My top 9 list for 2003. I'll try to add comments and pictures and generally snazz it up but I can't seem to write at the moment. It was a good year for movies, generally, mainly because I am partial to tragedies and there was certainly a lot. Not coincidentally, I put the most devastating tragedy at the top of my list. If I were the type of critic to give four stars then probably only the top three here would get that--something about film demands a visceral reaction as much as an intellectual one, and the top three films here either made me cry or nearly did so. (And #5 provoked sheer joy so maybe I am underrating that one.)

1) House of Sand and Fog
2) In America
3) The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King

What's to say at this point? Combine some of the greatest battle scenes since The Iliad with a sense of pathos usually inimitable to popular cinema and you get this subdued defeat within victory. Not with a bang, but with the whimper of a lost cause does The Lord of the Rings end. Jackson slightly fumbles the final scenes by going for the emotional jugular too often, but Tolkien's melancholy still shines through. It's a legend for the passing of legends, and grand cinema for an age too jaded to truly appreciate it. There is no greater scene in the movies this year than the lighting of the beacons: a call for help that reaches for the heavens.
4) Lost in Translation
5) School of Rock
6) Master and Commander
7) Cold Mountain

The director Anthony Minghella claims that The Thin Red Line, specifically it's abstract treatment of World War 2 and the pervasive presence of nature throughout the film, served as a big influence on Cold Mountain. I'm not sure how much of that I really see. Nature doesn't seem to be a character, as it is in The Thin Red Line, so much as a beautiful canvas that holds the actors. There is nothing wrong with this, though, and when you got actors as talented and attractive as Nicole Kidman and Jude Law there's no reason the movie shouldn't be about them and their characters rather than the more general concerns of the Malick picture. It's essentially an old-fashioned Hollywood romance, with a bitter and mournful edge--the final scenes betray the earlier tone of the movie with their aura of happy conclusiveness. Truth is the war never ended, and the kind of southerners depicted in the film would continue to suffer for a very long time.

But before the betrayal of the ending, the picture is a surprisingly moving adaptation of the Odyssey (the Sirens, the Cyclops, Penelope's suitors, and other stuff I probably didn't recognize all make appearances in 19th century American guises) and that story's timeless theme of men trying to return home from war. There is a moment early in the film that I think gets at the heart of its concerns: A blind man claims that he wouldn't want to see if it was only for a short time, what's the point if it's not permanent? Law's character disagrees and affirms the worth of transient experiences. The film, in a way, becomes about the need to reach for those moments even while knowing that they will leave in the end. That the film doesn't quite have enough conviction to hold true to this theme (to deprive the characters of everything they hoped for at the end yet still affirm the worth of those fleeting moments) is perhaps a small tragedy, but as a whole it's one of the best films about civil war we are ever likely to see.

8) Mystic River
9) Swimming Pool

Honorable Mentions:

Kylie Minoque's video for Slow manages to amusingly pander to her gay fanbase as well as marry the robotic sexuality of the song to the writhing contortions of half naked swimmers. The wide shots of Ms. Minoque surrounded by dozens of men (and some women) moving in unison conveys something formally beautiful as well as inherently sexy.

Kill Bill still leaves me conflicted, but I have to admit I saw it twice. It is supremely morally bankrupt, or perhaps it isn't? I can't tell, to be honest. And Tarantino's implication that violence is the most pure form of cinema is either a dangerous, nearly fascist, view of art, or an opportunistic yet profound acknowledgement of the ultimate limitations of the art form of film, and perhaps art period. If you distill something down to its essense, and all you find is mindless violence and revenge, do you revel in that purity or reject it?