TopTens:
NEAL BLOCK

1. Punch-Drunk Love
Having tackled in his three earlier films, with general success, the topics of greed, sex, and decay, P.T. Anderson moved onto love with this film, and did it with enough economy and poeticism that, in its light, his past indulgences seemed admissible. Skepticism about the director's ability to harness his more wankerish proclivities disappeared after the first scene, a minimalist symphony in which Adam Sandler tremulously receives his own baffling, mystical fate, in the form of an unwanted, hand-delivered harmonium. The film is insanely simple and its trappings spare; Sandler and Emily Watson discover romance in moments of vast, empty hyperanxiety, two people alone in a really, really bizarre world in which the only thing that can cause happiness is their inevitable coming together. Anderson's vision of love as a chemical compound of bright colors, empty spaces, and preposterous obstacles is as close to a working definition as any modern director has come.

2. About Schmidt
Achieving an emotional wisdom as thick and cutting as the satire of Election, Alexander Payne dredges sadness and pain from deep inside Jack Nicholson's sagging belly. He uses the actor in a role that other directors seem afraid to put him in: an old man. Nicholson's old, man, old, and the ubiquitous sunglasses can't hide it anymore. A sharp, simple script about families and forgiveness guides Nicholson through a quagmire of doubt and fear. Payne directs with a sure hand, and when Nicholson comes through on the other side, we're knocking the mud off our own shoes.

3. Far From Heaven
Julianne Moore puts in a fuller, more realized performance as a frozen, despondent housewife here than she did in Steven Daldry's repellent The Hours. Rarely does a film that leaves all of its principals profoundly unhappy at the end leave such a positive impression; unlike, say, Dancer in the Dark, Far From Heaven leaves you thinking that redemption and hope is still possible. Todd Haynes's marriage of music and color may borrow a lot, but doesn't necessitate a working knowledge of the past. Like the best academic films, Far From Heaven makes itself available to every audience.

4. Songs from the Second Floor
Severe social criticism as impressionist painting: in each of Roy Andersson's dire dioramas, we're compelled to pick apart the scene detail by detail. Andersson's vaguely linked characters cavort and lurch across a city in the midst of its death rattle. It's the end of the world as they know it, and they feel like shit. But they don't seem to care, and that's the scariest thing about this very frightening film. Its scenes, carefully composed and shot with a static camera, are stuffed with characters and background and props and nothing. Each one is its own I-Spy puzzle and, all put together, they form a despairing and hopeless picture of the world we've inherited from the economic sprawl of the last century.

5. Adaptation
Whereas Being John Malkovich was virtuosic in its directorial strength, Adaptation finds Spike Jonze rightly handing over the focus to Charlie Kaufman, and, in turn, all the glory. But this is just more proof that Jonze is a powerful director; he removes himself from the proceedings and lets his audience (and, in the end, it is his audience) see exactly what it should. Nicolas Cage gives us his best performance since Con Air (for real), and redeems himself for his unfortunate directorial debut, Sonny. This performance was so good, and Sonny so bad, that Cage emerged from 2002 even.

6. The Kid Stays in the Picture
Do I care about this Robert Evans guy? No, of course not. He's as relevant to my life and to entertainment in the new century as Cher, but that doesn't mean this wasn't a fine bit of reality television. Evans can tell a good story, which makes this movie, despite its documentary trappings, better than ninety percent of the fiction films released this year.

7. Spirited Away
One of the few films this year that left me feeling really weird and woozy, more than likely because it's a film about a bizarre illogical dream-state, and I slept through a chunk of it near the beginning. Endlessly imaginative, Hayao Miyazaki's meditation on growth, greed, childhood, and spirituality bombards you with terrifying images, but at the same time welcomes you into the dream-the monsters, and you, and the movie, all become a hazy landscape from which you emerge, eventually, patting your chest to make sure it's still there.

8-10. Nothing

11. Bowling for Columbine/25th Hour
Two very good movies, hovering beneath the list because they're the most frustrating films of the year. They still deserve mention, because their plusses ultimately outweigh the infuriating bullshit to which Michael Moore and Spike Lee subject their audiences. Moore's tactics are so underhanded and evil that Columbine winds up eliciting more sympathy for poor, doddering Charlton Heston than for the picture of the dead kid Moore ceremoniously places on his property. Spike Lee's last remaining vestiges of art shine through a boring, ordinary tale about an ordinary man heading off to prison. Edward Norton's "Fuck New York" speech gives the film's stumbling subplots something resembling immediacy, and only then do we feel what it must be like to be in the character's shoes, and only then do we remember what a good filmmaker Lee is. As entertainment, Columbine and 25th Hour come out swinging and aiming for your face; as examples of a director's vision, each could have swung harder and higher.