The Moviehouse: films of 2002

The best

1. DONNIE DARKO

Debut director Richard Kelly’s apocalyptic reworking of Back To The Future recalls early David Lynch before his festering Buñuelian impulses got smothered by the stylistic abandon displayed in Lost Highway or Mullholland Drive. Cult status beckons.

2. BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE (pictured)
Michael Moore’s timely and intelligent documentary about the all-American love affair with the gun is truly essential viewing for anyone who gives a fuck about the wider world.

3. DAS EXPERIMENT
Though melodramatic, this German flick inspired by the notorious Stanford Prison experiment of 1971 is a dark excavation of the depths of human behaviour, and quite the most chilling vision to emerge from the Fatherland since Herr Effenberg began jackbooting his merry path through Bundesliga defences.

4. LORD OF THE RINGS – THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING/THE TWO TOWERS
It may have taken decades for cinema technology to catch up with J.R.R. Tolkien’s middle earth saga, but Peter Jackson’s visually fantastic trilogy certainly proved to be worth the wait. Better still, Tom Bombadil is nowhere to be seen and against all odds, even the Ents look impressive.

5. SWEET SIXTEEN
Set in the festering former fishing town of Greenock – a shithole even by northern UK standards – Ken Loach’s latest focuses on a teenage boy determined to save enough money to give his smack-addled jailbird mother a fresh start. And then they win the lottery and live like kings and buy yachts and fur-coats. Or not, actually.

6. ALI
It was never going to outshine the Oscar-winning Ali documentary When We Were Kings, but Michael Mann’s biopic is a highly impressive stab at commiting the life of the ultimate champ to celluloid, boasting a brave turn by Will Smith in the title role.

7. IN THE BEDROOM
Uniformly superb performances coupled with the strikingly assured direction of first-timer Todd Field rescue this tale of murder and vengence from the usual generic confines. The result is as powerful and memorable a thriller as recent years have produced.

8. THE MAGDALENE SISTERS
A film concerning the industrial laundries wherein Ireland’s ‘fallen’ women once toiled may sound as much fun as caravaning outside Antwerp, but Peter Mullan’s harrowing work is a brilliantly affecting and searing indictment of the Taliban-style regime orchestrated by the Catholic church in Ireland until the 1970s.

9. MONSTER’S BALL
Billy Bob Thornton’s vicious, whoring racist finds himself engaging in an intense sexual relationship with the black wife of an inmate he has executed. This unabashed melodrama won Halle Berry an Oscar, and even her excruciating acceptance speech didn’t put us off. Fuck, even Puff Daddy and Heath Ledger, in supporting roles, didn’t put a foot wrong.

10. HEAVEN
Tom Run Lola Run Tykwer’s beautifully golden film of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s last screenplay typically inspired critical response of the Daily Mail ‘Ban This Sick Filth’ variety, but this cerebral and achingly romantic tale of Cate Blanchett’s unwitting terrorist is underscored by the kind of quiet, solemn joy that defines great European cinema.

The worst

1. WE WERE SOLDIERS
Nauseating imperialist gut-rot celebrating America’s genocide in Vietnam, happily revisited for timely geopolitical reasons: Mel Gibson leads the charge against humanity. It’s enough to make the blood drain from your body, the thought of a universe where slaughter of this nature can be converted into cinematic entertainment on such a massive scale. Sick.

2. JUST VISITING
This worthless Hollywoodisation of the already risible Gallic scatological time-travel ‘comedy’ Les Visiteurs may well be the most brain-dead movie churned out in years, and yes, we are factoring in the Adam Sandler/Farrelly brothers back catalogue. Featuring lots of toilets.

3. BLACK HAWK DOWN
For all Ridley Scott’s visceral style, this film and its treatment of America’s foray into Somalia in 1993 during the ironically titled ‘Operation Restore Hope’ boasts the least enlightened representation of ‘darkest Africa’ since Zulu.

4. ANYTHING WITH MARTIN LAWRENCE
Another year, another dozen or so Martin Lawrence movies. For your delectation in 2002, you could choose from the unbelievably puerile, sub-Tom And Jerry antics of the prophetically titled What’s The Worst That Could Happen? and the excreable medieval muggings of Black Knight. Or there’s always the cyanide capsules.

5. BEHIND ENEMY LINES
Beneath the impressive pyrotechnics, this noxious slice of Murdochian propaganda from Irish ad-man turned director John Moore is easily the foulest movie yet made about the Yugoslav wars, or ever likely to be. Plenty of unmissable Sky News and Coca-Cola plugs, though.

6. THE ROOKIE
World Cup year! And just what all our kids had been waiting for – a movie starring decrepit, porcine near-geriatric Dennis Quaid as a baseball-playing novice in his 40s (yawn), played out over more than two hours at sub-snail’s pace. No-one forcefeeds films about ‘sawker’ to the Yanks: can they at least keep their pathetic sports to themselves?

7. A WALK TO REMEMBER
This unfeasibly awful teen drivel – replete with a creepy-Christian ‘True Love Waits’ moral – stars squeaky-clean pop moppet Mandy Moore as a tyrannically twee good-girl with terminal illness, as if the movie wasn’t lifeless enough to begin with.

8. UNFAITHFUL
Feminist icon Adrian Lyne (Fatal Attraction, Lolita) continues on his maverick trilblazing path with this unintentionally hilarious ‘erotic thriller’, starring the year’s most promising youthful next-big-things Diane Lane and Richard Gere. Be very afraid.

9. QUEEN OF THE DAMNED
Laughably pathetic gothic crud aimed squarely at the more gullible types among the Marilyn Manson brigade and utterly lacking in wit, intelligence or heart of any kind.

10. CRUSH
Disgusting middle-aged chick-flick, in which Andie MacDowell leads a cast of menopausal female characters as dignified as a gaggle of Lulus, with some unfortunate male 25-year-old twat cast as a young ‘organist’ (hee hee hee!) insane, desperate and demeaned enough to inhabit their general vicinity. As excruciating as a 40-something hen-party.