Neither a banner year for cinema nor the wasteland that tastemakers bemoaned, the movie year 2003 was marked more by a great number of good films than a good number of great films. True, no one movie turned up on all four of the Top 10 lists contributed by Scene writers. But is that a sign of the overall strength of 2003’s offerings? Or is the lack of a single, clear-cut standout a show of weakness?

Below, Scene writers Jim Ridley, Noel Murray, Donna Bowman and Joshua Rothkopf recap the year’s highs and lows. Feel free to send your own take on the year’s movies to mr.pink@nashvillescene.com.

Movies That Mattered

American Splendor. What could’ve been another cutesy, awkward indie film adaptation of a popular alternative comic (like Ghost World) became an assured, casually experimental blend of documentary, animation and naturalist comedy, incisively capturing working-class reporter Harvey Pekar’s guiding principle: that commoners have as much to say as kings, and should control their own voices. —Noel Murray

City of God. By daring to portray poverty in terms other than finger-wagging miserabilism, by acknowledging a taboo cross-cultural debt to Tarantino and Boogie Nights—and worst of all, by connecting with a sizable mainstream audience—this feverish fact-based Brazilian crime epic pissed off the culture cops who determine how authentically “foreign” a movie has to be to meet snob approval. Their loss, our gain. —Jim Ridley

The Company. Robert Altman’s deceptively slight movie is more about the clever staging of ballet sequences than the nuts and bolts of their creation or the personal dramas of the players. But in his relaxed, unobtrusive approach, Altman conveys magnitudes about the mysteries and fascination of the collaborative arts—perhaps even summing up his career. —Noel Murray

Ichi the Killer and Irréversible. Two brilliantly made and deliberately reprehensible movies—from Japanese shockmeister Takashi Miike and French attack-dog provocateur Gaspar Noé, respectively—whose meat hooks I wish I could dislodge from my brain. But I can’t. And although I hate them on some levels, I respect them for reminding me that even in bloody, bellicose, benumbed 2003, there was still such a thing as going too far. —Jim Ridley

Kill Bill Vol. 1. Sure, there were movies in 2003 that were more civilized, more conventionally reputable. There was not, however, another movie that snapped my eyelids like roller blinds from the very first frame and reminded me of the horizon-wide possibilities that make me love cinema. The world of Quentin Tarantino’s pistol opera is like the one a kid invents for his action figures, where every piece of plastic carries its own mythology, and it’s imagined just as fully and believed in just as intensely. —Jim Ridley

Lilya 4-Ever. Can any movie be said to really matter—matter like a bowl of soup, a home, a protecting angel? Lukas Moodysson’s third feature is none of these things, but it was the year’s angriest cry of conscience on behalf of the young, the beautifully naive, the doomed. Inspired by a mysterious teen suicide in his own Swedish hometown, Moodysson peers unflinchingly into the brutal economies of parental negligence and the skin trade, a creative project taking him deep into post-Soviet slums, secondhand dreams of escape and America, and what may turn out to be the performance of the decade from 16-year-old Oksana Akinshina—a double miracle for having been directed through the language barrier. —Joshua Rothkopf

Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. Maybe it’s not surprising that the year when war broke out for real also brought us the full range of cinematic depictions of warfare: interspecies conflict in The Return of the King, Orient-Occident “never the twain” battles in The Last Samurai, brother-on-brother mayhem in Cold Mountain. None was more exhilarating and complex than the clash of nascent empires in Peter Weir’s filming of the Patrick O’Brian seafaring saga. Not only are we isolated on board ship, but we are also transported to a time when enemies were not that alien. When “Lucky Jack” Aubrey finds that his French counterpart has outsmarted him with a page out of his own playbook, his response is a delighted smile. —Donna Bowman

OT: Our Town. Flying in stealth mode in a year full of high-profile documentaries, Scott Hamilton Kennedy’s incisive OT: Our Town chronicles the casting, rehearsals and performance of Dominguez High’s first school play in 20 years. The Compton, Calif., school, populated by inner-city black and Hispanic youth, mounts a production of Thornton Wilder’s classic Our Town, with costumes, culture and some dialogue transposed into their own milieu. What’s amazing about this journey from idea to theatrical performance—something that happens several times a year at most schools, but here becomes a massive undertaking against all odds—is that these demonized, feared, political-football kids are really normal, and therefore extraordinarily beautiful. —Donna Bowman

The Weather Underground. In a year when millions of organized antiwar protesters found themselves routinely dismissed as “just another focus group” by Bush and Co., this was the only documentary that posed a provocative alternative to painting signs. As such, Sam Green and Bill Siegel’s careful history of America’s radical left—bombmakers on the run from Nixon’s law—deserved its small audience more than any other film. It may have much to teach us about the motives of terrorism, more than merely this year’s stump issue but the deciding factor of our very existence. —Joshua Rothkopf

The Actors’ Studio

Ellen DeGeneres. As the voice of Dory, the fish with no short-term memory in Finding Nemo, DeGeneres does the seemingly impossible: She keeps the character (or the shtick) from getting annoying. And her game enthusiasm for adventure makes Dory’s eventual pathos uncommonly affecting. As with many of the best roles for women in a slim year, DeGeneres’ best work was all beneath the surface. —Donna Bowman

Johnny Depp. Who let Depp get away with a titanic bout of swished-up, sloshed-out swashbuckling in a $130 million Disney family vessel? Whoever it was deserved (and got) some hefty booty. The surprise summer smash Pirates of the Caribbean was not only salvaged but made downright hearty by Depp’s besmudged mincing, the most subversive element allowed in a Hollywood film since Errol Flynn (or at least Beyond the Valley of the Dolls). —Joshua Rothkopf

Lindsay Lohan. Every year brings its share of unexpected pleasures, but 2003 was one in which an uncomfortable realization had to be made: Lindsay Lohan is a great actor. Not will be, Mouseketeers, is. See the way she drolly de-hipsterizes in Freaky Friday, primly pulling the shirt fronts down over her girlfriends’ navels? Lohan was so good that you forgot about Jodie Foster, forgot about the desperation that would bring Disney to feast on its own stale back catalog. And at times you almost forgot about her brilliant co-star Jamie Lee Curtis, who rose to sublimity once again, producing hormonal mania on a lunatic par with Bringing Up Baby. —Joshua Rothkopf

Ensembles. Is the tyranny of star vehicles (and star salaries) yielding to the democracy of evenly matched casts? Even in lesser movies like Love Actually and Mona Lisa Smile, the broad array of famous faces created meaning and momentum where screenwriters failed. Better were the yeoman troupes of Cold Mountain, goosed by the old-school scenery chewing of Renée Zellweger; The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, anchored by the bizarre love triangle among Elijah Wood’s Frodo, Sean Astin’s Sam and the Andy Serkis-voiced Gollum; and Big Fish, featuring Albert Finney’s spry but fading patriarch and Billy Crudup as his hurt, quietly petulant son. Clint Eastwood’s wounding Mystic River evoked the tangled loyalties and betrayals of a blue-collar Boston neighborhood simply by turning Sean Penn, Tim Robbins and Kevin Bacon loose in the same frame. The ensemble of the year, though, populated the journalism docudrama Shattered Glass. Beyond bracingly real turns from Steve Zahn and Hank Azaria in small roles, it offered a thrilling center-ring duel between Hayden Christensen as the amusingly needy plagiarist Stephen Glass and Peter Sarsgaard as his righteously pissed editor. —Noel Murray

Nick Nolte. More of a chameleon than his craggy Mount Rushmore face and build would suggest, Nolte can be a matinee idol, a magnificent ruin or a hulking brute with vast reserves of hurt. He can even be all three, as in his marvelous turn as The Good Thief’s chivalrous, Chet Baker-like junkie prince of the Riviera. And before everybody writes off The Hulk as a glob of green waste, revisit Nolte’s scenery-obliterating performance as Bruce Banner’s wicked dad—composed of equal parts comic-book arch-villainy and Greek tragedy, with a soupçon of off-off-Broadway dementia. —Jim Ridley

Emma Thompson. Warfare, it seems, is man’s work at the movies. That’s one reason for the overwhelming number of Y chromosomes on screen this year, although it doesn’t tell the whole story. The usual paucity of good roles for women was just exaggerated by epics and swordplay. One had to look a little deeper than the names above the title for the best female performances, but it was worth the effort. As the prime minister’s sister in Love Actually, Emma Thompson takes a tiny sliver of a role and digs deep into the emotions of a middle-aged woman disappointed by her flirtatious husband. When she doesn’t receive the jewelry she saw him picking out for Christmas, she retreats to her room, and for an agonizing minute, writer-director Richard Curtis holds the shot with Thompson composing herself at the extreme left of the screen. Suddenly, and briefly, a supporting role becomes the movie’s center. —Donna Bowman

Themes and Trends

The big payback. Filmmakers were well in tune with the anxieties of an unsettled globe this year, even in projects developed long before the Iraq war, and in some cases before 9/11. Look to the exaggerated pathos of revenge in Kill Bill Vol. 1 and Mystic River, the latter of which features characters comfortable with punishing the wrong party for an unspeakable crime. (Sound familiar?) Even “disreputable” pictures like William Friedkin’s The Hunted got into the act, with a story about what happens to problems left to fester. The Hunted has an elemental melancholy, describing how you can only offer tacit support to institutional murder for so long before that evil takes on a life of its own—and starts to forge weapons. —Noel Murray

Culture shock. Movies this year specialized in creating detailed worlds. The Tokyo of Lost in Translation was a three-dimensional multimedia sea impossible to escape. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King capped its massive creation of Middle-earth with the biggest images yet in a trilogy of unprecedented size, particularly the widescreen beacon-lighting fly-by sequence. Comparatively minuscule but just as impressively realized, Shattered Glass locked us in the airless mid-’90s newsrooms of high-end magazines. Even the documentary Spellbound refused to let us up for air in the stifling environment of elementary-school spelling-bee champs and their equally obsessed parents. In these movies’ finely developed atmospheres, we viewers willingly drowned. —Donna Bowman

Let us entertain you. Time was, you’d head to the movies like you’d head to the vaudeville house—to see a Jimmy Cagney, an Ann Miller, a Gene Kelly, a Jack Palance. Performers who half-killed themselves to make sure you were thoroughly entertained. Time was, and now time is again: Ewan McGregor in Down With Love and Big Fish, Renée Zellweger in Down With Love and Cold Mountain, Russell Crowe in Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, Uma Thurman in Kill Bill: Vol. 1. Heck, even low-rent Cuba Gooding Jr. left his all on the stage in The Fighting Temptations. You can’t help but be thankful for such energetic showbiz throwbacks. —Donna Bowman

Rock ’n’ roll fantasies. Besides the year’s obvious master class (taught by Jack Black), music shouldered the weight of unspoken desires, from Bill Murray’s karaoke-cum-confessional “More Than This” in Lost in Translation to Hilary Duff’s uber-tween transformation into a hip-swiveling Britney at the climax of The Lizzie McGuire Movie. Sure, Master and Commander’s Aubrey and Maturin tax their brains, minds and heads fighting the French on the high seas, but what they really want to do is rock, as evidenced in private jam sessions below deck. Maybe the White Stripes are simply not enough for an America that’s always been red, white and Broooce. Jack White might even think so himself—why else would he strum a banjo in the otherwise tone-deaf Cold Mountain? —Joshua Rothkopf

What’s up? Docs. A Top 10 list composed only of documentaries would have seemed esoteric just a few years ago. Not anymore. Documentaries no longer carry the activist mission of independent film; now they provide the drama as well. No political thriller this year was as gripping as The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, a mix of reporting and rebuttal delivered with point-blank urgency from behind the scenes of Venezuela’s attempted coup, or Bus 174, a tense, multifaceted account of a hostage stand-off in Rio. No live-action film matched the unscripted pathos of the family saga Love and Diane or the heart-tugging French schoolhouse portrait To Be and to Have. And while the blatant manipulation of the acclaimed Capturing the Friedmans left me cold, its narrative artistry is as undeniable as its treatment of sordid family history is troubling. With real lives like these, who needs House of Sand and Fog? —Jim Ridley

Better than you’ve heard, worse than you could imagine

Dr. Seuss’ The Cat in the Hat. I imagine this is the space where one could make retrospective pleas for the unloved geniuses toiling behind the much-derided (but extremely profitable) Cat in the Hat. Yet even if you heard this was the worst film of the year—and quite potentially the worst experience of your life—that would still be insufficient warning. But you already know this, don’t you? You went anyway, you suffered through Mike Myers’ wholly inappropriate caterwauling, you dried the tears off terrified tots, now afraid of anything tall and stripey for life. —Joshua Rothkopf

Dreamcatcher. If you subscribe to the theory that pleasure is pleasure and needs no redeeming context, then don’t sweat the wince-inducing dialogue and nutzoid genre-smashing of this Stephen King fever dream, and instead just dig its beautiful bruise-blue look and how often it makes you laugh (intentionally or not). And if you do need context, consider the current relevance of the film’s theme: trying to do the right thing and suffering for it. —Noel Murray

Elephant and House of Sand and Fog. The massive genre pictures of 2003 had more to say about duty, treachery and fear than art films like this overpraised pair, which were more interested in aestheticizing pain than illuminating it. —Noel Murray

Gigli. Ten movies I found harder to sit through than the year’s most reviled film: Bruce Almighty, The Human Stain, Legally Blonde 2, My Life Without Me, Northfork, Pieces of April, The Singing Detective, The Station Agent, Underworld and Wonderland. —Jim Ridley

The Life of David Gale. Without question, the dumbest message movie of 2003. How dumb was this anti-capital punishment screed packaged as a bird-brained thriller? Imagine a movie about PETA clubbing seals to stop animal abuse. —Jim Ridley

The Matrix resolution. Matrix fans were almost universal in their disdain for The Matrix Reloaded, with its mulatto refugees in Styrofoam caves wearing artfully frayed burlap and gyrating to tribal drumbeats. Those sci-fi clichés, however, are far truer to the Wachowski brothers’ intentions than the Teflon impenetrability of the first film’s ultra-cool aesthetic. We real geeks appreciate the efforts of the Wachowskis to weed out the cool kids from Matrix fandom. The movies were never theirs, only the Blinde sunglasses and the wire-fu. Cool culture is the opposite of geek culture, folks, and the Matrix movies—all three of them—are geeky and glorious. —Donna Bowman

Something’s Gotta Give. Nancy Meyers’ romantic comedy was the year’s most befuddling, confounding mishmash of broad farce, aimless plot and aging star power. But shining through the muck is a sequence that settles gracefully around Diane Keaton and Jack Nicholson like a pure, warming sunbeam. When the two fall into physical intimacy, Meyers allows them the realization of how rare and meaningful it is, and the time to talk about it and enjoy it. The “boy loses girl” crap that follows is mercifully postponed to give this sequence plenty of room to dwell, with astounding generosity, on the sudden thaw of these hearts. —Donna Bowman