The Cinéaste's Progress from This List to That Which Is to Come (He Hopes)


Once upon a time, I used to play a coy, rather pointless game w/r/t my annual top ten list -- dramatically "unveiling" it sometime in January, as if most everybody who reads this site didn't already have a pretty good idea of what it was gonna look like. Instead, I now publicly revise the sucker as I go along, so that the whole affair becomes a suspenseful Journey Toward Aesthetic Nirvana. Or something.

Here, then, is what my list would look like if (god forbid) I were forced to make it today:

01. Tropical Malady (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, France/Thailand)
02. Who's Camus Anyway?^ (Mitsuo Yanagimachi, Japan)
03. The Wayward Cloud^ (Tsai Ming-liang, Taiwan)
04. 3-iron (Kim Ki-duk, South Korea)
05. Grizzly Man (Werner Herzog, USA/Canada)
06. Frank Miller's Sin City (Frank Miller & Robert Rodriguez, USA)
07. Sky High (Mike Mitchell, USA)
08. Whisky (Juan Pablo Rebella & Pablo Stoll, Uruguay/Argentina/Germany)
09. Land of the Dead (George A. Romero, USA)
10. Head-On (Fatih Akin, Germany/Turkey)

(Films marked with an asterisk, if any, have not yet been released commercially in the U.S. but are currently scheduled for release during 2005. Films marked with a caret, if any, currently have no U.S. distributor. Films marked with both an asterisk and a caret, if any, have a U.S. distributor but currently have no set release date and hence may or may not turn up this year, who the hell knows. Lithium is no longer available on credit.)