Top Tens:
CECILIA SAYAD

1. Talk to Her
If, by definition, melodramas are built upon dichotomies such as right/wrong, good/evil, and so forth, Pedro Almodóvar reinvents the genre by collapsing these categories with his complicated and fascinating characters. Unnecessary to mention that the acting is superb: Almodóvar seems to discover a new talent every year. But more than reinventing the genre and introducing the audiences to new stars (he "discovered" Carmen Maura, Victoria Abril and Marisa Paredes; but also Antonio Banderas and Penelope Cruz), the Spanish director reinvents himself time and again. Audiences and critics have rightly claimed that his films have become subtler, more restrained over the years. However, all the elements of his previous works are present in the late ones, and Talk To Her proves that perversion, rape, betrayal, and suicide can be conveyed much more elegantly than through epic heroism and righteousness.

2. Adaptation
Charlie Kaufman writes himself into his script in the process of adapting Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief into a movie and establishes analogies between her meditations on nature and his ruminations on writing. But Adaptation goes way beyond the book. The film dramatizes a self-reflexive mechanism that is endlessly multiplied: Kaufman creates himself as a character creating himself as a character, each fictive version repeating the same self-reflexive writing. Thus Kaufman also fictionalizes his creative process, and as Adaptation exposes its genesis as a fictional event, it duplicates itself as a fictional film as well. A hybrid in many ways, the film displays a self-conscious egotism and a "cross-fertilization" dynamic among the authors portrayed in the plot (Orlean, twin brother Donald, scriptwriter's guru Robert McKee, and Charles Darwin), stressing the collaborative quality not only of filmmaking practices, but also of all creative and intellectual endeavor.

3. I'm Going Home
The convolutions of aging, death, and fame manifest within the everyday life of an aging actor (brilliantly played by Michel Piccoli) who loses his daughter, son-in-law, and wife in an accident. As Piccoli's character goes back to his daily activities and attempts to build a new life with a very young grandson, director Manoel de Oliveira's sensitivity extends to the role of details and routine in the mourning of loved ones. The tragedy seamlessly blends with a sharp sense of humor in the portrayal of the actor's career, which begins to suffer the consequences of seniority. All this is played in a very low key, which proves that economy of gesture often gives way to larger ranges of emotions.

4. The Hours
"Why does someone have to die in your books?" Leonard Woolf asks his wife, Virginia. "In order that the rest of us should value life more," she replies. The sometimes haunting, sometimes liberating presence of death is the element connecting the tales of a day in the life of three women (brilliantly played by Nicole Kidman, Meryl Streep and Julianne Moore) living in different eras, the generating event of their experiences being the writing of Mrs. Dalloway, a character that echoes in all three lives. Though their narratives are interwoven through, at times, obvious and inelegant graphic and sound matches, the complexity of the multigenerational drama fortunately overshadows the formal explicitness.

5. Far From Heaven
Call it pastiche or homage, this film shows how a contemporary assessment of an old form can simultaneously heighten the self-consciousness factor, keep the sentiment intact, and even enhance the emotional resonance. Far From Heaven departs from Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows using highly stylized cinematography and performances to depict a universe both repulsive and seductive. This formalism functions as a pungent critique of undisguised homophobia and racism, contrasting Julianne Moore's social passivity as she faces prejudice and disillusion after being abandoned by her gay husband and shunned by her closest friends for her friendship with a black gardener. What is surprising is that instead of setting this colorful, non-naturalistic universe apart from a recognizable realm, Haynes makes it uncomfortably familiar.

6. To the Left of the Father
Adapted from Brazilian writer Raduam Nassar's novel Lavoura Arcaica, Luiz Fernando Carvalho's film plunges into the subjectivity of a Lebanese-Brazilian young man as he returns to his father's house to confront an unresolved incestuous past with his sister. Images of striking beauty are juxtaposed with the book's evocative text (long excerpts of which are read through voice-over), constructing a narrative that at once involves and repels. Its claustrophobic atmosphere charges every human connection with sensuality; its overheated visuals merge parental authority and sexual repression into one ghastly presence.

7. What Time Is it There?
As usual, Tsai Ming-liang portrays solitude with a combination of profound melancholy and dark humor. This film is his most playful, and probably also the most touching. His alter-ego actor Kang-sheng Lee plays a vendor who falls in love with a girl who soon leaves for Paris. He then changes all the clocks in Taipei to French time. But to Tsai, Taiwan and France connect not only through time and platonic infatuation, but also through the ways in which the duo Tsai Ming-Liang/Kang-sheng Lee mirrors the collaboration between François Truffaut and Jean-Pierre Léaud. The spirit of The 400 Blows seems to haunt the entirety of the film, existing not just referentially, but spiritually.

8. Ararat
Experiences of the early 20th century Armenian holocaust are here conveyed through contemporary generational relations; it's all about memory and historical acknowledgement. The search for truth amidst oblivion is approached through multiple viewpoints, at times indirectly. The characters are either the offspring of those who suffered the consequences of the massacre or are related through thematically similar drama: a father coping with his son's homosexuality, a girl trying to understand her father's suicide. The central, unifying event is the making of a film about Armenia's conflict with the Turks. By conveying various and diverging experiences of history, the film does not relativize it. Instead, Egoyan asserts the legitimacy of the Armenian claim and manages to validate it through the convergence of multiple perspectives.

9. 25th Hour
Post-September 11th New York is an alive and distressed backdrop for the depiction of Monty's (Edward Norton) last day as a free man before a 7-year prison sentence. Or is Monty's story the backdrop, for a declaration of love through anger (or of anger through love) for the city? What makes Lee such a controversial and complicated director is that he plays Devil's Advocate. When he seems to be falling into sentimentality, he revitalizes the narrative with an ironic or pessimistic twist; yet, his cynicism is not deprived of emotion, be it rage or tenderness. The future Monty's father dreams for his son is an example of such ambiguity. What Lee certainly avoids is self-indulgence, an easy trap for a film so immersed in the 9/11 aftermath. Lee's passion manifests itself through questions rather than through answers.

10. Femme Fatale
Voyeurism, Hitchcock, self-reference, (self-)irony, pastiche: it's all there. This film is truly the dream of film scholars. But it is also a great comeback for De Palma, and consequently a treat to fans of movies such as Dressed to Kill, Blow Out, and Body Double, which can be aligned with this one in terms of both theme and language. Visual pyrotechnics, split screens and a re-worked Bolero soundtrack build a narrative that is more about the artificiality of its own construction than about the story it is supposed to tell (which is somewhat undermined by a Mulholland Drive-esque plot twist). However, the extent to which image can grasp reality, or the degree to which reality is a construct, is presented more ironically here than in his previous movies. But not more lightly.