When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences looked at 2003, it gave its Best Picture award to The Return of the King, a steadily-more-tedious bore of an epic that excises the best part of Tolkien's trilogy to make room for a four-hour sequence of hobbits jumping on a bed. (That's four hours in subjective time, of course. It is possible that I fell asleep during this scene and that the time that actually elapsed was longer.) These are all better:
1. The Wire 2
Written by David Simon, Ed Burns, Joy Lusco, Rafael Alvarez, and George Pelecanos
Directed by Ed Bianchi, Elodie Keene, Steve Shill, Thomas J. Wright, Dan Attias, Tim Van Patten, Rob Bailey, and Ernest Dickerson
Not only do I love the oft-maligned second season of The Wire; I think the union leader at the heart of the story, Frank Sobotka—a tragic hero who thinks he can do good by doing evil, and is brought down by it—is the show's best character this side of Omar.
2. Tarnation
Directed by Jonathan Caouette
By 2003 video cameras were standard equipment for a middle-class American household, and they had been for long enough that a documentary like this was possible. Tarnation takes the video diaries that Caouette started shooting at age 11 and assembles them into something absorbing, unsettling, and visually stunning.
3. The Saddest Music in the World
Directed by Guy Maddin
Written by Maddin and George Toles, from a story by Kazuo Ishiguro
You probably haven't heard of this one, but I swear it's one of the funniest comedies of the 21st century.
4. Osama
Written and directed by Siddiq Barmak
No, it isn't about bin Laden. But it is, in a way, about his mindset.
5. Lost in Translation
Written and directed by Sofia Coppola
If you want to appreciate how good Bill Murray is, watch the scene where his character makes a whiskey commercial. Everyone on the set but him speaks Japanese, and he has no idea what's going on. He tells us this with small movements of his jaw and eyes, and as I watched in the theater every one of those little facial ticks sparked spasms of audience laughter. I'm not an actor, but I'm pretty sure of this: It can't be easy to make people laugh just by moving your pupils slightly to the left or right.
6. Saraband
Written and directed by Ingmar Bergman
The sequel to Scenes From a Marriage is moving, disturbing, bleak; even better, I think, than the original.
7. Kill Bill: Vol. 1
Written and directed by Quentin Tarantino
A trash symphony.
8. Good Bye Lenin!
Directed by Wolfgang Becker
Written by Becker and Bernd Lichtenberg
There's a whiff of Ostalgie here, but I can overlook that—the concept is just so deliriously funny, and the protagonists' motive so sweet.
9. Looney Tunes: Back in Action
Directed by Joe Dante
Written by Larry Doyle
Dante dubbed this the anti–Space Jam, and that is exactly what he made.
10. The Same River Twice
Directed by Robb Moss
What The Big Chill was trying to be.
Honorable mentions:
11. The Triplets of Belleville (Sylvain Chomet)
12. Swimming Pool (François Ozon)
13. The Agronomist (Jonathan Demme)
14. Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter...and Spring (Kim Ki-duk)
15. A Mighty Wind (Christopher Guest)
16. Capturing the Friedmans (Andrew Jarecki)
17. All the Real Girls (David Gordon Green)
18. Hurt (Mark Romanek)
19. My Architect (Nathaniel Kahn)
20. Cunnilingus in North Korea (Young-Hae Chang, Marc Voge)
And I guess I should give a shout-out to Dogville, if only because anyone writing about the films of 2003 is probably obliged to take a stand one way or another on Dogville. I am pro-Dogville, mostly. I grant you that it is misanthropic, but plenty of good art is misanthropic. What's less forgivable is that it's too long.
Of the films of 2003 that I haven't seen, I'm most interested in The Flower of Evil.