Best Films of 2002, One Of The Great Unheralded Movie Years
You can rarely judge the quality of a movie year by its Oscar winners, but 2002 is especially misrepresented by the victory laps from well-meaning homework like Chicago and The Hours. You’ll notice neither of those movies show up on the list below, but what does appear runs an incredible gamut of genres and styles and moods. Any movie year can have elite titles at the top of the year-end critics lists, but how many can boast such high-quality junk?
25. Jason X
My weakness for this franchise knows no bounds, but this movie has so much fun with a fundamentally dumb and warmed-over premise (“What if Jason went to space?”) that I can’t help but get wrapped up in its manic energy and left field humor.
24. Roger Dodger
Largely a two-hander between pubescent Jesse Eisenberg and resurgent Campbell Scott, this is a great after-hours tour of seediness and dirtbaggery that never forgets how attractive idols remain even as they are falling.
23. One Hour Photo
The most successful version of Robin Williams’ “Triptych of Evil,” though both Insomnia and Death to Smoochy have their charms. He’s the deeply sad and creepy picture of isolation as a photo clerk who obsesses over details and lives a simulated life through the people in the prints.
22. Y Tu Mama Tambien
Delivers on the premise “What if you went on an extremely horny road trip through Mexico?”
21. Lovely & Amazing
It seems like every year I become obsessed with one movie that is mostly about women talking to each other. (One of those recent entries was literally called Women Talking.) This Nicole Holofcener joint is 2002’s entry, which crackles largely thanks to the constant simmer between Catherine Keener and Emily Mortimer.
20. Panic Room
Just a surgically executed chamber play that does everything right—including splattering Jared Leto’s brains everywhere early in the run time.
19. 8 Mile
Eminem is a surprisingly soulful presence in the slacking off at work and bullshitting with your go-nowhere friends sections of the film, but the rap battles would make this an elite entry even if the rest of the movie was Master of Disguise outtakes.
18. Road to Perdition
Hanks goes against type as a hard-bitten gangster who still finds his humanity and his heroism in a handsomely-rendered period piece that is quietly one of the best graphic novel adaptations there’s been.
17. Gangs of New York
People were extremely effusive about this thing at the time, largely because Scorsese had been on a bit of a critical and commercial cold streak, but we now recognize this to be second-tier Marty and a slightly sloppy warm-up for some of the second golden era stuff that followed. Still, this has an all-time transfixing Daniel Day-Lewis performance and some cool set pieces and a big-ass real set so it’s hard to be mad at it.
16. The Piano Teacher
Delivers on the premise “What if your piano teacher was impossibly horny and damaged?” This was my first experience with both Michael Haneke and Isabelle Huppert, and I wish this had become a backdoor franchise wherein she uses her MILF powers to have increasingly elaborate mental breakdowns.
15. The Ring
Started a terrible trend of limp remakes of inscrutably terrifying Asian horror flicks, but this remains fresh and terrifying and visually engaging. The relationship between Naomi Watts and her kid in this is all-time weird.
14. The Good Girl
This was Jennifer Aniston doing the thing where she makes a tiny indie to prove she can act beyond her TV star persona, and she mostly succeeds. I’m realizing now that a lot of these movies are mentally unbalanced women seducing younger men, and I’m not sure what that says about me.
13. Secretary
Is this list getting too horny?
12. Femme Fatale
Oh God, it is. It’s too horny!
11. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
Back on non-horny ground. I’m not as invested in this franchise as many people are, but this is an undeniably great war epic that uses its middle chapter shortcuts to great effect.
10. Far From Heaven
I didn’t see any of the Douglas Sirk melodramas that Todd Haynes is riffing on in this movie until years after I fell in love with it in the theater, but you don’t need to have seen All That Heaven Allows to appreciate the sharpness of the storytelling or Julianne Moore just absolutely getting buckets from everywhere.
9. The Rules of Attraction
An ambitious adaptation of a particularly unruly Bret Easton Ellis novel, this never became a cable staple but absolutely should have because it’s one of those flicks that is always five minutes away from something awesome. The “Black Is the Color of My True Love’s Hair” sequence! The Europe montage! Clifton Collins Jr.! The ladies who lunch! I simply must respect filmmaking this audacious.
8. Morvern Callar
People toss around the term “dreamlike,” but this is about as sharp a representation of the space between consciousness and not as I have ever seen. One of the great “nothing really happens” movies.
7. Talk to Her
He’s done it so often it’s taken for granted, but Almodovar delivers an off-beat story that is funny and sad and sumptuous. Rosario Flores spends most of the movie unconscious and still her performance is riveting.
6. Spider-Man
The further we get from this MCU ur-text the more remarkable it becomes. The difficulty level here is off the charts but everybody delivers, and Sam Raimi even makes it feel like one of his movies and not just a franchise for hire.
5. The 25th Hour
Spike Lee’s post-9/11 meditation on grief and regret is just series of incredible conversations about the state of men’s souls. Weirdly one of Spike’s prettiest movies despite being shot in a hideous and fractured version of lower Manhattan.
4. Punch Drunk Love
The first movie that showed us Adam Sandler had some real moves, and he totally gives himself over to Paul Thomas Anderson’s psychedelic vision of a San Fernando Valley man-child who finds a counterpoint.
3. Minority Report
An incredibly successful hard sci-fi thriller that still functions as popcorn entertainment because the greatest movie star in history is at the center of it. Funny and deeply weird, Minority Report ranked up there with any of Spielberg’s best work. I was mad at the ending when I first saw it but I’ve grown to realize the actual finale is so much darker than the one he actually teases in the movie. It turns out Spielberg is Good At It.
2. Adaptation.
Any time you can get Nicolas Cage in a scene with himself, you gotta take that ride. It must be hard to be Charlie Kaufman on a day-to-day basis but I do love it when that guy sweats.
1. Spirited Away
There’s a moment in every Miyazaki movie that gets to the heart of what it really feels like to be alive in the world, and it creates a physical ache in my chest that is painfully satisfying. Spirited Away hits that note about four minutes in and then maintains it for the length of the film. It’s one long gorgeous pang, and thus one of the greatest films ever made.