Hero an excellent Hong Kong film. Infernal affairs, another excellent Hong Kong film.
There are a great amount of asian films that get missed each year. The new Zatoichi an award winning film by Takeshi Kitano for example.

Of these, I've seen Dirty Pretty Things, Return of the King, and The Weather Underground. I enjoyed them all.

I would also suggest The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, about the Hugo Chavez coup attempt, but I'm not sure if that came out this year or last year.

I'd throw in Whalerider, and I'd take out Mystic River. The last 10 minutes almost ruined the previous 120, by making obvious the latent misogyny. Think back -- who was the only, and I mean ONLY, sympathetic female character in the film? That would be Kevin Bacon's wife, who is MUTE for the whole damn movie. Otherwise, you've got Lady MacBeth (Laura Lynney), Pathetic MacBetrayal (Marcia Gay Harden), and Brennan's mother, who is just plain mean, spiteful and shriveled.

Oh -- there's also the Madonna to go with the whores -- the victim; but she gets killed, because the only good woman, in this movie, is a dead one. (Or a mute.)

Adam- In a movie where the men are murderers and emotional cripples, is the fact that the women who marry these men are ALSO not that admirable a reason to label it all misogyny? It's a dark film with pretty rich and surprising relationships built around that darkness, but no one is supposed to be that sympathetic in the traditional sense.

Nathan, have you seen Big Fish yet?

Good call on Dirty Pretty Things, by the way. I had almost forgotten about that one.

I thought Freaky Friday was one of the worst movies of all time, let alone this year's.

Nathan, come on (and sorry it took a day to respond). Yes, it is a dark movie (and for the first two hours, I thought it was a really good movie). Yes, the men do bad things. But not all the men, and not all the time. The men are complex, twisted folks, but with depth and reasons behind their actions.

The women, by contrast, are shallow and simply ugly. Nothing really motivates them other than plain meanness (Laura Lynney and Brennan's mother -- don't know the actress' name) or weakness (Marcia Gay Harden). Or they are simple props (Kevin Bacon's silent wife).

Truly, if the movie had ended when Sean Penn and Kevin Bacon walk away from each other in the street, it would have been all well and good; it's a movie about men mostly, and so that the female characters aren't given much attention is not that big a deal.

But then comes the scene where Laura Lynney is revealed as the force behind the throne. Unrepentant or horrified at the wickedness of her husband, and downright supportive of it, she comes off as the driving force behind it.

Then Marcia Gay Harden wimpers along the parade route, having betrayed her husband (and not just a run of the mill betrayal -- she gets him killed). She's worse than shallow, she's a plot device.

I'm sure this was all in the book, and that the book is pretty misogynist. But the movie could have taken some license.

Adam- I understand your argument, I just disagree. Yes, the women in the film enable the worst tendencies or subvert the recovery of the men, which could be seen as role-based female behavior to match the role-based machismo of the men, but I just think all the performances, male and female, transcend those roles. Yes, the Laura Linney speech went an inch too far, but not because of substance but because a subtler speech would have conveyed the same familial dynamic at work-- and Linney is usually more subtle.

But let's be real-- the Sean Penn character is a brutal, nasty guy and either his wife recognized this or was a stupid doormat. That the wife actually was a supporter and enabler of his brutality makes her a nastier character but also is a twist from a simple wife-victim role that could often accompany such a relationship. And Marcia Gay Harden-- well, sometimes spouses are not long-suffering supporters of their husbands depressive and neurotic behavior; yes, getting him killed is a nasty tragedy, but it actually again makes the female character more of an actor than the typical reactor. In both cases, the ending of the film makes the women more central to the action of the film than you would have suspected from what seemed on the surface just a profile of three childhood male buddies.

So I still stand by Mystic River.

I'm glad I wasn't planning to see Mystic River, cuz y'all just ruined the ending for me.

:)

--Kynn

Dear Mr. Newman,
Kudos to Finding Nemo...great movie!

You forgot "The Whale Rider." The best of 2003.