as Iran and North Carolina is something else entirely. In some senses this portrait of dissolute life in a provincial factory town could seem standard-issue neo-realism but its blank spaces, bitter edge and narrative leaps aren’t. Few directors now working can match Jia’s visual sense, especially when he has the audacity to close with one of cinema’s greatest tracking shots.
3. Before Sunset (Richard Linklater 2004) - A sequel to Before Sunrise seemed like a phenomenally bad idea but then there’s a thin line between clever and stupid. This is actually almost more a remake and would be almost meaningless if it wasn’t.
3. Decasia (Bill Morrison 2002) - “I remember the light of darkness doubled / I recall lightning struck itself”.
4. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry 2004) - The anti-realist music video version of Before Sunset.
5. Collateral (Michael Mann 2004) - Psychogeography with a vengeance.
6. Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary (Guy Maddin 2002) - The story would have appeared to be played long ago out but this startling fever-dream revision shifts trust to the teller.
7. The Dreamers (Bernardo Bertolucci 2003) - Vivre sans temps morts.
8. 24: Season Two (various, 2003) - Though you could make a claim that this is an interlocking exploration of trust and duty, its real strength is the near-flawless orchestration of excess (including probably the highest body count in TV history).
9. Dawn of the Dead (Zack Snyder 2004) - The original’s satire and all-American existentialism are toned way down but this still burns with the true flame.
10. Derrida (Kirby Dick & Amy Ziering Kofman 2002) - Not really an introduction to Derrida’s work but an uncommonly honest depiction of the life of the mind.
11. Ghost in the Shell (Mamoru Oshii 1995) - Like cyberpunk was all that happened.
12. Page of Madness (Teinosuke Kinugasa 1926) - One of the most sheerly bonkers movies I’ve ever seen.
13. Suicide Club (Shion Sono 2002) - Though marketed more or less incorrectly as horror, this set of dissolving narratives is pretty much what I’d always hoped Raul Ruiz’s films would be like.
14. The Tracker (Rolf de Heer 2002) - Possibly something of a parable about the dissolution of colonialism, this is also an unusually sharp chamber drama played out among an unusually expansive landscape.
15. Passing Fancy (Yasujiro Ozu 1933) - Like Maddin’s Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary, this uncredited remake of The Champ shows just how far you can go with an apparently washed-out story.
Honorable: All the Real Girls (David Gordon Green 2003), Bus 174 (José Padilha 2002), Fahrenheit 9/11 (Michael Moore 2004), Firefly pilot episode (Joss Whedon 2002), The Five Obstructions (Jorgen Leth & Lars Von Trier 2003), The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert McNamara (Errol Morris 2003), Freaky Friday (Mark S. Waters 2003), Ginger Snaps (John Fawcett 2000), Graveyard of Honor (Kinji Fukasaku 1975), Hero (Zhang Yimou 2002), The House with Laughing Windows (Pupi Avati 1976), I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead (Mike Hodges 2003), In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-wai 2000), Infernal Affairs (Andrew Lau and Alan Mak 2002), Ju-On: The Grudge (Takashi Shimizu 2003), Kairo / Pulse (Kiyoshi Kurosawa 2001), Mean Girls (Mark S. Waters 2004), The Saddest Music in the World (Guy Maddin 2003), Shaun of the Dead (Edgar Wright 2004), Shrek 2 (Andrew Adamson, Kelly Asbury & Conrad Vernon 2004), The Sopranos: Season Four (various 2002), Spartan (David Mamet 2004), Spider-Man 2 (Sam Raimi 2004), The Stone Reader (Mark Moskowitz 2002), Sweet Sweetback’s Baadassss Song (Melvin Van Peebles 1971), Suzhou River (Lou Ye 2000), The Weather Underground (Sam Green & Bill Siegel 2002).
Crimes Against Humanity: Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (Adam McKay 2004), Azumi (Ryuhei Kitamura 2003), The Bourne Identity (Doug Liman 2002), The Cooler (Wayne Kramer 2003), Fat Albert (Joel Zwick 2004), Freddy vs. Jason (Ronny Yu 2003), Haute Tension (Alexandre Aja 2003), Intolerable Cruelty (Joel Coen 2003), National Treasure (Jon Turteltaub 2004), Saved! (Brian Dannelly 2004), Scorched (Gavin Grazer 2003), Secret Defense (Jacques Rivette 1998), Shaolin Soccer (Stephen Chow 2001), So Close (Corey Yuen 2002), Team America: World Police (Trey Parker 2004), Thirteen (Catherine Hardwicke 2003), Thriller: A Cruel Picture (Bo Arne Vibenius 1974), The Triplets of Belleville (Sylvain Chomet 2003), 28 Days Later (Danny Boyle 2002), Versus: Director’s Cut (Ryuhei Kitamura 2000).
Undecidable: Irreversible (Gaspar Noe 2002).
Beyond all understanding: Addio Zio Tom: Director’s Cut (Gualtiero Jacopetti & Franco E. Prosperi 1971) - Probably the most racist “anti-racist” film ever made.