Film - Best of 2002

ArtForum, Dec, 2002

Ian Birnie

1. Merci pour le chocolat (Claude Chabrol) Merci to Chabrol for this master class in the elegant use of mise-en-scene to subtly reveal character and create drama.

2. Talk to Her (Pedro Almodovar) Sex for Almodovar is like murder for Chabrol: It's a key to the mysteries of the human heart.

3. Russian Ark (Alexander Sokurov) A cinematic enigma, an epic piece of Brechtian theater, themes that overlap and build like a nineteenth-century symphony--a haunting experience.

4. Gerry (Gus Van Sant) This existential buddy film is an aesthetic about-face for Van Sant and a welcome return to the mordant humor and outsider poetry of Mala Noche and My Own Private Idaho.

5. Open Hearts (Susanne Bier) This all too believable story about adultery in Copenhagen is a modern classic thanks to the intimacy and realism of the Dogme shooting style.

6. Far from Heaven (Todd Haynes) Haynes's imitation of Sirk's imitation works because the emotions are real and the taboos of race and homosexuality still resonate. Plus it's gorgeous.

7. Punch-Drunk Love (Paul Thomas Anderson) No imitations here: classic screwball comedy made fresh by a punch-drunk style that swings between deadpan and operatic. And families really do act that way.

8. 24 Hour Party People (Michael Winterbottom) Shorn of the usual moralizing and melodrama, this wildly entertaining look back at the Birmingham punk scene trades in verbal wit, inventive editing, and quirky characters.

9. Y Tu Mama Tambien (Alfonso Cuaron) A Mexican road movie that pulses with joie de vivre right up to the bittersweet ending.

10. War Photographer (Christian Frei) A documentary that matches its subject--photojournalist James Nachtwey--in obsessiveness, courage, and moral indignation.

Chrissie Iles

1. Punch-Drunk Love (Paul Thomas Anderson) Anderson's razor-sharp direction incorporates artwork by Jeremy Blake and music by John Brion and Harry Nilsson.

2. Russian Ark (Alexander Sokurov) In the longest single take in film history, Sokurov escorts us though thirty-three rooms in the Hermitage, past 867 actors and three orchestras, as though traversing his country's history in a dream.

3. What's the Time in Vyborg? (Liisa Roberts) Written with teenagers in the formerly Finnish town of Vyborg, Russia, Roberts's film rebuilds this lost city though images of the present, as part of a larger project involving the restoration of Vyborg's Aalto Library.

4. Empire (Paul Sietsema) An exploration of filmic and architectural space though three constructed interiors: a labyrinth, a Rococo room, and Clement Greenberg's New York apartment.

5. Southeast Passage: A Journey to New Blank Spots on the Map of Europe (Ulrike Ottinger) Ottinger charts the forgotten places in the post-1989 splintering of old Europe.

6. The Man Without a Past (Aki Kaurismaki) A powerful portrayal of psychological fragility from the director who shaped the Finnish cinematic climate out of which Eija-Liisa Ahtila emerged.

7. Angel on the Right (Jamshed Usmonov). A searing drama of life in post-Soviet Tajikistan, in a rare film from the region.