In a year when every second picture at the multiplex seemed to be either a remake of a beloved old classic (The Italian Job, Solaris, Swept Away), or one of those loud, crass, empty spectacles (Bad Boys II, Daredevil, 2 Fast 2 Furious) Hollywood trots out every summer to lure the mainstream audience into its air-conditioned seats, here are ten movies (in no particular order) that dared to be true to their artistic visions regardless of box-office success.

Heaven
In Tom Tykwer's stellar follow-up to the art-house sensations Run Lola Run and The Princess And The Warrior, Cate Blanchett paints an indelible portrait of a Turin schoolteacher who commits a terrible crime. Following her arrest for the unintentional murder of four innocent people, a young police officer (Giovanni Ribisi), blinded by devotion, helps her escape. With Heaven, Tykwer proves once again that he is a superb visual stylist. His compositions - a train emerging from a tunnel; two lovers, in silhouette, disrobing beneath a tree - are as formal, and fluid, as Kubrick's. When Ribisi's father (Remo Girone) offers the fugitives his help, the camera moves in close and the effect is overwhelming: we know, in those brief, eloquent moments, that there is no turning back.

Punch-Drunk Love
Philip Thomas Anderson's delightfully offbeat consideration of familial rage, frequent-flyer miles, and the dubious pleasures of phone sex. Under Anderson's sure-handed guidance, Adam Sandler tones down his comic persona and delivers a surprisingly restrained performance as a man in a bizarre blue suit no tailor worth his stitches would take credit for. Sandler's encounter with Philip Seymour Hoffman in a furniture store has everything a viewer could hope for: pathos, tension, and above all, heart. A singular achievement by one of Hollywood's least predictable directors.

Swimming Pool
An elegant puzzle, with the incomparable Charlotte Rampling as a British mystery writer who may or may not be complicit in a murder. In a worthy companion piece to another of his efforts, the equally ambiguous Under The Sand (also starring Rampling), Francois Ozon examines, with a clinician's eye for detail and a novelist's sense of pace, the curious bond that develops between Rampling and Ludivine Sagnier, the sexually-precocious daughter of Rampling's publisher. The languid cinematography, by Yorick Le Saux, and sensuous score, by Phillippe Rombi, intensify the film's exquisite mood of erotic menace.

Lost in Translation
In a career-best performance, Bill Murray plays Bob Harris, an American movie star who arrives in Tokyo to film a series of television commercials. In the lounge of the hotel where he is staying, Murray meets Scarlett Johansson, a disaffected young woman who shares his ennui in Sofia Coppola's delicious comedy of modern manners.Coppola is still learning some of the finer points of filmmaking - her camera is sometimes too jittery for its own good - but her storytelling could not be more astute.There are many beguiling moments: Murray hamming it up on a local talk show; Johansson wistfully observing the rites of a traditional Japanese romance; and in a classic bit of physical comedy Murray proves, once and for all, that workouts are not for the faint of heart.

Spider
A somber, disturbing, complex examination of mental illness, starring Ralph Fiennes as a schizophrenic haunted by his past. In a series of flashbacks Gabriel Byrne plays Fiennes's working-class father, and in a spectacular dual role the gifted English actress Miranda Richardson skillfully portrays Fiennes's nurturing mother, as well as a neighborhood tart. Impeccably directed by David Cronenberg, Spider is a superior example of an incisive script matching an artist's incisive sensibility. Cronenberg has made many excellent pictures, but Spider is his most accomplished film to date. A dark tone poem that resonates long after the screen goes black.

Girl With a Pearl Earring
In this splendid account of the 17th Century Dutch painter Jan Vermeer (Colin Firth) and the servant (Scarlett Johansson) who serves as the model for one of his most revered works, cinematographer Eduardo Serra frames his luminous images with the same attention to detail as Vermeer himself. And first-time director Peter Webber's quiet, modulated, refreshingly non-Hollywood approach suits the material well, allowing the narrative tension to build moment by moment, frame by radiant frame.Firth's portrayal of the brooding artist never strikes a false note, nor does the ever-reliable Tom Wilkinson as Vermeer's sleazy patron, but from the first shot on the picture belongs to Johansson. Her aura of calm - the stillness at the center of her acting - gradually reveals a young woman's awakening sexuality and startling emotional depth.

Rabbit-Proof Fence
Australian director Philip Noyce returned to his homeland to tell the inspiring true story of three young Aboriginal girls (Molly, the oldest, is thirteen) who in 1931 escaped from a relocation camp and then, astonishingly, walked the 1200 miles back to their tribal home, all the while eluding professional trackers. A searing indictment of the shameful Aborigine Act, which granted the government the right to remove any half-caste child from their home and train them to become servants to wealthy white families, Rabbit-Proof Fence is also a stirring tribute to the human spirit. Solid filmmaking greatly enhanced by Christopher Doyle's soaring cinematography and Peter Gabriel's evocative score. With memorable performances by the entire cast, including Kenneth Branagh as the ironically titled "chief protector", and Everlyn Sampi as the indomitable thirteen-year old who refuses to accept his authority.

Cold Mountain
In light of his two previous adaptations - The English Patient and The Talented Mr. Ripley - Anthony Minghella seemed a logical, if unimaginative, choice to bring Charles Frazier's epic civil war novel to the screen. Fortunately Cold Mountain, the story of a battle-scarred Confederate soldier (Jude Law) and his determination to return home to the woman he loves (Nicole Kidman), showcases Minghella's considerable strengths, his sense of scale and design tempered by the intimacy of the core story. The battle that opens the picture is suitably horrific. Law and Kidman's hushed, delicate scenes are beautifully paced and acted. And the supporting cast - Donald Sutherland as Kidman's father, Philip Seymour Hoffman as a wayward preacher, Brensan Gleeson as a repentant fiddler, Natalie Portman as a frightened widow and, in a surprising comic turn, Rene Zellweger as the earthy waif who saves Kidman's farm - could not be better.

Elephant
Gus Van Sant's lyrical, unsettling meditation on the tragedy at Columbine. Although critics have carped about Van Sant's refusal to provide easy answers to the dilemma of random violence among our young, his refusal is apt: in the final analysis there are no answers - there are only the victims, the killers, and those who survive.With a few bold strokes the movie captures the uneasy rituals of a typical American high school: the boredom, the casual cruelty, the daily angst. Van Sant's intricate visual strategy - students appear, in sharp focus, in the front of the frame while the killers pass, like blurs, across the background - is flawless. It's like a dream you can't quite wake from and then, when you do, can't quite forget.

The Man Without a Past
Like his amnesiac central character, Finland's Aki Kaurismaki, one of world cinema's great eccentric directors, once again journeys into territory uncharted by other filmmakers. Part love story, part social treatise, part comic spoof, The Man Without A Past examines, among other worthy subjects, capitalism, poverty, poisonous mushrooms, potato farming, and a Salvation Army band's droll initiation into the midnight wonders of rock and roll.The deadpan actor Markku Peltola is the penniless man who discovers, through loss of memory, enrichment in the poorest of communities and redemption in a woman's unconditional love.

                                                                 © FILM JOURNAL 2002