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Film - Best Of 2003
ArtForum, Dec, 2003
John Waters
1. Irreversible (Gaspar Noe) The art shocker of the year is also the year's best. Put on the horrifying sound track CD (there is one), take a roofie, and remember this amazing journey into rape and, yes ... intimacy.
2. Dog Days (Ulrich Seidl) Runner-up. The most humiliating film ever made (for both actors and audience). Astonishingly hateful and original. Vienna never looked so depressing.
3. The Son (Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne) Lead actor Olivier Gourmet won the best-actor award at Cannes for this performance, despite the fact that he's filmed almost entirely from the back of the head. If this isn't art, what is?
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4. Blind Spot: Hitler's Secretary (Andre Heller and Othmar Schmiderer) Very Paul Morrissey. Very Andy Warhol's Hitler's Kelly Girl. Chillingly simple.
5. Medea (Lars von Trier) I kiss the ground of New York's Screening Room for booking this beautifully muddy, 1988 shot-on-video masterpiece when it finally got a theatrical release this year.
6. Swimming Pool (Francois Ozon) Sexual compulsion, a semi-erect "Hollywood loaf," and the most amazingly naked performance of the year (Ludivine Sagnier).
7. Cet Amour-la (Josee Dayan) Jeanne Moreau is Marguerite Duras--and as much fun as Faye Dunaway in Mommie Dearest.
8. Ken Park (Larry Clark and Edward Lachman) Leave It to Beaver goes hard-core. Bravo! Clark's the only director who consistently makes the New York Times rise to his bait.
9. Anything Else (Woody Allen) The critics are full of it! Woody is still smart and funny, and nobody does a medium master shot better. Christina Ricci is the perfect Woody Allen leading lady.
10. Friday Night (Claire Denis) The most provocative traffic jam since Fellini's 8 1/2. So slow. So infuriating. So sexy.
Amy Taubin
1. K Street (Steven Soderbergh) Turning DC into an analogue of Warhol's Factory, Soderbergh's ten-part HBO series proves that fact and fiction are inoperable categories and performance the only reality.
2. Elephant (Gus Van Sant) An achingly beautiful meditation on the Columbine massacre. As disassociated as an anxiety dream and elusive as the horror it references.
3. Play Dead; Real Time (Douglas (Gordon) Flanked in memory by Chris Marker's pachyderm tribute Slon-Tango and the monumental Serras that have graced the same space, Gordon's site-specific video installation at Gagosian had a ghostly weight.
4. Love and Diane (Jennifer Dworkin) An intimate, unruly portrait of a mother/daughter relationship and three generations of a black Brooklyn family struggling with poverty and a Byzantine welfare system. Dworkin's documentary may sound familiar, but it's in a league of its own.
5. Bus 174 (Jose Padilha) One of the rare documentaries that depicts both micro and macro, Bus 174 turns live TV coverage of a hostage standoff that transfixed Brazil into an indictment of a dysfunctional social system.
6. Star Spangled to Death (Ken Jacobs) Forty-six years in the malting and nearly seven hours long, Jacobs's obdurate, anguished cacophony of personal, political, and movie history is punishing but too grave to ignore.
7. Seaside (Julie Lopes-Curval) The bittersweet tonalities and antimelodramatic structure of this bountiful French first feature suggest Chekhov by the shore.
8. Camp (Todd Graft) Graft's belief in the redemptive power of performance and his smarts about adolescent romance make this dime-store Fame a joy.
9. Crimson Gold (Jafar Panahi) The Iranian's Fassbinder-like depiction of class resentment focuses on a Tehran pizza-delivery man, made memorable by the lumbering Hossain Emadeddin.
10. Distant (Nuri Bilge Ceylan) Self-imposed loneliness and the difficulty men have connecting emotionally is the terrain of this subtle Turkish film.
Geoffrey O'Brien
1. Mystic River (Clint Eastwood) Dennis Lehane's dense and tragic saga is pared down and filmed with unerring tone and timing.
2. The Flower of Evil (Claude Chabrol) Chabrol's fiftieth, recombining favorite elements of family corruption and perverse longing, is steeped in his rapt pattern-making genius.
3. The Fog of War (Errol Morris) This feature-length portrait of Robert S. MacNamara--all the more devastating for avoiding a polemical approach--is like an overview of twentieth-century warfare as seen from the control booth. Mournful and terrifying.
4. To Be and To Have (Nicolas Philibert) A beautifully exact movie about early childhood education that's fresh enough to make you want to learn the alphabet again for the first time.
5. Chihwaseon (Im Kwon-taek) A nineteenth-century Korean artist's life told as a skein of gaudy fragments. Best shot: the painter buried under his rejected sketches.
6. The Man Without a Past (Aki Kaurismaki) Finland, degree zero: a comedy about soup kitchens, rock 'n' roll, and other matters.
7. Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola) Sonata for two oddly matched people and a gigantic hotel: The spaces are elegantly deployed, and Bill Murray was never better.
8. Elephant (Gus Van Sant) The hours before the Columbine massacre rendered as lyrical abstraction; when the shooting starts, however, the effect is oddly numbing.
