In Film editor Luke Buckmaster rewinds 2003 and recaps the year's best films.  The following is a list of capsule reviews for the ten best films of the year, listed in no particular order...

FINDING NEMO 
The latest in a string of tightly written and superbly animated features from Pixar Studios, who have risen to become gods of animation.  Finding Nemo begins with one of the darkest openings in Disney cartoon history, telling the story of a father clown-fish named Merlin who loses his wife and all but one of his hundreds of fish eggs in a tragedy destined to make you think twice about ordering fish and chips for dinner.  Marlin becomes the over-protective father of Nemo, his sole surviving child who is kidnapped by a scuba diving dentist and placed in a fish tank in his operating room.  Thus the search begins, and Marlin must travel through the Great Barrier Reef to rescue his son, conquering his fears and meeting all sorts of strange and interesting creatures on the way (Bruce, a shark battling a ravishing fish addiction, is particularly memorable) The story thrives on simplicity, riding a singular concept all the way to a gloriously satisfying conclusion, and the script is choc-a-block full of gags and one-liners that are genuinely funny for all ages.  This, in fact, is the perfect family movie: gorgeous to look at, tightly wound and high-octane, without a trace of pretension or dumb-downed ideals that so frequently condescend the younger market.  Finding Nemo is one of the best animated films ever made, a glorious awe-inspiring tale comparable to classics like The Lion King. 

DOWN WITH LOVE
This charming razor sharp comedy starring Ewan Mcgregor and the bony Renee Zellwegger is a surprise hit of the year, cheerfully reinvigorating the battle of the sexes into a clever game of wits and deception for its primary players.  Mcgregor saddles up to his fantasy alter ego Catcher Block, an excessive womanizing journalist who meets his match with Barbara Novak (Zellwegger), the author of a sexually revolutionary book titled Down With Love.  The book becomes an international phenomenon and women everywhere begin to view men as sex objects rather than hands in marriage, prompting Catcher to devise a devilish scheme to masquerade as a charming traditional Southern gent in an attempt to prove Barbara wrong by making her fall in love with him.  Everything is not what it seems and the game of deception and misdirection begins, and director Peyton Reed (Bring It On) makes the sharpness of his script irresistibly flamboyant by gorgeous costume design and wrings splendid comic performances from his excellent cast.  Down With Love is funny and witty, comically high-octane with rapid-fire laughs and not a beat of boredom spliced in between its hilariously promiscuous gags.  The scene in which creative use of split screens turn an innocent phone conversation into something more is a highlight.

UNDEAD
Australian horror fanatics have waited over thirty-five years to see a local film of this calibre, ever since the master macabre guru George A Romero inspired a revolution of the genre in 1968 with Night of the Living Dead.  Undead is Night of the Living Dead meets Welcome to Woop Woop, with a dash of a Peter Jackson horror film thrown in for good measure.  It is a visually lavish and insanely funny production; the cast and crew inhabit a loony larrikin charm that perfectly suits the zany spontaneity of the zombie film genre.  Debut twin artists the Spierig brothers have assigned the pennies of their small budget (the film was made for less than one million dollars) incredibly shrewdly, mastering a cool visual style with a plethora of gross-out effects at their disposal.  A small Australian town becomes infiltrated with zombie invaders, and it is up to a rugged hero with a dark hat and a shadowy face to save the day, using his experiences with alien abductors and flying undead fish to guide him and a group of angst ridden Aussies through the night.  For horror buffs Undead is an achievement not be missed, oozing style from cheekily scripted mayhem and it also happens to boast one of the funniest lines of dialogue in the genre in years: a panicked police officer looks out a lounge room window at a bunch of approaching zombies and exclaims "in my day kids respected their parents, they didn't fuckin' eat 'em."  This hilarious film deserves to become a revered cult classic on DVD/video. 

CITY OF GOD
If I had to name a best film for 2003 it would be this brilliantly made low-budget Brazilian movie that rocked the art house circuit all the way to the Oscars, where it sneaked in a couple of nominations and came away predictably empty handed.  The first thing you notice about City of God is its gritty fast-cutting style, and the second is its excessive and unrelenting violence.  It is based on a true story about gang warfare in the shady slums of Rio de Janeiro.  At first its sequences seem random and irrelevant, before a fluent story eventually unravels about a scared young boy who bravely follows his desire to become a professional photographer and to find a way out.  Within minutes of watching City of God I knew I’d found the kind of film I spend lonely nights wishing for, a visually lavish production determined to sustain realism while it drenches its subject matter in style.  The opening scene, which details the life and death and ingestion of a chicken, is a striking moment simultaneously beautiful and cruel; only the beginning of a technically stunning movie that tickles the brain as it punches the gut.  A fantastic achievement and a very powerful experience.

RETURN OF THE KING
Peter Jackson becomes the undisputed king of popular filmmaking, as his Lord of the Rings trilogy spirals towards a spectacular large-scale conclusion to rival the magnitude of any film ever made.  Don't get me wrong, this is not the pinnacle of cinema's powers or even the year's best film, but for those who love to absorb the medium as a mode of spectacle (which at one stage or another is most of us) this is about as good as you'll get.  Technically speaking Return of the King is one of the best movies ever made, with lush sweeping images photographing the New Zealand landscape with glorious detail.  Cinematography and editing are at superbly tweaked levels, and the animation that brings Middle Earth to life is the most convincing CGI achieved so far in cinema history.  Where Jackson faults is in his conclusion to his three-film epic, which serves up a fattening glob of fried cheese as he (somewhat understandably) finds it difficult to say goodbye to his heroes. 

NINE QUEENS
Imagine a Spanish mixture of The Usual Suspects and The Sting welded into a street story about con men who unite to pull off the greatest maneuver of their careers, involving nine very experience stamps and an endless supply of hustlers, criminals and scheming fat cats in a city populated by crooks.  Nine Queens is one of smartest thriller I've seen in years, comprised of a script choc-a-block full of trapdoors and misdirection which invites the audience to participate in a paranoid game of who's conning who.  The film is almost always two steps ahead of its suspicious viewers, and it is impossible to second-guess exactly where we are being led.  Great fun to follow and also a proficient technical achievement.

SECRETARY
"Who says love has to be soft and gentle," quips one character in Steven Shaimberg's Secretary, and that pretty much sums it up for this film.  Secretary, starring James Spader and Maggie Downal (Donnie Darko’s sistser) is a true oddball of cinema, because there is virtually nothing that has come before it comparable to the strange breed of eroticism and black comedy on display here.  Lee (Downal) is a attractive alternative self-mutilator constantly fighting the temptation of burning herself or cutting open her arms and legs.  One day she lands the title job as a secretary to E. Edward Grey (Spader) a lawyer with peculiar habits and a strange fascination with red pens.  Things progress ordinarily enough until one day Lee makes a couple too many typos and is punished by Grey with a strange form of discipline: she is asked to put her elbows against the desk and bend over just as far as possible.  He isn't interested in sex -- "not in the least," he explains -- thus prompting a bizarre form of sexual encounters in which Lee finds a new addiction and Grey lets off a little office steam.  For the large part the film feels sick and hedonistic, and it revels splendidly in its own provocative weirdness, but really it's about finding love in the most unexpected places and through the most unusual of circumstances.  Although the film is ultimately a story of optimism, it reads for the most part as something deliriously perverted.  Secretary, like Punch Drunk Love, is a diamond in the rough: a romantic comedy that bears very little resemblance to the meekness of the standard American product.

PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE
An odd collaboration with moron comic Adam Sandler makes PT Anderson's follow-up to Magnolia an impressive art house comedy hit.  Easily Sandler's best work to date, the script was written with him in mind and thrives off Sandler's surprisingly superb central performance as a quirky rage-repressed man whose best achievement in life is working out an infallible way to scam frequent flyer points from pudding coupons.  Its enormous heart notwithstanding, the film is also incredibly smart.  It begins with a bizarrely beautiful opening sequence in which a strange piano is abruptly dumped on the street for Barry Egan (Sandler) to find and ponder over.  The two romantic leads (the other is Emily Watson) come together in unexpected circumstances, and their plausible attraction seems to dance comically along to the film's jovial beat, a celebratory mixture of psychedelic swirls of colour and accordion tunes.  It marks a strange achievement for an American film, a largely unpredictable romantic comedy that shares the same principles as any standard offering in its bloated genre but approaches the material with a refreshing zest that breathes new life into dusty conventions.  "I'm looking at your face and I just wanna smash it," says Sandler, lovingly to his new woman while lying in bed.  "I just wanna fuckin smash it with a sledgehammer and squeeze it."  What other movie could get away with dialogue like that in an affecting moment of romance between two newly found lovebirds? 

TAPE
Exciting filmmaker Richard Linklater's resume of talent grows impressively diverse with this back-to-basics approach to cinema that relies entirely on strong characters and dialogue to maintain an intense atmosphere of interest, adapted from a one setting play in which a clever drug dealer invites a couple of high school buddies to his motel room to resolve a long-standing conflict between them.  All the action takes place in the same room and the film is shot with a digital camcorder.  Ethan Hawke, Robert Sean Leonard and Uma Thurman are the only performers, and they all work with exemplary effectiveness.  In a special effects and spectacle obsessed industry, it is greatly refreshing to watch an engaging production at opposite ends to where current cinema conventions are at.  An excellent, engaging feature that takes the term "zero-budget" to new levels of interest.

DREAMCATCHER 
Stephen King himself has described this film as the finest adaptation of his work for at least fifteen years, and Dreamcatcher joins Kubrick's The Shining and Romero's The Dark Half as King’s best screen projects of all time.  The film is directed by Lawrence Kasdan, who began his career as a screenwriter for the Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises before finding his own critical success as a filmmaker, notably for The Big Chill in 1983 and Grand Canyon in '92.  Kasdan likes to tweak empathy from compassionate characters, and the personalities in Dreamcatcher feel abundantly real even as the story moves into its supernatural elements that, in lesser hands (and this has been proven far too many times in the past) would feel like transparent schlock.  You get the feeling that a lot has been chopped from the novel, and still the narrative divides into several dense threads.  One of them involves a group of children who, after a moment of brave kindness, are given the ability to talk without using their mouths and share their experiences via a telepathic connection.  This is to prepare them for what is to come years later, when as adults they become the key figures in a battle against alien invasion.  The scenes in which one schizophrenic character looks through windows into his mind are the pivotal points of weirdness in this strange and compelling production.  I've always been a fan of King's writing -- he has a certain way of grinding his characters into unrelenting personal hell -- and I've seen almost all of his movie adaptations.  Only Kubrick's seminal horror opus is better than this, a beautifully crafted supernatural drama with a range of strong performances and characters.

All original pieces of writing are © copyright to their authors