From the bamboo grove to w(h)ine country The cinematic year in review BY PETER KEOUGH

The best of 2004 came from all over the cinematic map: foreign films, American independents, and, yes, some big-budget mainstream efforts. Here’s my list.

1) House of Flying Daggers

So you think Ang Lee knows bamboo? Zhang Yimou knows bamboo. His bamboo-grove battle, one of many spectacular climaxes in House of Flying Daggers, transcends the martial-arts genre. So does the film. Integrating color, image, rhythms, set design, character, plot, and music into a symphonic whole, Zhang has made his epic statement on the themes of individuality, responsibility, love, freedom, and fate. In short, life and cinema as he knows it.

2) The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou

This has nothing to do with real life as we know it — instead, Wes Anderson’s ¾thereal, absurd confection reaffirms the dreamlike in movies. With a surreal toss-away visual and verbal wit, Anderson takes on a tale of Ahab-like revenge and Oedipal questing and makes it as cozy and unsettling as a spin in the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine. Bill Murray as the Jacques Cousteau–like humbug of the title explores deeper nuances and ironies in his loopy persona, and the performances from the rest of the crew — Owen Wilson, Cate Blanchett, Jeff Goldblum, and Anjelica Huston, to name a few — are uniformly poignant and hilarious.

3) Crimson Gold

Some films have unhappy endings. Jafar Panahi has unhappy beginnings that only get worse. An Iranian Taxi Driver but less upbeat, Crimson Gold begins and ends with a robbery gone awry. Hussein, a lumpen pizza deliveryman, is tormented by the thought of a world of privilege and pleasure that he’s excluded from. He’s portrayed by an actor who is himself a mentally ill pizza deliveryman, and the performance is a masterpiece of pathos, a paradigm of disenfranchisement. For his part, Panahi never succumbs to didacticism. Events unreel elliptically but with the inevitability of tragedy and with a recognition that, in the closed society that is this world, desire spells doom but can’t be denied.

4) Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Michel Gondry’s consummate love story not only investigates mind, it makes you use it. Twenty minutes into the film, when the credits first kick in, the questions remain: where are we? when are we? who are we? Joel, played by Jim Carrey in his true dramatic breakthrough, bumps into Clementine (Kate Winslet) and somehow finds himself in her apartment, and it looks like the beginning of a doomed relationship. Or is it the end? It seems people are playing games with their memories, and not just the filmmakers. Like the work of Philip K. Dick, the film, which Gondry wrote with Charlie Kaufman, taps into the suspicion that the world is a figment manipulated by evil powers. It also bolsters the hope that memory, identity, and love can withstand those powers, not to mention their own inclination to self-destruction.

5) Sideways

Paul Giamatti may end up getting typecast as a beleaguered writer frustrated and inspired by the commonplace catastrophes of his life, but it’s a type whose time has come. And Alexander Payne has perfected his own genre of the absurdities of everyday life. With the equally brilliant Thomas Haden Church as his sad-sack pig of sidekick, Giamatti discovers that in vino there might not be a lot of veritas but there is some of the funniest and truest dialogue you’ll find in any movie this year. A no-frills tour of the wine and the whine region, this investigation into the nature of male bonding and delusion and the reality principle of female companionship adds one more varietal to a vintage year in film.

6) Before Sunset

Last year, Richard Linklater demonstrated his genius for genre with School of Rock. This year, he returned to a tale he began 10 years ago and proved that he is one of the most understated and talented forces in independent filmmaking.

7) Kinsey

"What organ in the human body can expand its size 100 times?" Dr. Alfred Kinsey asks an embarrassed co-ed in his Marriage Class at Indiana University in the 1930s. She indignantly refuses to answer. "I’m talking about the iris of your eye," he says, then cuts to a slide of an erect penis entering a vagina that gives the lecture hall, and the movie audience, an eyeful. Bill Condon transforms bio-pic convention into an eye-opening treatise on the virtues of tolerance and human diversity, not least of all that of its subject. True, for a film about sex, Kinsey isn’t very erotic, but Liam Neeson as Kinsey is terrific, and be sure to stay after the credits for the footage of porcupines mating.

8) The Aviator

Martin Scorsese’s version might not reveal much new about the great and strange Howard Hughes, but like his underrated Kundun, it uncannily re-creates the phenomenon of an individual experience. Leonardo DiCaprio seems at first too callow for the part, but he grows into it and confirms his early promise as a great actor. Through his eyes, the conflicts and the power of Hollywood and Washington in the ’30s and ’40s seem a phatasmagoria akin to Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow but with all the wonder and the terror intact. Not least wondrous is Cate Blanchett, who as Katharine Hepburn elevates note-perfect mimicry into genuine incarnation.

9) Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

Replacing Chris Columbus, who helmed the first two installments, Mexican director Alfonso Cuar—n shows us a Harry Potter at childhood’s end and facing emotional and physical changes that are much scarier than Lord You-Know-Who. It’s enough to make you wish he could get hold of Hermione’s time turner and re-direct the first two.

10) Open Water

Some have described Chris Kentis’s excruciating existential thriller as "The Blair Witch Project meets Jaws." I prefer "Jaws meets Waiting for Godot." A workaholic couple seek a break, so they join like-minded yuppies to scuba-dive in the life aquatic. Entranced by the deep, they overstay their allotted time and are stranded. This $300,000 DVD-shot indie demonstrates the fragile barrier between the daily grind and the inhuman forces that would grind us up for real. It also celebrates a primal bond that almost vindicates the power of love.