Anyone remember who was reported as an initial backer of Fahrenheit 9/11? Anyone? No joke: Mel Gibson. In some quarters, that would be considered a Revelation—though perhaps only in a cinematic year whose boundaries were marked by zombies and resurrection, Manchurian Candidates and documentary sniper-fire, and Jesus and President Bush. Somewhere in the middle—and at times, on the extreme edges—were the most notable movies of 2004. Below, Scene writers Donna Bowman, Noel Murray, Jim Ridley and Scott Manzler survey the year.

Best of '04

Before Sunset The least you can say for Richard Linklater's sustained 80-minute marvel of a movie is that it offers a late-afternoon stroll through Paris by the sun-dappled Seine. At best—which constitutes the entire film—the characters, the locations, the actors, their off-screen histories and the simmering sexual tension in their banter produce a sensation like falling in love, in real time. —JR

Bright Leaves In a year when the very idea of cinematic truth was under attack by the culture at large, Ross McElwee's personal-essay film plays like salvation itself: an introspective, deeply biased look at its creator assembled from the two ends of the movie continuum, "home" and "Hollywood." All the shallow truths that McElwee initially wants to embrace slowly fade, replaced by the reality of his own polar desires: to revise his life, and to record it. —DB

Crimson Gold A noirish account of a veteran turned pizza deliveryman traversing Tehran's gaping social divide, Jafar Panahi's latest masterpiece (no other word for it) shares much with his prior efforts—a carefully plotted circular narrative, an uncommon feel for the rhythms of city life, an allegorically loaded episodic structure—but at a higher level of formal and tonal control. The director's work has always been more "accessible" than that of his mentor (and Crimson Gold screenwriter) Abbas Kiarostami; he may yet prove to be the greater filmmaker as well. —SM

Distant The narrative is intentionally spare: Yusuf, an unsophisticated provincial, boards with his cousin Mahmut, a commercial photographer, while pursuing his dream of life at sea. As Yusuf ultimately returns home chastened and dispirited, and Mahmut's asceticism and aestheticism become a self-imposed prison, director Nuri Bilge Ceylan paints a nearly flawless portrait of urban alienation in the crisp, cold blues of the Istanbul cityscape. But his modern reinterpretation of the city-mouse/country-mouse parable is as mordantly funny as it is quietly tragic. —SM

The Doc Is In This year nonfiction film not only trumped most of the year's fiction for drama and human insight, it found commercial clout to match, breaking the box-office charts and establishing a potent grassroots network for alternate distribution. It merits its own Top 10, just as strong and stylistically varied: The Corporation, Bright Leaves, Aileen: The Life and Death of a Serial Killer, Bukowski: Born Into This, Los Angeles Plays Itself, Slasher, Control Room, Tom Dowd and the Language of Music, The Five Obstructions, Lost Boys of Sudan. —JR

Dogville A big, bold, nervy experimental film at heart, Lars von Trier's furious socio-religious parable imagines Our Town set in a world where both sin and justice depend on humanity's power to enact them. Harrowing, exhausting and outrageous by turns, the film confirms von Trier's Mephistophelian power to create worlds out of ideas alone. —DB

Hero takes its opening and closing crawls from history, but undercuts its framing narrative by re-narrating itself multiple times as it proceeds, pace by pace, toward the inevitability (and banality) of what actually happened. In the interstices of history, one might as well tell a story about flying warriors and magical coat sleeves. —DB

I [Heart] Huckabees While critics debated whether the movie's pop philosophy is pseudo-profound or intentionally pseudo-profound, many missed David O. Russell's hauntingly accurate survey of the barren American mallscape, and his clear-eyed depiction of how we live now—partitioned by pet causes. —NM

The Incredibles Brad Bird's hero family fought crime and social mediocrity in an angular, brightly lit world of modernist furniture and fading space-age optimism. If ever there was a movie where the style said as much as the content, this toothy super-cartoon is it. —NM

Red Lights Cedric Kahn's slowly winding thriller made marital discord and unplanned road-trip rest stops as suspenseful as a lurking serial killer, in part because of Kahn's precise compositions—and because in the right context Debussy can be as spine-tingling as Bernard Herrmann. —NM

The Actors' Studio

The Women Another year, another critical chorus bemoaning the dearth of quality female performances. But either mainstream scribes are swayed by industry spin, or they're just not looking all that hard—or in the right places. Imelda Staunton (Vera Drake), Julie Delpy (Before Sunset), Hilary Swank (Million Dollar Baby) and Kate Winslet (Eternal Sunshine) have all been justly lauded, but the field is an especially crowded one. Catalina Sandino Moreno's unaffected naturalness clinches Maria Full of Grace's simulated verité; Maya Maron's conflicted teen-adult shines among Broken Wings' uniformly strong ensemble; and Since Otar Left proves a veritable showcase for Esther Gorintin and Dinara Drukarova. Nicole Kidman's vengeful Christ in Dogville and de-facto pedophile in the flawed but fascinating Birth both easily surpass her Oscar-feted Virginia Woolf impersonation, and Neve Campbell displays tremendous range—self-effacing but authoritative in The Company and deliciously over-the-top in the very guilty pleasure When Will I Be Loved. Also: Ziyi Zhang's striking silent-era invocation in House of Flying Daggers, the incomparable Isabelle Huppert's signature turn in I [Heart] Huckabees...and just too many others to mention. —SM

Cate Blanchett OK, think how hard it would be to play Katharine Hepburn without lapsing into some sort of Martin Short routine, as Blanchett does with swaggering panache in The Aviator. Now think how hard it would be to play yourself—and to play your punky identical cousin, in the same conversation—as Blanchett does in the most potent of Jim Jarmusch's Coffee and Cigarettes vignettes. Now think of another contemporary actor with this spirit of adventure. Bonus points for the "effing" pregnant reporter in The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou. —JR

Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind's one weakness was screenwriter Charlie Kaufman's usual lack of interest in writing characters any deeper than their neuroses. But Carrey and Winslet put flesh on the script's conceptual bones—essentially by playing moody 14-year-olds trapped by adult desires. —NM

Paul Giamatti and Virginia Madsen The torrent of acclaim that greeted Sideways probably set up audiences to expect some kind of Event Movie, when the real event is the near-perfect realization of its modest intentions. But Giamatti's master class in shaded self-loathing deserves every word of praise. The sole note of wish fulfillment is that this guy could entice the lovely, sweetly damaged Madsen as a romantic interest—but she radiantly embodies the movie's only sliver of hope. —JR

Damien Lewis Quite possibly the strongest performance of the year, in Lodge Kerrigan's indie drama Keane, and still no distributor. Lewis seems to live his role as the father of a missing girl, working from dissociative misery through a gradual, torturous redemption that approaches transcendence—but with the specter of far greater horrors in wait. —SM

Clive Owen Out of a quartet of vivid Closer performances, Owen's alternately sweet, stung and pushy turn as a desperate cuckold did the most to redeem the script's forced ugliness. It's really the anchor of the film, but for some reason the studio is pushing Owen for Best Supporting Actor, which'll probably keep awards out of the hands of the year's true deserver: David Carradine's growly, scarily reasonable pulp villain in Kill Bill: Volume 2. —NM

The Ray Ensemble Jamie Foxx has been rightfully getting praise for his uncanny, layered interpretation of Ray Charles' passive-aggressive business savvy and personal insecurity in Ray, but the movie is really a showcase for underused black character actors: Terrence Dashon Howard, Clifton Powell, Wendell Pierce. The best of the lot is Regina King as an ill-fated Raelette, who puts all her lust and rage into every background vocal shout. And Sharon Warren's indelible performance as Charles' tough-loving mother embodies the difference between merciless and pitiless. —NM/JR

Mark Ruffalo The year's top utility man? Ruffalo, who had a slow-burning, indignant dignity as the lead libertine in We Don't Live Here Anymore but did his best work in smaller roles: as the worrisome but lovestruck technician in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind; a keenly concerned undercover cop in Collateral; and the jilted best friend too human not to carry a grudge for decades in 13 Going on 30. —NM

Liev Schreiber Jonathan Demme's remake of The Manchurian Candidate isn't likely to be appreciated until Demme gets a career retrospective, but we don't have to wait to appreciate Schreiber's controlled, generous performance opposite a manic Denzel Washington. This patrician scion with bombs going off in his head is a type we've never seen from the actor before—and people new to Schreiber's work would never guess what his other performances have been like. —DB

Imelda Staunton Whatever clip the editors pick to represent Staunton's performance in Vera Drake at the Academy Awards ceremony has no chance of capturing its flavor, which builds inexorably throughout Mike Leigh's immensely humane film. Staunton's Vera is a woman committed to doing good, who does something evil, and then has evil done to her, and every life-sized twist and turn shows on her earnest, warm, grandmotherly face. —DB

Billy Bob Thornton was the perfect choice for Coach Gary Gaines in the film adaptation of Friday Night Lights: intensely larger than life without ever succumbing to the temptation to overplay. His moments are quiet, authentic and sweet, even when the movie is busy with trumpet-fanfare mythmaking. —DB

Great performances, not-so-great movies Even people who hated The Village (see below) couldn't deny the eerie force of Bryce Dallas Howard's performance as a blind Little Red Riding Hood. As a slimy porn hustler, Timothy Olyphant cut through the sentimental sap of the Risky Business rip-off The Girl Next Door, while John C. Reilly had his juiciest role in years as the grifter anti-hero of Criminal. Jeff Bridges, playing a carousing children's-book author, gave yet another superbly modulated performance in yet another odd movie, The Door in the Floor. My favorite, though, might have been in the slack-ass slasher-movie parody Broken Lizard's Club Dread: Bill Paxton as the smarmy Jimmy Buffett copycat Coconut Pete, singing his hit song "Piña Coladaburg." —JR

Themes and Trends

East Asian Blues Sure, it's culturally suspect to lump together the movies of a vast, ethnically diverse region. But when it comes to Asian cinema, Nashvillians know what they don't like when they don't see it. Even more troubling, local programmers are beginning to take note of their apathy. A brief rundown of recent A-list Asian titles unlikely to appear at a theater near you: Infernal Affairs 1 & 2, Goodbye Dragon Inn, The Twilight Samurai, Millennium Mambo, Blissfully Yours, Platform and Bright Future. And though I'd like to believe Hero's recent success portends a brighter future, Zhang Yimou's wuxia spectacle was crafted with a Western audience in mind. I pray for my beloved Springtime in a Small Town, the distant Chinese cousin of Far From Heaven—not because I'm sponsoring it in the "Scene Picks" series at the Belcourt, but because it deserves a far better fate. —SM

I Love the '90s If the movie year 2002-3 resembled 1973—dominated by Super Seventies stalwarts like Scorsese, Spielberg, De Palma, Polanski, Altman and Lucas—2004 at least seemed more like 1994. Excepting Paul Thomas Anderson, most every promising filmmaker from the early-to-mid '90s emerged with new work this year: Tarantino, Richard Linklater, David O. Russell, Alexander Payne, Wes Anderson, Kevin Smith (and you can argue whether Steven Soderbergh fits in). And for the most part they did exactly what their supporters hoped: invigorated mainstream moviemaking with an emphasis on personal stories over spectacle and ensemble work over star vehicles. The kids stayed in the picture. —JR

Lives of Great Men A half-dozen bio-pics this year couldn't satisfy our national hunger for Horatio Alger stories and self-help odysseys, whether the lives fit the bill or not. Thus we got a Ray Charles whose crowning achievement was kicking heroin, an Alfred Kinsey who nobly bucked the establishment without a hint of prurient enjoyment, a Che Guevara who gazed offscreen awaiting his enshrinement on a million dorm-room walls, and a Cole Porter who watches his corny old musical biography with disdain from his corny new musical biography. Give The Aviator credit for ending with such morbid foreboding, suggesting that there actually are third acts in American lives. —JR

Location, Location, Location The unspoken theme of the cine-year 2004 was setting—the grounding of movies in actual time and place—and Thom Anderson's festival favorite Los Angeles Plays Itself set the tone with its obsessive preference for where movies take place over what goes on there. In Alexander Payne's Sideways, a genteel tour of wine country becomes mostly about Paul Giamatti stumbling past a car lot on the way from a reasonably priced kitsch motel to his favorite vino-literate tourist-trap steakhouse. If nothing else, Richard Linklater's Before Sunset offers a walking tour of Paris. Even the most visually dazzling movie of the year—Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind—earned its fireworks by launching from a gray, grainy, docu-realistic New York. Of course, filmmakers who couldn't find what they were looking for in practical locations had to build a little, like Quentin Tarantino's drive-in fantasy world of Oriental opulence and working-class grit in Kill Bill Vol. 2 and Steven Spielberg's consumer-driven public space in The Terminal. And for The Life Aquatic, Wes Anderson built a supership torn from the doodle pad of a 12-year-old boy—a world that's hermetically sealed, but will probably still be fresh decades from now. —NM

Revisiting History It wasn't just the Fahrenheit 9/11s that spliced and diced the past in search of direction for the future. Your Kinseys and Miracles proposed dueling interpretations of America based on media-made moments. Your Passion of the Christs and Motorcycle Diaries reenacted the origin stories of Cold War ideologies. But best of all, in The Five Obstructions Lars von Trier forced his cinematic hero, Jurgen Leth, to produce new drafts of a movie he finished in 1967, saddling him each time with freaky new restrictions. If there are any lessons to be found in the history books, von Trier's psych-out methodology is the way to find it. —DB

Better Than You've Heard, Worse Than You Can Imagine

Beyond the Sea When stagecraft is kitsch, failure can always be redefined as intentional phoniness and meta-commentary. But to writer-director-star Kevin Spacey, going for broke in his Bobby Darin bio-pic, there's nothing phony about showbiz pizzazz—and that makes him vulnerable to the jeers of the jaded. As he delves into the nuances and contradictions of a career as a professional pleaser, Spacey offers an eloquent apologia for show business. A life in the spotlight hasn't been this nakedly winning since Gene Kelly sang to Debbie Reynolds on an empty stage sprinkled with 500,000 kilowatts of stardust. —DB

The Big Bounce / 50 First Dates The Elmore Leonard adaptation The Big Bounce died at the box office, and it's certainly far from great, but Owen Wilson gives his most rounded lead performance in years, and the generally low-key, resort-bound capering makes for a pleasant movie holiday. Similarly, once you get past the early gross-out gags of 50 First Dates, the Adam Sandler-Drew Barrymore romantic comedy becomes bittersweet and lightly profound. Even the Hawaiian setting becomes meaningful, as a representation of the heroes' mutual desire to duck adult responsibility and take a permanent vacation. —NM

Cellular You'll run across this first-rate B movie, a gimmicky high-concept Kim Basinger thriller taut as a tripwire, some night next year on TBS or FX. It'll stop you dead in your tracks, and you'll wonder how you missed it in theaters. You heard it here first. And yes, it's from the author of Phone Booth, the ultimate in telecommunications terror. Coming soon: Pager! —JR

Greendale Neil Young's home movie qua state of the union is ripe for ridicule: a community-theater troupe of friends and family lip-synching the auteur's confused musical narrative, all recorded in patented 8mm Shakey-vision. Yet the film nonetheless proves oddly compelling, equal parts fragile lyricism and bilious wail. The Young album it most resembles is On the Beach, a rambling, haunted, sometimes incoherent interior monologue, once dismissed, now deemed a misunderstood masterwork. Time will tell. —SM

Napoleon Dynamite The indie breakout and/or cult phenom of the year, but little reason to celebrate. As lazy and slovenly as any C-list studio release, the film's lowest-common-denominator laffs arrive with the tired regularity of spitballs from the back row. Right, writer/director Jared Hess' Midwestern doesn't truly qualify as a reductive caricature of Red America, but only because he cares so little about character and setting. Here, everything is cheap, manipulative and superficial, including the "redemptive" finale. Sheet. —SM

The Stepford Wives / Walking Tall Dear Hollywood: You can stop taking '70s movies whose prime virtue was their plainness, and gussying them up with ironic asides and ballooning fireballs and all the other crap that needlessly clutters a film. You can also do away with the "inspired by" credit, since the new Walking Tall saddled Buford Pusser's character with a stripper girlfriend who can fire a machine gun. Thanks. —JR

The Village is chilling evidence of alien abduction: they took our master of suspense, M. Night Shyamalan, and in his place left us with an earnest film-school student determined to write and direct this story the way Ingmar Bergman would have done it. The result was a script full of Capitalized Nouns That Are Spoken in Hushed Tones and William Hurt doing Cotton Mather-style improv. Cursed be the day the Film Crew came to The Village! —DB

Greendale Neil Young's home movie qua state of the union is ripe for ridicule: a community-theater troupe of friends and family lip-synching the auteur's confused musical narrative, all recorded in patented 8mm Shakey-vision. Yet the film nonetheless proves oddly compelling, equal parts fragile lyricism and bilious wail. The Young album it most resembles is On the Beach, a rambling, haunted, sometimes incoherent interior monologue, once dismissed, now deemed a misunderstood masterwork. Time will tell. —SM

Napoleon Dynamite The indie breakout and/or cult phenom of the year, but little reason to celebrate. As lazy and slovenly as any C-list studio release, the film's lowest-common-denominator laffs arrive with the tired regularity of spitballs from the back row. Right, writer/director Jared Hess' Midwestern doesn't truly qualify as a reductive caricature of Red America, but only because he cares so little about character and setting. Here, everything is cheap, manipulative and superficial, including the "redemptive" finale. Sheet. —SM

The Stepford Wives / Walking Tall Dear Hollywood: You can stop taking '70s movies whose prime virtue was their plainness, and gussying them up with ironic asides and ballooning fireballs and all the other crap that needlessly clutters a film. You can also do away with the "inspired by" credit, since the new Walking Tall saddled Buford Pusser's character with a stripper girlfriend who can fire a machine gun. Thanks. —JR

The Village is chilling evidence of alien abduction: they took our master of suspense, M. Night Shyamalan, and in his place left us with an earnest film-school student determined to write and direct this story the way Ingmar Bergman would have done it. The result was a script full of Capitalized Nouns That Are Spoken in Hushed Tones and William Hurt doing Cotton Mather-style improv. Cursed be the day the Film Crew came to The Village! —DB