After long arguments and the occasional agreement, Herald reviewers PETER CALDER and RUSSELL BAILLIE finally came up with a list of the 20 best flicks of 2002.
1. Whale Rider
Yes, it's cheating to include this, as it's not officially out until January 30, but would you rather be told about all the great films you missed or told about the one film you should see in 2003?
We've been lucky enough to see it already. We haven't quite recovered. We're going again, we suspect we will love it even more second-time round.
To say director-writer Niki Caro's adaptation of Witi Ihimaera's novel packs a bit of an emotional wallop is an understatement; there are parts of Whale Rider which dance a haka on your tear ducts.
That's all because of Caro's gentle way with her story and the devastating lead performances of Keisha Castle-Hughes, as 12-year-old Paikea, and Rawiri Paratene as her grandfather. Both living in an East Coast settlement steeped in the myth of the original Paikea, an ancestor who arrived on the back of a whale, the pair become involved in a kind of battle of wills about the leadership of their tribe.
The result is magical and resonates far beyond its specific location - the audience at this year's Toronto Film Festival thought so when they voted it best movie of the acclaimed North American festival against some heavyweight competition. About now, Caro is readying to go to the Sundance Film Festival where it will undoubtedly pick up more international momentum.
Yes, for most of us Whale Rider will be a movie of 2003 and we're picking it's going to be our defining film of the New Year. But, hey, its story starts in 2002 and this film about a New Zealand myth may well become an international legend. - RB
2. Y Tu Mama Tambien
A sexy and sweetly melancholic road movie, more widely seen because a morals group tried to have it banned, this story of two Mexican teenagers and a lustrous but ill-used married woman was indisputably explicit but the film was more interested in exploring the characters' internal lives.
The central trio's performances were unaffected and courageous and the film was more complex and interesting than the male fantasy its bare story outline might suggest. - PC
3. Yi Yi (A One And A Two ... )
Taiwanese director Edward Yang's beautifully observed drama was full of quietly wrenching moments, a depiction of a superficially contented Taipei family which was culturally specific but transcendentally universal. Deftly and elegantly interlacing various plotlines, Yang created a visually arresting film which aggregated small incidents into a rich and rounded film of profound humanity. -PC
4. Last Orders
Director Fred Schepisi made Graham Swift's wonderful Booker Prize-winning novel about four men travelling to scatter the ashes of a fifth into a cinematic fugue which the medium might have been invented for. Cutting between past and present with technical and emotional fluency, he brought disparate but connected stories slowly into focus and the cream of British acting talent all worked at the top of their game. - PC
5. The Tunnel
The thriller of the year was this based-on-fact story of a group who dug an escape route from West Berlin under the freshly cemented Wall to the east of the divided city. It became more suspenseful with each swing of its shovel and an affecting human drama, whether it was showing us the diggers' grim determination or their exiled families dealing with life under the all-seeing eye of the East German secret police. A subterranean classic. - RB
6. The Man Without A Past
Cannes Jury Prize winner from Finnish master of the deadpan, Aki Kaurismaki, dressed a hard-headed social critique in a droll and offbeat yarn about an amnesiac who stumbles into life on the margins of Helsinki society. Effortlessly transcending its formulaic elements, it created specific and individual characters and made the most memorably engrossing and oddball picture of the year. - PC
7. The Piano Teacher
Deeply disturbing, darkly brilliant, Michael Haneke's portrait of the relationship between a music teacher and a talented pupil belonged to a tradition of social critique which depicted the bourgeoisie as a vipers' nest of repressed emotion. French actress Isabelle Huppert's performance as a chillingly plausible and emotionally repressed sociopath was the best of a distinguished career which ushered us into the presence of real horror. Hard to watch but a film of mastery. - PC
8. Mulholland Drive
America's most celebrated celluloid surrealist David Lynch returned to baffling form after the relatively pleasant diversion of The Straight Story.
A gripping, bloodcurdling and strangely sexy film, it might have started life as a pilot for television, but it ended up as the year's greatest cinematic headscratcher with its labyrinth centred on two women mixed up in a vortex of Hollywood power games, parallel universes, amnesia, films-within-films and (insert your own theory here about what really happened).
With alluring performances from both Australian newcomer Naomi Watts and Laura Elena Harring as the leading pair, and a final reel best watched between the fingers, Mulholland Drive still plays on the mind months afterwards. - RB
9. Lantana
An intense, sophisticated chamber piece, the second feature outing for acclaimed Australian commercials director Ray Lawrence looked like a murder mystery but became a pungent and thoughtful rumination on the nature of marriage and the precarious process of being human.
Superb performances, evocative score and eerie but unpretentious cinematography turned a film which might have been contrived into one of the most satisfying of the year. - PC
10. The Son's Room
Italian cinematic humorist Nanni Moretti was in sombre mood creating a gently observed, heartrending story of a middle-class family visited by sudden tragedy. The 2001 Palme d'Or winner at Cannes was free of sentimentalism and cheap manipulations, its screenplay an object lesson in restraint which lent the performances from a wonderful core cast a ringing authenticity. - PC
11. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
The second film in Peter Jackson's LOTR trilogy might not carry the emotional weight of the first as the strands of its story spread out across Middle-earth, but it sure turns up the pace and the visual wizardry whether it's in the performance of the partly computer-animated Gollum or its grand finale, the siege of Helm's Deep.
Oh, and it's nice to have Gandalf back, too. White suits him, don't you think? - RB
12. Insomnia
After his startlingly original American indie flick, Memento, it might have seemed director Christopher Nolan had gone for an easy mainstream option of remaking a European obscurity (a bleak Norwegian film of the same name) with a couple of big names (Al Pacino and Robin Williams).
Instead, he delivered a psychological thriller made all the more enticing by the performances of the leads (Pacino as fish-out-of-water cop, Williams as murder suspect) and the setting - an Alaskan town named Nightmute where the Arctic summer means 24-hour daylight. - RB
13. Apocalypse Now Redux
Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 Vietnam War masterpiece was a sprawling, bloated, brilliant, unrestrained tour de force without a trick shot, much less a computer-generated image. The new cut tampered with a cinematic icon and mostly the Redux was a reduction - but the film was always going to be big enough to sustain the assault of reinterpretation and it was good to be reminded that they don't make movies like they used to. - PC
14. Dogtown and the Z-Boys
The sports doco of many a year was this retrospective study of the birth of vertical skateboarding and with it extreme sports by a bunch of kids from the wrong side of Los Angeles who went on to become the first global stars of the boom-and-bust pursuit. Directed by Stacey Peralta, who was one of the Z-Boys, and entertainingly narrated by Sean Penn, it delivered an insightful and visually thrilling study on how popular culture spreads and becomes co-opted by the mainstream. - RB
15. Donnie Darko
This surreal suburban fable of teenage gloom and, yes, doom was the take-notice imaginative and original debut of twentysomething American director-writer Richard Kelly. Playing like a dark riff on 80s flicks such as Back to the Future, it told its time-shifting, apocalyptically themed story through the eyes of the titular Donnie, who, as performed by Jake Gyllenhaal, emerged as the year's most memorable study in teen alienation. And it was certainly the best film in quite some years to feature a giant bunny as a pivotal character. - RB
16. About A Boy
As with High Fidelity, this further Nick Hornby hit novel arrived on screen with much of its bittersweet charm intact.
With an impressive performance by Hugh Grant as late-30s, well-off commitment-phobe Will who, having hatched a plan to date only single mothers, forms a reluctant friendship with 12-year-old Marcus (Nicholas Hoult), About A Boy managed to be funny, touching, honest and an entertaining study on modern romance and the nature of family. Nice soundtrack from Badly Drawn Boy, too. - RB
17. Ghost World
Terry Zwigoff, who explored deep dysfunction in his biography of cartoonist Robert Crumb, gave a sharp and original spin to the disaffected teenager genre in a film about a very odd odd couple - a high-school misanthrope and a fortysomething lonely heart.
Zwigoff and Daniel Clowes, who wrote the source cartoon novel, had a feel for their teenage character which was remarkable for two middle-aged men and Thora Birch's slightly self-mocking performance nailed it perfectly. - RB
18. Unfaithful
One of the year's best mainstream dramas was this amazingly restrained and textured film about infidelity based on a 60s French thriller. Compelling central performances by Diane Lane and Richard Gere made for a film driven by the knowledge that sexual betrayal need not come from explicit discontent but rather by a lust which borders on rage. Not quite a masterpiece but for something from the mainstream, it was a delightful surprise. - RB
19. La Ville Est Tranquille
Working on an operatic scale but with a microscopic focus, the filmmaker laureate of Marseilles, Robert Guedigian, created a sprawling panorama of the city, made up like Nashville, say, or Short Cuts, of loosely interconnected stories.
Often grim, it was leavened by the writer-director's evident affection for his characters and was the work of a man at the peak of his game. - PC
20. Star Wars II: Attack of the Clones
"I'm just a simple man trying to make his way in the universe." With that Temuera Morrison as intergalactic bounty hunter Jango Fett delivered the best line in a movie that didn't have a lot of good ones. But Attack of the Clones was still the thrill that the previous prequel, The Phantom Menace, wasn't. Yes, it did look like The Sound of Music in Space for a minute or two. And yes, Hayden Christensen's Anakin Skywalker did show that Darth Vader was a really whiney teenager. But it looked brilliant in all its digital glory and restored the sense of wonder to the franchise. - RB
Top 20 films of 2002
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