EW critic Owen Gleiberman's top 10 films of 2004:

1. Sideways
2. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
3. The Incredibles
4. Maria Full of Grace
5. Kinsey
6. Before Sunset
7. Osama
8. Open Water
9. 13 Going on 30
10. Ray

EW critic Lisa Schwarzbaum's top 10 films of 2004:

1. Sideways
2. Million Dollar Baby
3. The Incredibles
4. Maria Full of Grace
5. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
6. Moolaade
7. Collateral
8. The Aviator
9. The Return
10. Bright Leaves

the subway is a porno...

Roger Ebert's Best Films of 2004:

1. Million Dollar Baby
2. Kill Bill, Vol. 2
3. Vera Drake
4. Spider-Man 2
5. Moolaade
6. The Aviator
7. Baadasssss!
8. Sideways
9. Hotel Rwanda
10. Undertow

No. 7 is particularly comical...

i was born in the desert...

I now present the three best albums of the year:

1.
This is post-punk at its best. Interpol has now released two singularly brilliant albums, both of which will become rock classics (see their 2002 debut album, Turn on the Bright Lights, which earned them favorable comparisons with the likes of Joy Division and The Fall).


2.
Addictive beyond repair, this New Wave glam rock band delivers the year's best debut. Who can resist the doom-thumping dance beats of tracks like "Take Me Out," "Michael," and "Darts of Pleasure"?


3.
This is the year's comeback album. Robert Smith transcends the 80s, finally, and it is a sight to behold.

something beautiful, something free...

And the National Board of Review's top ten picks for 2004:

1. Finding Neverland
2. The Aviator
3. Closer
4. Million Dollar Baby
5. Sideways
6. Kinsey
7. Vera Drake
8. Ray
9. Collateral
10. Hotel Rwanda

Finding Neverland was much too sappy for top honors. However, Johnny Depp was indeed shown to be the most versatile actor alive.

reach out and touch faith!

New York Magazine film critic Ken Tucker's Top Ten of 2004:

1. Sideways
2. The Incredibles
3. How to Draw a Bunny
4. Collateral
5. House of Flying Daggers
6. End of the Century: The Story of the Ramones
7. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
8. Kill Bill, Vol. 2
9. A Very Long Engagement
10. Fahrenheit 9/11

If only Vol. 2 were really a top ten film...Tarantino, you disappointed me to no end. I suppose even self-indulgence has its limits!

mírala mírala mírala...

Peter Travers of Rolling Stone has chosen his top 10 films of 2004:

1. Sideways
2. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
3. Million Dollar Baby
4. The Aviator
5. The Incredibles
6. Kinsey
7. Closer
8. Finding Neverland
9. Kill Bill, Vol. 2
10. Fahrenheit 9/11

Fahrenheit 9/11--campaign advertisement as film? Please. In that case, the Swift Boat ads were infinitely more interesting.

words like violence...

AFI's 10 best films of 2004 (in alphabetical order):

-The Aviator
-Collateral
-Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
-Friday Night Lights
-The Incredibles
-Kinsey
-Maria Full of Grace
-Million Dollar Baby
-Sideways
-Spider-Man 2

Kinsey is so overrated. It's the typical injured-intellectual movie that has become so fashionable since A Beautiful Mind. And in no way does it even approach Crowe's graceful acting in that film. Away with you, Liam Neeson!

#1 - WES ANDERSON

Bolstered by the support of veteran director James L. Brooks and producer Polly Platt, Wes Anderson attained a status in the late 1990s that most young filmmakers only dream of achieving--he proved that he could work within the Hollywood studio system and still create distinctive, willfully quirky films infused with an independent sensibility.

Anderson's masterpiece, Rushmore, was completed in 1998. Critics gave the film an overwhelmingly enthusiastic reception: by the time it opened in wide release in February, 1999, Premiere magazine had called Rushmore the best film of the year, and co-star Bill Murray had already been named Best Supporting Actor by both the New York and Los Angeles Film Critics Associations, as well as the National Film Critics Society. A bittersweet coming-of-age tale about an underachieving but ambitious-to-a-fault teen, played with gusto by then unknown Jason Schwartzman, the film scored points for its wry, deadpan sense of humor and inventive visuals. Anderson drew from sources as disparate as Murmur of the Heart, Charles Schultz's Peanuts cartoons, and Meatballs, giving the proceedings a giddy absurdity without ever losing genuine compassion for his characters. Easily the most original and creative movie of the 1990s, Rushmore quickly established a cult following the likes of which had not been seen since the time of the Evil Dead movies. Despite the orgy of positive reviews and Touchstone studios' aggressive marketing campaign, however, the director's second feature failed to resonate with mainstream audiences who may have been expecting a laugh-a-minute Murray vehicle. Worse yet, when Academy Awards nominations were announced in mid-February, Murray was passed over in favor of actors in more traditionally high-minded roles.

Still, Anderson's ardent fans--including director Martin Scorsese, who listed Bottle Rocket as one of his 10 favorite movies of the 1990s--eagerly awaited his 2001 effort. Titled The Royal Tenenbaums, the J.D. Salinger-inspired tale revolved around a loose-knit, oddly-dressed, super-intellectual Manhattan family, and reunited some of the cast of Rushmore with a new phalanx of stars including Danny Glover, Anjelica Huston, and Gene Hackman. Given a careful platform release by Touchstone, the film garnered enough critical praise and positive word-of-mouth to rally over $50 million dollars in box office receipts--more than three times that of Rushmore--proving perhaps that the public had finally come around to Anderson's uniquely skewed worldview. At the very least, the members of the Academy had: In February, 2002, Anderson and Wilson garnered a Best Original Screenplay nomination for their multi-character opus.

What's next for the quirky and highly imaginative Anderson? The Life Acquatic with Steve Zissou will be released nationwide on December 25th. The film follows the internationally famous oceanographer Steve Zissou (Bill Murray) and his crew--Team Zissou--as they set sail on an expedition to hunt down the mysterious, elusive, possibly non-existant Jaguar Shark that killed Zissou's partner during the documentary filming of their latest adventure.

#2 - QUENTIN TARANTINO

Director/screenwriter/actor/producer Quentin Tarantino was perhaps the most distinctive and volatile talent to emerge in American film in the early '90s. Unlike the previous generation of American filmmakers, Tarantino learned his craft from his days as a video clerk, rather than as a film school student. Consequently, he developed an audacious fusion of pop culture and independent art house cinema; his films were thrillers that were distinguished as much by their clever, twisting dialogue as their outbursts of extreme violence.

In 1994, Tarantino's status was elevated to major film icon. Pulp Fiction won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival that May, beginning the flood of good reviews for the picture. Before Pulp Fiction was released in October, Oliver Stone's bombastic version of Natural Born Killers hit the theaters in August; Tarantino, who wrote the screenplay for that film, distanced himself from it and was only credited for writing the basic story. Pulp Fiction soon eclipsed Natural Born Killers in both acclaim and popularity. The film expertly captured the skill, wit, and violent temperament that is now associated with all Tarantino movies. Made for eight million dollars, the film eventually grossed over 100 million dollars and topped many critics' top ten lists. Pulp Fiction earned seven Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay (Tarantino and Avary), Best Actor (John Travolta), Best Supporting Actor (Samuel L. Jackson), and Best Supporting Actress (Uma Thurman).

In late 2002/early 2003, hype soon started to build around his fourth feature, Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003). A kinetic homage to revenge movies of the 1970s, Kill Bill featured Uma Thurman as a former assassin known as "The Bride." Waking from a five-year coma after her former comrades turned her wedding day into a frenzied bloodbath, The Bride vowed vengeance on both the assassins and her former boss, Bill (David Carradine). Easily one of the best films of 2003, Vol. 1 epitomized Tarantino's fascination with violence. However, instead of presenting a kind of violence that should strike fear into our hearts, Tarantino managed the trasnformative feat of presenting violence as an artform. Riveting visuals in an ultraviolent landscape gracefully recalled the kung-fu genre, and even drew parallels with the great director Stanley Kubrick.

What's next for Tarantino? Watch out for Inglorious Bastards, scheduled to be released in 2006, about a group of American soliders during WWII who manage to escape a Nazi execution squad.

#3 - JOEL & ETHAN COEN

Combining thoughtful eccentricity, wry humor, arch irony, and often brutal violence, the films of the Coen brothers have become synonymous with a style of filmmaking that pays tribute to classic American movie genres--especially film noir--while sustaining a firmly postmodern feel. Beginning with Blood Simple, their brutal, stylish 1984 debut, the brothers have amassed a body of work that has established them as two of the most compelling figures in American and world cinemas.

Fargo (1996), the Coen brothers' masterpiece, was a black, violent crime comedy with a surprisingly warm heart. It recalled Blood Simple in its themes of greed, corruption, and murder, but provided a more redemptive sentiment than was afforded to the characters of the previous film. What makes this film the best of the Coen brothers canon is that it succeeds in creating an entire universe of semi-absurdist characters, replete with their own unconsciously slapstick language. Fargo was not just a town in North Dakota--it was a simpler world hidden amidst our very own about which there was much to learn in the way of human nature and its particular eccentricities. The brothers shared a Best Original Screenplay Oscar for their work, and another Oscar, for Best Actress, went to Frances McDormand, to whom Joel had been married since 1984.

Following Fargo, the Coens went on to make The Big Lebowski in 1998. A blend of bungled crime and warped comedy, Lebowski was a laid-back, irreverent revision of the hardboiled L.A. detective genre. Probably the most original comedy of the 1990s, Lebowski was a testament to the Coen brothers' versatility in film and storytelling.

The year 2000 brought the Coens into the depression-era with O Brother, Where art Thou? An admittedly loose adaptation of Homer's The Odyssey, O Brother starred George Clooney, John Turturro, and Tim Blake Nelson as escaped convicts on a surreal journey through 1930s Mississippi. Blending crackpot comedy, melodrama, folky country music, and film noir, O Brother was proof that the Coen brothers truly had no limits.

Wasting no time in production of their next feature, the following year found Joel the recipient of his third Best Director award at Cannes for the darkly comic, monochromatic post-noir The Man Who Wasn't There. Starring Billy Bob Thornton as a humble, small-town barber who gets mixed up in a tangled web of blackmail and deceit, the moody atmosphere of The Man Who Wasn't There eschewed the wacky antics of O Brother in favor of a darker, more moody tone that recalled such earlier Coen efforts as Blood Simple and Barton Fink.

Two years later, Joel and Ethan re-teamed with Clooney for Intolerable Cruelty, a film that represented their version of a '30s screwball comedy. The film was noteworthy in that it was the first movie made by the brothers that did not originate with them; they rewrote a script that was already in existence. Joel and Ethan were also listed as executive producers on the 2003 Terry Zwigoff film Bad Santa, a story that came from one of their original ideas.

What's next for the prolific Coen brothers? 2005 should see the release of Paris, je t'aime, a film exploring the plurality of cinema in the neighborhoods of Paris.

#4 - TERRY ZWIGOFF

Sarcasm masking sensitivity and vulnerability is a theme with which Terry Zwigoff is quite familiar. Zwigoff's first feature-length documentary, Crumb (1994), proved to be a devastating examination of a family utterly divorced from mainstream "normalcy" as well as a portrait of a uniquely twisted artist. Crumb's emotionally disturbed brother Maxon was a particularly poignant reminder of the suffering dysfunctional families can inflict. Winner of several critics' awards as well as one of the best-reviewed films of the 1990s, Crumb was partly responsible for the Academy's drastic reassessment of its nomination process when it failed to receive an Oscar nod for Best Documentary. Though Zwigoff's unflinching film caused a riff with his subject, he and Crumb were reconciled several years later.

Refusing to go Hollywood and compromise his long-standing aversion to corporate commercialism, Zwigoff turned down numerous projects, including The Virgin Suicides (2000), and struggled for five years to get an adaptation of cartoonist Daniel Clowes's graphic novel Ghost World made. Co-scripted with Clowes and starring the inimitably deadpan Thora Birch and Scarlett Johansson as two alienated teens stuck in a generic suburban city, Ghost World was far wiser, funnier, and more moving than the usual teen film. Suffering from more than just an average case of adolescent anomie, Birch's Enid's journey toward an alternative life is aided by Illeana Douglas's hilariously earnest art teacher and Steve Buscemi's gently eccentric collector Seymour; all of the players exude veritable humanity rather than Hollywood gloss. Directed with an assured low-key style that suited both its subject and its comic book source, Ghost World showed that Zwigoff could handle a fictional narrative as well as documentaries and became a summer 2001 art house hit. Seymour's onscreen record collection of jazz and blues 78s belongs to Zwigoff himself.

In last year's Bad Santa, Zwigoff takes the dry humor to a whole new level. Giving one of the best performances of the year, Billy Bob Thornton stars as the bad Santa--a nihilistic, sometimes-suicidal version of the Grinch who stole Christmas. Of course, like all of Zwigoff's films, Bad Santa doesn't merely start and end with the dry wit. Rather, the sarcasm is shown to mask vulnerability, tenderness, and genuine emotion. The Thornton character is not the monster he projects himself to be. When he befriends an introverted 8-year-old boy, we get a glimpse of the bad Santa's true self. Nietzsche once wrote that compassion for the friend should conceal itself under a hard shell, and you should be able to break a tooth on it. "That way it will have delicacy and sweetness." Such delicate sweetness is found in Thornton's character through his friendship with the kid--one of the most disarming relationships in film that year.

What's next for Zwigoff? Look for the 2005 release of Art School Confidential, about an undercover cop (John Malkovich) who poses as an artist before coming to the conclusion that pretending to be a serial killer will lead him to great acclaim.