TimeOut's best films of 2004

Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson in Lost in Translation.

Although it was another year of superheroes, star vehicles and sequels, low-key charmers still reminded us about the true power of movies. TimeOut film reviewers Peter Calder and Russell Baillie select the best movies of the year

1. LOST IN TRANSLATION

Fading film star Bob Harris (Bill Murray), in Japan to front a television commercial, meets bored and unloved twentysomething Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) in a Tokyo hotel and nothing happens. Therein lies the charm of a watchful, intelligent film which belongs in a long tradition of chaste love movies, from Brief Encounter to Before Sunrise. Director Sofia Coppola wrote the script with Murray in mind and the result restored our faith in movies' ability to tell stories that go straight to the heart of our shared humanity. It also finally exploited the full range of Murray, who had Bob Mitchum's knowingness and none of his menace and turned in one of the best screen performances of any year. The pay-off line - actually a non-line - was to die for and only the terminally prosaic could wonder what he actually said to her.

2. ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND

The best film yet from mindbending screenwriter Charlie Kaufman was one that played on the memory long after the credits rolled, which was fitting because it was a film about the nature of recall, romance and and how relationships can affect who we are, even after they've fallen apart.

With Jim Carrey shutting up and acting, just as he did in The Truman Show, and Kate Winslet playing his former darling, Clementine, from under a riot of dayglo hair, Eternal Sunshine had an unlikely couple to go with its romantic comedy. But this was a love story in reverse - Carrey's character decides to have his memories of Clementine electronically erased after they break up, only to have second thoughts and find himself chasing his evaporating recollections through his subconscious. The result - as directed by French music video whiz Michel Gondry - was a bittersweet contemplation of how it is indeed better to have loved and lost, than never have loved at all.

3. THE STATION AGENT

Like its main character, it was small of stature and big of heart, but the film that won the audience award at Sundance last year was a gem, an offbeat and utterly charming story of the redemptive power of friendship, whose unforgettably oddball trio recalled Percy Adlon's 80s charmer Bagdad Cafe.

The dwarf who inherited an abandoned railway station in the backblocks of New Jersey found his resolve to hold the world at bay undermined by a mercilessly cheerful Cuban coffee-seller and grief-stricken middle-aged artist. It was another film in which nothing much happened but where it was impossible to tear your eyes away as the movie explored territory where most never go: the lonely passions of the human heart. The best of the year's many small charmers.

4. THE BARBARIAN INVASIONS

Cannes-lauded and the Oscar-winner for best foreign film, this Quebecois offering which revisited the characters of director Denys Arcand's 1986 film Decline of the American Empire was The Big Chill for grown-ups in a post-September 11 world. A perfectly judged comedy of manners, it explored with acuteness and not a trace of hectoring preachiness one of the sharpest ironies of our age: that the rebels of the 60s have spawned a generation as hostile as they were to all that their parents held dear.

The Montreal history professor who was the ladies' man of the earlier film lay dying of cancer and the writer-director explored the complicated jumble of remembered resentments, good intentions and missed opportunities that constitute human (particularly family) relations. The breadth of vision and generosity of spirit were remarkable and the ensemble played as if they had never been apart.

5. ELEPHANT

Gus van Sant's patchy career hit a peak with this brilliant and disturbing meditation on the massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, which enacted a fictional facsimile of the real events but adopted an elliptical time-slipping narrative schema that made for something close to cinematic fugue.

The Palme d'Or winner at Cannes in 2003, it was a true original, a technical tour de force whose formal inventiveness never felt like a gimmick. Incidentally, it showed up Michael Moore's Bowling For Columbine as the shameless self-aggrandising it was and there was a more-than-oblique critique of the way the media - particularly reality television - makes prime-time drama of little lives and offers the certainty of infamy as inducement to monstrous crime. The cast of unknowns and a narrative approach that constantly undermined our expectations made for an utterly engrossing film.

6. THE RETURN

The bleak and beautiful debut feature by a Russian actor recalled the entrancing and enigmatic 1970s masterpieces of Andrei Tarkovsky. Although it was drenched in a sort of cinematic mysticism, there was nothing arcane about it. This was an unadorned story of an estranged father and his confused sons, but the assured hand of the film-maker invested it with an allegorical power which was subtle and suggestive yet lucid and accessible. The relationships were laced with biblical imagery. And the exteriors abounded in compositions of eerie and faintly menacing beauty, accentuated by a film-processing technique that seemed to both bleach and saturate the colour into an almost monochromatic palette. The youngsters' performances, luminous and harrowingly authentic, were beyond praise, and the film - haunting, evocative and handsome - lingered in the mind for days.

7. IN MY FATHER'S DEN

This adaptation of the Maurice Gee novel wasn't only a critical hit, it managed to reach a big local audience beyond the festival and arthouse circuit. That was despite being the toughest dramatic feature to spring from these shores in some time.

Director-writer Brad McGann's script updated and relocated the 1972 Gee story to Central Otago and the return home of photojournalist Paul Prior (rising English star Matthew MacFadyen), who arrives late for his father's funeral, then gets entangled in the lives of the locals, including former girlfriend's daughter Celia (Emily Barclay).

With striking performances from its leads and supporting cast alike - and a sense of place and atmosphere created by its moody photography and score - it made for a special film, one that was part psychological thriller, part family skeleton drama, and all New Zealand classic.

8. SPIDER-MAN 2

The first of the movies in this list to have a "2" to its name was the best film of what was a lacklustre mid-2004 blockbuster season. It not only improved on the original, it improved on the concept of comic-book flicks being turned into franchises.

Yes, it did have a soft soapy centre but it also had a heart beneath all that red and blue lycra and a sizeable funnybone right next to where Spidey's web fluid spouts from. It upped the ante on its high-flying, runaway train-stopping special effects but didn't make them the whole point of the film. The best superhero flick yet. 

9. THE INCREDIBLES

For their latest computer-animated extravaganza, Pixar put aside the insects and toys and fish of their earlier hits and instead went with people, albeit a family of superheroes forced into stopping their crime-fighting ways and living an ordinary suburban life - at least, until Dad's longing for the good old days got the better of him. The resulting story was a riot of a film that managed the trick of being all things to everyone - multilevel comedy, action thriller and a touching family drama, as well as setting the new standard for computer animation. Yes, it's worrying just how many gigabytes and how much time must have gone into giving Mr Incredible's beer belly the right degree of bounce, but you can only admire Pixar's efforts at getting it just perfect.

10. SINCE OTAR LEFT

In her feature debut, a respected a French documentary film-maker used three generations of women to play the central characters in a deceptively slight but deeply affecting film that explores the power of fantasy and the complicated mix of self-deception and duty we owe to those we love. The title character, who never appeared in the film, works in Paris and sends money to his family in Tbilisi, the crumbling capital of the former Soviet republic of Georgia. But when he dies in an accident his sister and her daughter resolve to keep it from Otar's mother. The nonagenarian Esther Gorintin, a stage veteran in her native country, was a revelation and the film was distinguished by its narrative, emotional economy, and an easy loping pace. Small, character-driven European films often don't return after the film festivals and this unsentimental and touching gem was welcome.

11. COLLATERAL

The thriller of the year starred Tom Cruise, rising star Jamie Foxx, and Los Angeles at night. Under the cool control of director Michael Mann it made for a winning combination with its plot about a hitman in LA for one night to take care of business, and Foxx as the mild but meticulous cabbie who is forced to do a deal with the devil in his back seat. Acting-wise, Foxx stole the show from his fare, his edgy performance helping make this a nerve-frayer all the way to its curiously conventional showdown.

12. JAPANESE STORY

Toni Collette, who played the nuptially challenged title character in Muriel's Wedding, reminded us that she is one of Australia's best actors in a handsome and imaginative film, the best this year from the country to our west. The story of a workaholic geologist assigned to escort a visiting Japanese man who may represent a big business opportunity started as an acidic study of culture clash but morphed into something much deeper and more challenging. The first feature shot in the red and eerily beautiful Pilbara of Australia's northwest made the desert into the film's third, and sometimes main, character. And the plot - with its huge narrative lurch at the midpoint - had the character of a thriller. Taking a strikingly original approach to an old idea - it merges white Australians' unease about their burned hinterland and their suspicion of their Asian neighbours - it wrapped a cracking good yarn around something ineffable and suggestive. Very special.

13. MYSTIC RIVER

Clint Eastwood's modern heroic style found its perfect outlet in a drama set in blue-collar Boston, a masterful rumination on sin and redemption which attained the status of a great American tragedy. The volcanic central performance by the long underrated Sean Penn, recalled young Marlon Brando. But the whole ensemble, rich in great names, contributed to a dense and intricate drama of crime and punishment in which ironies, coincidences and misunderstandings collided and multiplied.

The film cleverly revealed its characters' stories only gradually and there was no supporting role that wasn't crucial. If the cynical ending failed to interrogate the idea that rough justice is more rough than just, this was still a substantial and serious film, easily the equal of anything the star director has done and possibly his best work.

14. RUBY AND QUENTIN

The clown prince of French farce, Francis Veber, turned in a film as good as anything he's done, pairing two of France's best serious actors, Gerard Depardieu and Jean Reno, in a nimble and enjoyable comedy about an imbecile and a suspicious gangster. Depardieu's Quentin, a hopelessly incompetent bank robber, shared a cell with Ruby (Reno) a hood with a secret who was sure Quentin was a police plant. Needless to say, the cheerful halfwit won the crook over - but Veber had a lot of fun along the way. The subplot involving a young woman was something of a distraction but it was rib-ticklingly, laugh-out-loud funny.

15. SHREK 2

He was the international box-office office champ of 2004 so doesn't that make the non-jolly green giant - in the words of John Lennon - "bigger than Jesus"? That said, Shrek 2 wasn't quite as radical or satirical as the first, but it kept the laughs coming. And in Puss-In-Boots there was the potential for a whole new franchise despite Donkey's view on the new arrival: "The position of annoying talking animal has already been taken".

16. BEFORE SUNSET

The nine-years-later sequel to Before Sunset might have seemed ill-advised, especially for those who still treasured the charms of the original brief Euro-romantic encounter. But director Richard Linklater kept it deceptively simple, having his leading couple Jesse (Ethan Hawke), and Celine (Julie Delpy) reconnect over 80 minutes of real-time conversation on the streets of Paris. That may not sound like much, but its insights about love lost and possibly rekindled made it as captivating as the original.

17. KILL BILL 2

Like Spider-Man, the second instalment topped the first, although this wasn't a sequel but a second volume in Quentin Tarantino's genre-mashing revenge saga. And while it wasn't as flashy or outlandish as Vol 1, it had a bigger, blacker heart - mostly thanks to Uma Thurman as Beatrix Kiddo, the assassin out to get her former boss and colleagues after they left her for dead when she tried to quit the murder business for motherhood and marriage.

While the first instalment dragged through stylistic indulgences, this one allowed its story to unfurl and its characters to relish the Tarantino dialogue - in between swordfights, of course.

18. BAD SANTA

The brilliantly creepy Terry Zwigoff (Crumb, Ghost World) took a Coen brothers idea, added Billy Bob Thornton and made of the mixture a movie so gleefully obscene and blackly nasty that it was impossible not to cringe while revelling in its bad taste. Thornton played a nihilistic alcoholic loser who, each year, plays Santa in a department store. By day he verbally abuses the odious children who land on his knee and by night he and his elf helper disarm the alarms and rip the place off. He takes advantage of an obese boy who is both fatherless and friendless and the cruel and abusive relationship between the two is all of a piece with the film's iconoclastic concept. It was almost derailed by a jarringly sentimental ending but was still a wild and exhilarating ride.

19. OPEN HEARTS

A spare and unflinchingly honest Danish domestic drama made according to the now-affected Dogme 95 "vow of chastity" took us in for a close look at the messy, passionate behaviour of humans under stress and nailed it perfectly and effortlessly. It was hard to watch at times but there was not an unauthentic moment in it. The plot was the stuff of daytime television: young man crippled by a speeding car driven by the wife of the doctor who tends him, who then ... well, if you didn't see it, rent it. The film is full of surprises and the skill with which this tight ensemble unfolds the extraordinary drama of ordinary lives cannot fail to impress.

The bleakly ironic Danish title (which translates as "I love you for ever") gives some sense of the simple fallibility of the characters and the sense of having stepped into real life lasted for hours after the credits roll. A knockout.

20. GARDEN STATE

Scrubs star Zach Braff's first feature as writer-director was an accomplished, heartfelt piece about coming home to find home isn't quite there anymore - and finding lithium dependency and the awkwardness of falling in love. It's a sign that this is a no-ego vehicle for Braff in that despite casting himself in the lead role, Braff the director got such winning performances from his main supporting players - especially Natalie Portman, who was beyond irresistible as the livewire romantic interest of Braff's emotionally comatose character Andrew Largeman.

It was a bleakly funny portrait of an over-medicated generation, and the best romantic comedy starring a sitcom guy, ever.