The 10 Best Films

Ebert has spoken. There's scant overlap between his taste and mine for 2004 (two titles), and I suspect the year is going to produce some other wildly divergent 10-best lists. The New York Times' troika (1, 2, 3) will weigh in past my deadline, and my votes in the annual Village Voice critics' poll only yielded three matches to its top 10. For present purposes, I consider only those movies that had a Seattle theatrical release during the calendar year—not stragglers from '03 or early openers in New York and L.A. that'll reach here in early '05.

Among the latter group is Clint Eastwood's boxing melodrama Million Dollar Baby (reviewed next week prior to its Jan. 7 opening), Ebert's top pick. In a year when the bulk of the critics groups' prizes and early nominations are going to Alexander Payne's Sideways (absent from my list), reliable old Clint is getting special consideration, I think, because he values traditional storytelling over baby-boomer navel gazing. But if you want traditional, I say, then Scorsese is a lot more traditional—and entertaining—in The Aviator, the swiftest three-hour movie I've seen this year. Unlike 2003, when Capturing the Friedmans topped my list, truth turned out to be less compelling than pure inventiveness in 2004, which explains my No. 1 choice.

1. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Go buy the DVD if you don't believe Jim Carrey can be reined in to deliver a low-key, naturalistic performance so far from his Lemony Snicket tantrums. This March release depends on his somber, grounded realism, because the movie's such a flight of fancy. Thanks to the direction of Michel Gondry and script by Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich), the premise that Carrey's ex, Kate Winslet, could have memories of him electronically purged from her head—causing him to do the same with her—seems downright plausible. A heart trip and a head trip all at the same time, Eternal Sunshine takes the subject of love gone sour and runs it backward into a Möbius strip of memory. It ends up being a wonderfully optimistic and affirmative film that somehow argues that bad memories can be the best place to start a new romance.

2. Vera DrakeA film about abortion set in the dreary English early '50s sounds like the most depressing topic available. I'm not sure the sun ever shines in Mike Leigh's latest ensemble piece; most of it is set in the dark, cluttered sitting room of its protagonist (Imedla Staunton) and her close, loving family. There are no speeches, no shouting, no histrionics about the rights of women and the rights of the unborn. Leigh expertly leaves everything out that doesn't matter to the drama, crystallizing it to Vera's moral impulse to "help out girls in trouble." That such do-gooderism is necessarily doomed is a given to Vera Drake's tragedy; compassion is her flaw and undoing. Staunton's is the best work by an actress I've seen this year, and Sally Hawkins also excels as a rich girl, impregnated by rape, whose story Leigh contrasts with Vera's ministrations to her fellow poor. Not yet on DVD.

3. The Aviator Martin Scorsese's best film since GoodFellas is getting unfairly lambasted in some quarters because—God forbid!—it takes liberties with its historical subject. Who cares if the real Howard Hughes was an anti-Semitic freak and drug addict? If Oliver Stone can rewrite Alexander the Great's foibles, so, too, can Scorsese and his producer-star, Leonardo DiCaprio. They concentrate on making Hughes' story as cinematic as possible, because The Aviator is a movie, not history, not biography. As such, it's great looking, expertly told, and episodic in a way that implicitly invokes Citizen Kane: There's no understanding a complicated, flawed man in his entirety, only flashes and glimpses along his meteor's path. DiCaprio acquits himself very well, too, and Cate Blanchett does an excellent job of acting beneath her Katharine Hepburn act. This may be Scorsese's last, best hope for an Oscar.

4. Blind Shaft Not a lot of people saw this March arrival about two con artists preying on miners in the laissez-faire economy of the new China. "Now only fucking money matters," says one of the cons. In this climate, they systematically befriend and kill hapless peasants in staged cave-ins, claiming the hush money from mine owners by declaring kinship to the victims. Blind Shaft dramatizes the flip side of globalization—a nation in wrenching transition from farms and collectives to smokestacks and cell phones. The doomed miners resemble the workers in a Sebastião Salgado photo. The half-Communist, half-capitalist system depicted here is like some dark doppelgänger of our own, like Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. Somehow we're implicated, too—this is our history being played out again, only in Mandarin. Already on DVD from Kino.

5. Kinsey As Frank Rich keeps writing in The New York Times, isn't it funny how sex is still upsetting people a half-century after this guy did his work? In one of the best male performances this year, Liam Neeson makes Dr. Alfred Kinsey an odd, compelling, self-blindered evangelist of statistics—not sex. Apart from tender scenes with his wife (the always excellent Laura Linney), he's more clumsy than concupiscent. Writer-director Bill Condon's intelligent treatment of a once sensationalized life is anything but sensational: His not-quite-tragic hero follows his research to its logical conclusion (birds do it, bees do it . . . ) and can't understand why higher mammals don't want to hear the truth. Crucially, Condon leaves in the lingering confusion and hurt feelings to both sex and love; Kinsey can't explain their ultimate mysteries, and the movie doesn't neatly explain him, either.