The year's 20 best movies

By PETER CALDER and RUSSELL BAILLIE

1. THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING

See, it was worth getting all over-excited about. And not just because the talent behind it and the scenery was ours. The first in Peter Jackson's adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's fantasy trilogy did everything that was expected of it and more, making it the year's greatest screen spectacle, greatest adventure, best book adaptation, and certainly the best film involving wizards you're likely to see ... well until next year's second instalment, The Two Towers.

And it did all that while still managing to unfurl Tolkien's dense tale with ease, let the characters breathe and establish themselves without being overwhelmed by the eye-popping action or the special effects.

It's not without its flaws, but it gets so much right in its take on the first third of a supposedly impossible-to-adapt book it's hard not to be swept up in it all and left feeling desperate to see parts two and three - even if you already know how the story ends.

The Fellowship of the Ring is a great film, one that reminds us what incredible magic true movie wizards can do.

2. SHREK

Co-directed by braindrain Kiwi animator Andrew Adamson, this fairytale spoof might have seemed amusing enough on paper - the tale of an un-jolly green giant's efforts to get some peace and quiet when his swamp becomes a refugee camp to a bunch of storybook characters.

On screen it turned into something splendid, care of its wondrous visuals - a disconcerting blend of the real and the fantastical - and its irreverent sense of humour.

It also served to remind us that in the right (non-Disney) hands, "they lived happily ever after" can still make a really good ending.

3. YOU CAN COUNT ON ME


Centred on one of the year's finest performances - in Laura Linney's portrayal of a small town solo mother dealing with the return of her errant brother - this directing debut for screenwriter Kenneth Lonergan offered something you hardly ever see in movies for grown-ups: an intelligent, witty and poignant look at the stuff of adult-sibling relationships and the meaning of family. A memorable, lovely film that, of course, hardly anyone has seen.

4. BRIDGET JONES'S DIARY


The film of the bestselling novel of the newspaper column was an utterly beguiling romantic comedy enlivened by Renee Zellweger's portrayal of a heartsore London singleton who worries that life and love have passed her by. Debutante director Sharon Maguire extracted a reptilian performance from Hugh Grant as Bridget's caddish boss but Zellweger (who adopted a perfect Sloane Ranger accent and put on 10kg) owned the film and was a knockout.

5. RAIN

It didn't carry off the gong for the best local film of the year - that honour went to Snakeskin and should have gone to Stickmen - but Christine Jeffs' adaptation of Kirsty Gunn's short novel of lost innocence was a work of considerable mastery, ravishing to look at and driven by two heartrendingly authentic child performances from Alicia Fulford-Wierzbicki and Aaron Murphy. Jeffs, an acclaimed commercial director, had a tendency towards visual overdesign - although John Toon's sublime cinematography was equal to any challenge she threw at him - but as the waves lap gently on a North Auckland beach and a family slowly melts down she has the patience to wait and watch.

What was most impressive was the way the minutely examined family seems sealed in a suffocating cocoon of its own making.

Jeffs, who wrote the screenplay, teased out the emotional complexities with enormous assurance and the acting (Sarah Peirse, faintly loopy with longing; Alistair Browning, exuding a helpless decency) was at once guileless and laden with foreboding, quite devoid of showiness or self-regard.

It's hard to think of a more accomplished debut, or deny that this is the best Kiwi film in the thick end of a decade.

6. MEMENTO


For a film about amnesia caused by brain damage, Memento was memorable even if it risked inducing a concentration headache from director Christopher Nolan's telling his whodunit backwards. Guy Pearce was in great form as a guy who can't make new memories on the revenge trail of his wife's killer. Or is he? Sorry, who are you again? It was one to keep you awake nights trying to rewind the whole thing forward to unravel its twists-within-twists.

But it wasn't just a mind game, it was simply the best film noir in many a year.

7. O, BROTHER, WHERE ART THOU?


The Coen brothers' take on The Odyssey was a fast and loose story of rogues on the run in the American South of the 1930s. The Homeric allusions are thick on the ground but remain incidental diversions in the boys' most affectionate film since Raising Arizona. The valentine to a lost era of Americana also spawned the year's best soundtrack, a virtual encyclopaedia of southern style. Splendid.

8. DANCER IN THE DARK


This anti-musical from Danish inconoclast Lars Von Trier came with the most heart-stopping finale of the year. Contrasting the utterly sad melodrama of Selma - played by avant-pop star Bjork - against her daydream musical fantasies, it wove a strange and unsettling spell all its own. The music was better than Moulin Rouge's too.

9. NURSE BETTY


The most meticulously crafted satirical comedy since Being There was the story of a small-town waitress (that Zellweger girl again) in love with a soap opera doctor, who goes into psychological shutdown when she sees her husband killed and flees for Hollywood to find the man of her dreams. Life becomes indistinguishable from art in a film that achieves the tension of a thriller but has pointedly satirical intent and was deeply satisfying.

10. AMORES PERROS


The style of young Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu owed debts to Tarantino, Altman and John Sayles, but the precociously assured stylistic bravura and fevered energy are all his own and announce an original, distinctive new talent. His rambling, epic-length tale of literally intersecting lives in Mexico City was a hugely ambitious undertaking but he carries it off and displays a sure feel for the dangerous disorder of human desire.

11. IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE


An exquisite meditation on memory and desire, Wong Kar Wai's tender, delicate love story had a surefooted command of mood and was as tantalising as Brief Encounter because the lovers - played by two of Hong Kong's biggest stars - seem always about to fall into the liaison which is their fate from the first moment we see them. Visually ravishing and rapturously sexy, it was an object lesson in the power of restraint and something very special.

12. STICKMEN


It might not have had much depth beyond its carefully lit green-felt surface, but this caper about three pool-playing mates who get themselves unwittingly mixed up in a colourful Wellington underworld made for rambunctious entertainment, with a small sideline in social commentary about the modern Kiwi bloke's lot.

13. TRAFFIC

Every modern American war, it seems, eventually gets the movie it deserves. For America's "War on Drugs" that movie was Traffic, a compelling, sprawling drama which shows that campaign as a grand political hypocrisy, hazardous to users and largely meaningless to those who supply them.

With its ensemble displaying some fine performances, the ambitious film by Steven Soderbergh deservedly won him a best director Oscar.

14. CUNNAMULLA


Dennis O'Rourke's documentary of small-town life 800km west of Brisbane was a grim and sometimes bleakly comic portrait of fringe dwellers that managed to avoid the obvious targets.

The concept may strike some observers as exploitative but it conveyed a strong sense of the complexity of a world that documentary makers so often reduce to easily chewed platitudes. An intelligent and engrossing piece of filmmaking.

15. A LA PLACE DU COEUR


A 3-year-old intimate domestic drama by Robert Guediguian confirmed his status as a European version of Ken Loach and a filmmaker of heart and soul. He relocated to working-class Marseille the James Baldwin novella If Beale Street Could Talk and cast his wife and best mate in a story about childhood friendship blossoming into problematic teenage love. Dignified, unpretentious and rich in the drama of being human.

16. BILLY ELLIOT


It's an old story but this tale of how young Billy makes ballet his escape from his grim life in an English mining village was done so very well. With fine performances, especially from young Jamie Bell as the title character, the hit from director Stephen Daldry's film managed to walk a fine line between inspirational crowd-pleaser and gritty kitchen sink drama.

17. THE CONTENDER


A White House drama smart enough to satisfy the most demanding fan of The West Wing, this film earned an Oscar nomination for Joan Allen in her role as a vice-presidential candidate whose nomination becomes mired in scandal.

It came so cleverly plotted and driven by performances of such ferocious intelligence that it was easy to forgive its potential flaws, chiefly that it might seem an apologia for the philandering Bill Clinton.

18. SEXY BEAST


A bracing antidote to the blokish crime caper flicks, this is the story of a retired gangster (Ray Winstone) whose blissful life on the Costa del Sol is interrupted by his former gangland colleague (Ben Kingsley) who wants Gal to take a new job.

The Pinteresque dialogue exuded genuine menace and the film was a tight and claustrophobic chamber piece steered by an ensemble that was a treat to watch.

19. SNAKESKIN


It wasn't really our best movie but it was still one wild ride - a sex, drugs and rock'n'roll road movie showing the South Island in its best light, even if some of the locals proved a bit of a worry.

Director Gillian Ashurst's debut - and Melanie Lynskey's second New Zealand feature after Heavenly Creatures - proved a heady mix of fantasy and culture clash.

Cult following here we come?

20. HOUSE OF MIRTH


Terence Davies, whose short memoirs of childhood in working-class Liverpool, Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes were rapturously beautiful cinematic tone poems, found the dark and violent heart of Edith Wharton's novel, casting The X-Files' Gillian Anderson as the benighted Lily Bart seeking succour in the shark pool of New York society in 1905.

The gorgeously dressed interiors make a tangled moral jungle and the film, which abounded in meticulously observed detail, was profoundly absorbing.

2001 – The year in review