As usual, many of the year end releases had a limited engagement during the Holiday Season, and went into wide release in January or later with "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind" and The Hours" among them. For this reason you may find this list in the 2003 review section as well as for 2002. My runner up films for the Top 10 are virtually interchangeable with "Gangs of New York" except for the fact that none of the following stirred me as much as Martin Scorcese’s epic.

ABOUT SCHMIDT - Dir. Alexander Payner - Jack Nicholson is an old curmudgeon who has devoted his whole life to the insurance business and not much else. He’s a guy who thought he had it all and doesn’t. Warren Schmidt has taken his wife and his life for granted for so long that when he retires and she dies, he must learn to fend for himself. The simplest household chore is beyond his comprehension. He finds he has not much else to do except get in his Winnebago and go cross country to bust his daughter’s chops on the eve of her wedding. Nicholson downplays the small tics usually associated with his personality by internalizing Schmidt’s emotions. But hee externalizes all his frustrations with hilarious results as when he misreads a Good Samaritan’s intentions and makes a move on her. He may have been able to sell insurance, but not himself, not even to his daughter who’s about to marry a weird looking guy with an even weirder family. These zany second leads give "About Schmidt" the flavor of a classic Preston Sturges movie. The cast of eccentrics is led by Dermott Mulroney as the prospective son-in-law and Kathy Bates as Mulroney’s earth-mother. Hope Davis plays the only seemingly ‘normal’ person as Schmidt’s daughter Jeannie.

CHICAGO - Dir. Rob Marshall - Rene Zellweger plays the infamous Roxie Hart aspiring to fame as a showgirl who killed her lover in the 1920’s and got away with it in this screen adaptation of the hit Broadway musical. "Chicago" has everything you could want in a musical with the drama taking a back seat to the production numbers. Richard Gere shines as the lawyer who literally tap dances his way through the trial, treating the courtroom as his stage and the members of the jury and the press as his audience. Catherine Zeta-Jones, in her best role to date as Velma Kelly - the tabloid flavor of the month, finally gets a chance to put on her dancing shoes as the star behind bars who holds the spotlight until Roxie comes along

CONFESSIONS OF A DANGEROUS MIND - In some ways, this is on par with "24 Hour Party People" (see my Ten Best). It’s a rip roaring rollicking tale about Chuck Barris, the creator of such TV gems as The Dating Game, The Newlywed Game, and the one show that the critics declared was a sign of our declining American culture - The Gong Show. "Confessions" covers all that and more. Based on Barris’ memoir, the movie dwells on his - according to him - role as a CIA Assassin. Under the guidance of first time feature director, George Clooney, Barris’s tale is told tongue in cheek, with a jaunty style that picks you up and carries you along as if you were riding the rapids. Clooney plays Barris’ CIA contact, Drew Barrymore is Penny, the sympathetic love interest, and Julia Roberts plays a lusty international spy. Sam Rockwell nails the Chuck Barris Gong Show persona, swivel hips and all!

DRUMLINE - College marching bands are given the full blown treatment in this "Rocky" style movie about a young man who has to suppress his ego for the good of the band while learning a few things about life beyond high school. This winner is one of the big surprises of the holiday season because it came out with very little promotion, it has no big name stars (Orlando Jones is the only recognizable name) and its director - Charles Stone III has no track record (his well received "Paid in Full" came out earlier in the year - also without any fanfare). Nick Cannon, who is the star of his own Nickelodeon series, stars as Devon. "Drumline" is avoids all the cliches and inner city stereotypes that normally identify a Hollywood version of Black Cinema. This is about kids striving to better themselves by using their brains, their talent, and determination. The competition is just as grueling. Training for the band is like being in Boot Camp - only the best will last and the best of the best will lead. I’ll never look at college marching bands in the same way again. This is a terrific picture!

FAR FROM HEAVEN - Writer/director Todd Haynes’ tribute to the fabricated soap operas of Douglas Sirk does more than just copy his style, he borrows the plot from "All That Heaven Allows" and turns the gardener - originally played by Rock Hudson - into Dennis Haysbert. The rumor mills of this fifties style melodrama dwell, not on Jane Wyman’s dalliance with a man younger than herself and beneath her social station, but with the always superb Julianne Moore’s growing friendship with a Black Man. Dennis Quaid plays the husband coming to terms with his homosexuality, a riff on Rock Hudson’s image as a ladies’ man in view of his real life homosexuality. This is filmmaking at its best, but I still felt a sense of uninvolved detachment despite the superb performances, the great cinematography - ‘Those autumn colors’ - and set and clothing design which nailed the whole decor of the fifties down to a tee.

FRIDA - This one is Salma Hayek’s baby from beginning to end. She is star, producer, and agent provocateur assembling an array of talent to bring the story of an artist little known in this country to life. Her life is traced from ogling school girl admiring the much older Diego Rivera (Alfred Molina), the premier Mexican artist of his generation, from afar to the young aspiring painter who thrusts herself into his life as lover, wife, divorcee, fellow Communist and wife again. Director Julie Taymor’s input, with her depiction of a traffic wreck in minute increments from the interior of an overcrowded bus, and her stylized tour of New York in the thirties made with cardboard cut-outs and dreamscapes of the Manhattan skyline with King Kong on the empire state building are a tour-de-force. These two set pieces alone are enough reason to recommend this movie, but "Frida" is much more. It’s a panoramic view of Mexico’s art and social history seen from the point of view of someone who helped create it. .

THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE TWO TOWERS - It’s an epic fantasy in the tradition of Frtiz Lang’s two part "Die Nibelungen" (1924), "The Thief of Baghdad" (1940, co-directed by Michael Powell, and George Lucas’ "Star Wars" movies. Those movies’ heroes were on a quest much like Frodo who must return the all powerful ring of Tolkien’s Ring Trilogey to Mordor, the place where it was created, to save the world and all middle earth from eternal darkness. That will happen in the sequel, "Return of the King." Meanwhile, there are battles to be fought and wars instigated by Saruman to be won in "The Two Towers." As in "The Fellowship of the Ring," the special effects are awesome. The living forest, the CG creature - The Gollum, and the storming of Helm’s Deep by the Orcs are all spectacular to the nth degree. This is a big screen movie in every sense of the word.

ROAD TO PERDITION - "The Road to Perdition" is an apt title for a movie whose main character, hit man Michael Sullivan (Tom Hanks), is on the road to ruin. Perdition also happens to be the name of the town where he hopes to find a safe haven for himself and his son, Michael Jr. (Tyler Hoechman), when he is forced to flee from the mob family that nurtured him. By extension the word perdition is also a clue to the fate of Sullivan’s soul. By film’s end Mike Sullivan can be perceived as totally damned or saved. Damned for the life he’s led, or saved for the guilt free life he bequeaths to his son in his final moments. When Mike Jr. witnesses a hit, friendships and bonds of loyalty dissolve with the speed of a bullet. Michael will do anything to protect his son. His Irish Mafia boss John Rooney (Paul Newman) will stick behind his trigger happy son, Connor (Daniel Craig) even if he has to sacrifice Sullivan. But Sully is the best and the brightest of his kind. Even when members of his family forfeit their lives, he knows exactly what has to be done and he does it with imagination and cunning. Hanks projects an ingrained fatalism that goes with the territory. "The Road to Perdition" has some glorious moments that define the shadowy world the Sullivans and Rooneys inhabit in the rural America of the 1930s. A simple piano duet dramatizes the unspoken affection between Sullivan and his surrogate father; knowing glances and hushed whispers between Michael and his wife (Jennifer Jason Leigh) imply her unswerving complicity in her husband’s life; the look on Sullivan’s face tells you what will go down when he realizes he has been set up for a hit; his meeting with Chicago crime boss, Frank Nitti (Stanley Tucci), confirms his worst fears - he’s a small fish in a pond full of piranha; a crime photographer (Jude Law) who doubles as a hit man, relentlessly pursues Sully and Mike Jr. ; and Sullivan teaching his son to drive. (see 2002 review for more details)

Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN - (Spanish with Eng. subtitles) - It’s hard to believe that "Y Tu Mama Tambien" is the work of the same director who made "A Little Princess" from 1995 and the 1998 update of "Great Expectations." Those movies have all the artifice of the Hollywood system that created them and none of the earthiness that characterizes this movie. It’s brutally funny, surprisingly poignant and ultimately thought provoking. "Y Tu Mama Tambien" is the work of a filmmaker at his artistic peak. Alfonso Cuaron’s story begins with a bedroom romp full of graphic sex, sexually explicit language and male bravado and turns into a road movie. (Diego Luna) and Julio (Gael Garcia) are two immature teens, friends from different social classes, with libidos bigger than their brains. They are in search of a place called Heaven’s Mouth, a place that exists solely in the boys’ minds, with Tenoch’s beautiful cousin-in-law, Luisa (Maribel Verdu). They move away from the urban sophistication of Mexico City through the search and seizure checkpoints in the countryside into the heartland of Mexico and beyond to a world of pristine beauty where a man’s way of life is still tied to the earth and nature’s bounty. Imperceptibly, "Y Tu Mama Tambien" morphs into a tone poem about the sea of change in modern day Mexico. (see 2002 review for more details)

ADAPTATION - The creators of "Being John Malkovich," writer Charlie Kaufman and director Spike Jonz, have concocted another brain twister out of "The Orchid Thief," a best seller considered un-adaptable for the screen. So what does Kaufman do? He turns the real life author Susan Orlean (Meryl Streep) into a character using her life and research into the life of the orchid thief of the title as a starting point to create a story about his creative processes. Then he creates a fictitious twin brother as a fellow aspiring screenwriter who is not above selling out. He gives him to the inspiration to create a hook for the story, which he gets from a seminar within the movie, that turns Orlean’s book into a quasi thriller - for the hook. It was at this point that I felt like a fish that couldn’t wait to get off that hook and escape. I loved the first two thirds of "Adaptation" and was perfectly willing to get caught up in Kaufman’s absurdity as I did for "Being John Malkovich," but I found the rest of "Adaptation" overly self indulgent. That said, I thought Chris Cooper stole the show as orchid fanatic John Laroche. Nicholas Cage ran a close second as Charlie - and - his twin brother, the fictitious Donald.

ALL OR NOTHING - Another one of director Mike Leigh’s British slice of life dramas about a family of losers who have lost their way through life and find it again through tragedy. This is not for all tastes but if you are a fan of Mike’s "Secrets and Lies" from 1996 you will appreciate this one. Mike Leigh stalwart Timothy Spall heads an outstanding cast.

BARBERSHOP - Ice Cube is the owner of a neighborhood barber shop who has a crisis of conscience when he decides to sell it to get the money for his own sound studio. He comes to realize, with the help of his friends and neighbors, that the shop is just not a barber shop but a symbol of stability and independence in an ever changing world. This is a funny movie with an uncluttered message about heart and hearth, and civic pride.

8 MILE - Think "Rocky" in the Rap world of Detroit with rap face-offs where rappers rank each other out to a beat instead of killing each other in the boxing ring. Eminem is a revelation as the movie’s star with the able hand of Curtis Hanson ("L.A. Confidential") to guide him through the paces. Brittany Murphy plays the love interest. And surprisingly, Kim Basinger is the only weak link as Eminem’s sex addled white trash mother. Otherwise, the movie makes sense out of a music world that has always been incomprehensible to me. It also portrays the undercurrent of violence perpetrated by the rival factions within the ranks of the rap music world. Good Movie!

EVELYN - Based on a true story, Pierce Brosnan plays Desmond Doyle, a father whose landmark case changed the child custody laws in Ireland which stated something to the effect that a mother must grant custody to the father in writing if for any reason they should be separated. But what was a father to do when the mother skipped out with her lover and moves to the other side of the world never to be heard from again? This is not a great movie by any stretch of the imagination but it’s an entertaining one nonetheless thanks to Brosnan’s sincere performance, Stephen Rea as a the local solicitor who champions his cause, Aidan Quinn as an American lawyer who represents him, and the welcome presence of Alan Bates as the barrister who comes out of retirement to fill in the legal blanks in his case.

HARRY POTTER AND THE CHAMBER OF SECRETS - Strange doings at the Hogwarts school bring Harry back to solve the mystery of a ghost who haunts a remote part of the castle when his fellow students are inexplicably turned to stone. All the evidence points to Harry but we know Harry is incapable of performing dastardly deeds. It all has to do with a living diary and the story behind Hagrid’s banishment from the castle in his youth. Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint are back as Harry, Emma, and Weasley, as are many of the other cast members. The newest teacher of the dark arts is played by Kenneth Brannagh. This one is fun at times but moves slower than the first Harry Potter movie.

THE HOURS - This one has ‘Art’ written all over it. The style, the mood, and the music give "The Hours" a dreamy quality that is at first seductive but wears a little thin by film’s end. It is nonetheless affecting thanks to the presence of three of today’s top actresses. They play three different women in different time periods who are dealing with their mortality and feelings of suicide in this adaptation of the prize winning novel by Michael Cunningham. The one thing that ties them all together is the novel, "Mrs. Dalloway" by Virginia Woolf (by extension - "The Hours" was Virginia Woolf’s original title for "Mrs. Dalloway"). Nicole Kidman is unrecognizable - and mesmerizing - as Woolf trying to balance her bouts of mental illness with her creative gifts while writing Mrs. Dalloway. Meryl Streep is a modern day woman modeled after Mrs. Dalloway, and Julianne Moore is a post WWII fifties housewife and mother who finds parallels in Woolf’s novel to her own life. Ed Harris gives an Oscar caliber performance as a contemporary writer dying from AIDS who has reached the pinnacle of his career. His life and death choices parallel those of Virginia Woolf.

NARC - Jason Patric and Ray Liotta do a not-so-pure good cop/bad cop routine while on the trail of a cop killer who may or may not have been in league with the dead cop. Instead of a clear cut black and white morality tale, writer/director Joe Carnahan explores the shades of gray that undercover cops have to deal with on a daily basis to stay alive and do the job they are paid to do. "Narc" is gritty, realistic, and not for the squeamish, especially during a brutal interrogation scene. This is definitely not for the faint of heart. The only drawback that some may see as a plus, is an overuse of the hand held - or what I call - the nervous camera. It works in the opening scene where a drug bust goes bad, but its continued use is dizzying at best.

NICHOLAS NICKELBY - Charles Dickens’ England comes to life with all the grit of the poor and the splendor of the rich in this latest adaptation of his novel by writer/director Douglas McGrath. Like his other novels, the title character is trying to make his way in the world. There are people - his Uncle in particular - who are trying to drag him down and others who will do anything to help Nickelby. His London is a city of saints and sinners with the sinners getting their comeuppance. But not Nicholas Nickelby usurps a dictatorial school master, rescues a downtrodden child from his grip, joins a theater company, discovers his Uncle’s secret past, and finds true love. Charlie Hunnan plays the title character, and Jamie Bell from "Billy Elliot" is the urchin Spike who becomes his side kick. Great support comes from Timothy Spall (also in "All or Nothing" at the head of this list), Barry Hunphries of Dame Edna fame, Alan Cumming, Jim Broadbent, Tom Courtney, Edward Fox, and Christopher Plummer as the evil Uncle.

RABBIT PROOF FENCE - Australia is skewered in this one about a racist policy that was outlawed in 1971. The government used to kidnap children of mixed blood, take them over a thousand miles from their home and train them to be domestic servants or some other subservient trade, in an attempt to integrate them into a white culture and decrease the strain of indigenous blood in each successive generation. Sounds bizarre because it is. But as the movie details - if historically accurate - this is what the Director of Indigenous Affairs (or some such title) believed with his heart and soul. But this is just one aspect of the movie. "Rabbit Proof Fence" tells the story of three female cousins who run away from a White run school and try to find their way home through the Australian wilderness. It’s a harrowing tale of survival. The girls are played by non-actors. All they had to do was look the role and play the part. They more than live up to their end of the bargain. Kenneth Branagh plays the head inspector threatened by the girls’ tenacity and the changing mood of the country. David Gulpulil (see "Walkabout" from 1971 and "The Last Wave" from 1977), a native of Australia and renowned actor in his own country plays the tracker who must catch them to protect his own interests. The rabbit proof fence of the title was the longest barbed wire fence ever erected in the world. It was put up to keep an overabundant population of rabbits from invading the rest of the country. It was also viewed as a line of demarcation between the outback and the ‘civilized’ world. Philp Noyce directed.

ROGER DODGER - Scott Campbell gives a bravura performance as an over the hill womanizer who’s seen better days who takes his nephew on a night on the town to show him how to score. The language is explicit, the situations are sometimes downright funny, others are raw. Jesse Eisenberg is also outstanding as the nephew who idolizes his uncle.

SOLARIS - This story based on a 1961 novel by Russian author Stanislaw Slem was adapted for the screen once before by his fellow countryman Andrei Tarkovsky in 1972. This version, adapted by director Steven Soderbergh, is virtually interchangeable except for the accents and subtitles. So if you’ve never seen the original, you can’t go wrong with this one. George Clooney is sent to a remote space station on a rescue mission to find out what happened to its crew. Sleep at the outpost brings dreams and dreams turn into reality - sort of. Even though Solaris takes place in outer space, it is not a space epic as the ads may have lead you to believe. It’s a meditation on life, death and immortality - a search for a spiritual center in the absence of God. This is a thought provoking film that raises more questions than it answers. It moves slowly and methodically but still manages to remain interesting. The same themes have been explored before in a play called "Outward Bound." A film version was made in 1930 with Leslie Howard and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and remade as "Between Two Worlds" (1944) with John Garfield and Paul Henreid. Who knows? They may have been the inspiration for Lem’s novel, Solaris.

25th HOUR - The novel by Daniel Benioff takes place before 9/11 but he updates the story with director Spike Lee to make Ground Zero where the World Trade Center stood as much a character as Monty Brogan (Ed Norton) and his buddies (Philip Seymour Hoffman and Barry Pepper). The lives of the heroic firemen from the local firehouse who gave their lives in that tragedy are honored with a shrine of photographs at the local bar owned by Monty’s father (Brian Cox). The movie draws an unnerving parallel between Monty who squandered his life as a low level drug dealer with the death of people who had everything to live for. The plot centers around Mary’s last night of freedom before he goes to jail and whether or not his girlfriend (Rosario Dawson) put the finger on him, but this seems secondary to the feelings of a wasted life that dominate "25th Hour."

AUTO FOCUS - Greg Kinnear gives a breakout performance as the sex addicted Bob Crane, star of the late sixties TV series "Hogan’s Heroes" who died tragically and mysteriously in a small Arizona town while eking out an existence on the theater dinner circuit. Willem Dafoe is equally good as the sleazy John Carpenter who latched onto Crane’s minor celebrity to get women. Rita Wilson also shines as the neglected wife who is replaced by Crane’s addiction. The movie moves at a languid pace and interest may wane as it follows Crane on his downward spiral, but it’s Kinnear - not necessarily the story - that should hold your attention. (see 2002 review for more details)

DIE ANOTHER DAY - I was a fan of Pierce Brosnan’s TV show Remington Steele and I’m just as much a fan of his James Bond movies. There’s not much I can add for any other James Bond fans except to say this is as good as they get - a little more brutal perhaps - a sign of our times. But, as always the gadgets are imaginative with an invisible car and an ice fortress for the bad guys. A North Korean trys to take over the world with a laser gun in outer space aimed at earth to wreak havoc. Halle Berry is Bond’s American counterpart.

THE EMPEROR’S CLUB - Once again Kevin Kline brings a lot more to a movie than the story deserves. He plays an idealistic history teacher at a private boys school who takes on a troubled, but charismatic student riding through the world on the coattails of moneyed privilege instead of his brains. The center piece is a contest about Roman History where the winner is lauded and enshrined in school for posterity. The ending of the movie is a let down because the movie sledgehammers its message in a pretentious display of self-redemtion. But Kevin is great as are the kids in his class, particularly, Sedgwick Bell as his test case, and Jesse Eisenberg as one of his gifted students.

INTACTO (Spanish /English with Eng. subtitles - Dir:Juna Carlos Fresnadilio - This December release barely saw the light of day, but I was intrigued enough by its bizarre story and stylized treatment to include it here as a curiosity if nothing else. The premise has to do with luck or fate. You either have it or you don’t. If someone else has as much luck as you, you can steal their luck with a touch or a talisman In many instances a simple photograph of the person will do. Tomas (Leonardo Sharaglia), the sole survivor of a plane crash is recruited by Federico (Eusebio Poncela) who was presumably, the second luckiest person in the world, having lost his luck to a mysterious Holocaust survivor (Max Von Sydow) who runs a gambling empire. The survivor must partake in a series of gambling ventures that include betting on whether a bug will land on his head in a dark room to running blind folded through the woods. All this will lead the finalist to a final game to determine who is the luckiest man in the world. "Intacto" has the feel of a Universal Horror picture - the ones without the monsters - like "The Black Cat" with Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi. This is for the curiosity seeker who’s looking for something different.

MY BIG FAT GREEK WEDDING - I probably wouldn’t have listed this with the year end films if it weren’t still playing in the tri-state area and raking in the dough. It’s basically a feature length version of a Love American Style (the old TV chestnut - on a lucky night you can catch the Happy Days pilot) segment with enough characters to fulfil the time requirements for a movie. It’s based on Nia Vardalos’s one woman show. She stars as the - not quite ugly duckling - who manages to snag her prince charming despite the idiosyncrasies of her Greek family. Michael Constantine and Lanie Kazan are the parents, Andrea Martin - the doughty aunt, and John Corbett is the groom to be. This is pleasant family fare that seems to have caught on because of the paucity of family entertainment on the silver screen. It fosters moral values without being preachy. That can’t be bad.

ONE HOUR PHOTO - Admittedly, I wasn’t crazy about this movie but Robin Williams gives a multi-layered performance about a guy who lives a fantasy life through the photographs of a seemingly happy family who are anything but. This is on par with his role as a calculating, murderous, mystery writer in "Insomnia" which came out in the beginning of the Summer.

PERSONAL VELOCITY - This has ‘indie’ written all over it with its hand held camera moves and video to film look. It’s three stories about three totally different women trying to turn their lives around. Of the three, Kyra Sedgwick has the best role as a local townie who uses her sex as an instrument of power. She gives up her lifestyle for heart and hearth only to find herself in an abusive relationship. She is both the victor and victim of her sexuality. Sandy Posey is a book editor unhappy with her staid NY middle class life and her complacent husband. And Fairuza Balk is a pregnant runaway traumatized by a car accident. Her story is a blend of fantasy and reality with no clear dividing line. The film is dark in texture, yet it gives the feeling that the women will somehow come to terms with the world. First time writer/director Rebecca Miller based the movie on her own short stories.

THE QUIET AMERICAN - This is director Philip Noyce’s second movie of the Holiday season (see "Rabbit Proof Fence" above) in this adaptation of Graham Greene’s novel about a mysterious American who falls in love with the mistress of a British journalist who has reinvented himself in the Viet Nam of the fifties. The movie is best when depicting the murky war taking place in the countryside where you’re never sure who the good guys are. The American presence is always felt in the background offering aid and support in a clandestine war to whoever is fighting a shadowy insurgent force. Through it all the relationship between Brendan Fraser and Michael Caine’s British journalist and the woman they both love is at the core of the story. It’s slow going but fans of Caine will love it.

Copyright 2003