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Y TU MAMÁ TAMBIÉN
"Y tu mamá también stayed with me for weeks after I saw it. I particularly liked its melancholy sweetness, its unbridled eroticism, and its absolute believability. If a studio film tried for this kind of eroticism, it would look forced and phony." - Mitch Metcalf, Stamford, CT
"Y tu mamá también: See it with someone you love ·. to have sex with." - Rob Morton, New York, NY
"All the year-end hoopla for Y tu mamá también goes to show that most film critics need to get laid. Don't get me wrong - I loved the film, but better than Talk to Her?" - Ivan Ramos, San Ysidro, CA
PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE
"Punch-Drunk Love manages to do not one, but two things previously considered cinematic impossibilities. First, it channels Adam Sandler's manic energy into a touching, fully-realized performance. Second, and perhaps more impressive, it rescues the weirdly affecting Shelley Duvall song "He Needs Me" from the morass of Robert Altman's Popeye. Combined with Jon Brion's percussive score, Punch-Drunk Love features the most eclectic, and yet the most effective, music of the year." - Adam Jahnke, Culver City, CA
"Not your typical Adam Sandler movie. Not your typical romantic comedy. In fact, not your typical anything." - Rob Morton, New York, NY
"It was classic yet modern. Logical yet illogical. Intense yet light. It was dramatic, touching, and depressing, yet comical and goofy. PT Anderson is a master storyteller and the most visually intriguing young director working today. I find Adam Sandler movies to be unwatchable, yet an Adam Sandler film ranks as my favorite film of the year. Only PT Anderson can pull that off·." - Neil Marks, Hoboken, NJ
SPIRITED AWAY
"Spirited Away is full of the kind of imaginative ideas that J.K. Rowling could never conjure up on her best day." - Daniel Raphael
"If Spirited Away does not win the Oscar for best animated feature, Congress should feel impelled to establish an independent inquiry." - Walker Roberts, Nagoya, Japan
"There's so much to love about the wonderful Spirited Away, but I keep returning to that remarkable sequence where a train glides silently above an endless expanse of ocean. It's an image that stirs the heart and reminds us why we willingly spend so much of our lives inside a movie theater." - Ethan Alter, Brooklyn, NY
BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE
"Bowling for Columbine - Like it or not, this film got people talking like none other released last year by being just what the academic world fears most - populist! Moore raises many important questions but it's up to us to find the answers." - David Connelly, Los Angeles, CA
"All in all, it was a pretty good year to see movies in the Twin Cities; so I'm very sorry, but any rant, pithy or otherwise, just doesn't seem warranted. I may have been able to summon enough venom to launch a proper attack against Michael Moore had he not been ignored, justly, by the critic's poll - now it wouldn't amount to much more than kicking a lying Socialist . . . . and who wants to dirty their bourgeois shoes anyway? Give me Rohmer's reactionary politics-and his formal progress - any day!" -Michael Anderson, Delano MN
"Although I was always going to place Bowling for Columbine in my ten best, I wasn't originally going to rank it quite as high. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it is one of the most important films of the year. Moore has the finesse of a bull in a china shop and has an unfortunate (at times irritating) tendency to hog the spotlight from his subject. To his credit, however, he did tackle an extremely important topic and he had the courage and wisdom not to present any simple answers." - Gary Cooper, Albuquerque, NM
"Whatever Michael Moore's intentions, this is, at the end of the day, simply a film, and it was one of the most entertaining films I saw all year (ditto for The Two Towers, but for vastly different reasons)." - Jeff Jewell, Kentwood, IL
"Bowling for Columbine - I am so glad that Michael Moore is on our side. He is absolutely fearless and cares about all of us who feel we have no voice." - Mitch Metcalf, Stamford, CT
" I might have added Bowling for Columbine to my top ten list, but Michael Moore comes across as such an egomaniac on his website and emails, always bragging about how well his book and film are doing, that I couldn't do it." - Ross Nickow, Highland Park, IL
"Don't mistake this for a documentary. This is purely a subjective filmed essay that raises its points by any means necessary. Bowling for Columbine may enrage you. It may confirm your worst suspicions about America and Americans." - Adam Jahnke, Culver City, CA
GANGS OF NEW YORK
"Sadly, Gangs of New York was just missing something vital. Somebody ought to maybe put a contract out on Bono before he ruins the closing credits to anything else·but they'll probably give him an Oscar instead." - Nichol Lovett, Brooklyn, NY
"The much-maligned Gangs of New York is undeniably flawed, but Scorsese's sprawling epic is more ambitious than any other American film made in the past decade. To me it was an enthralling, engaging, intermittently profound experience." - Richard Suchenski, Princeton, NJ
"Daniel Day-Lewis has become the Stanley Kubrick of actors - you never know what he'll do next, it's always different, always brilliant, and the gap of years between films just keeps growing longer." - Gregory J. Prohl, Kent, WA
"Twenty years from now, surely the public will realize Gangs of New York to be along the lines of Apocalypse Now, a director's pet project realized within the studio system. Or it could be the next Once Upon a Time in America." - Walker Roberts, Nagoya, Japan
THE PIANIST
"The Pianist - Merging the twin horrors of his life into a single shot of astonishing efficacy, Polanaski shows us a pregnant woman screaming as she is hoisted by Nazi soldiers into an over-crowded railroad car bound for Treblinka. The closest thing
to autobiography we may ever see from cinema's great survivor." - David Connelly, Los Angeles, CA
"If, for whatever reason, you choose to pass on The Pianist, you are skipping one of the very best movies of this new decade and the single finest movie on the Holocaust ever. Anchored by a mesmerizing performance by Adrien Brody, The Pianist is the only film I've ever seen that stirs the same feelings as reading literature by Holocaust survivors." - Adam Jahnke, Culver City, CA
"The Pianist was Polanski's best since The Tenant. Powerful, yet stridently unsentimental; lyrical, yet uncompromisingly bleak. The climax is one for the ages." - Daniel Wible, Glen Mills, PA.
ABOUT SCHMIDT
"You'd think this wouldn't be such a big deal, capturing the look and sound of normal Americans like this, but movies practically never attempt it, let alone succeed. About Schmidt is a very special movie, and truly thrilling in its honesty. My framed About Schmidt poster is already hanging on the wall to the right of my computer. I'm afraid my fondness for this movie is bordering on obsessive dementia." - Rob Morton, New York, NY
"Whereas Payne's previous films successfully walked the fine line that is Satire, About Schmidt, all too often, stumbles into the murky, disease-ridden waters below, namely the great lakes of Mockery and Condescension." - Ryan Tracy
THE FAST RUNNER
"The Fast Runner flows with an unparalleled realism, its story built naturalistically through everyday events. To see this kind of realism in a moral and visual landscape so completely alien to our own, heightened our awareness of, and interest in, the basic and "mundane" stuff of reality (yet how laughable the word "mundane" is when shot by this camera, on this landscape!)" - Steven Toews, Kingston, ON
MINORITY REPORT
"Blade Runner will always likely be the lionized landmark of sci-fi noir, but not even that has the intrigue of Steven Spielberg's
Minority Report. Here, the noir story is told in a Memento-like way, as Tom Cruise puts together the pieces of a murder before it happens, and Spielberg takes us along for the ride with smarts and style to spare. The year's best script and most inventive piece of escapism." - Brian Skutle, Marietta, GA
"The best Spielberg movie of 2002 was 20 years old, but I preferred Catch Me If You Can to Minority Report for being a con movie that was actually about something, while the latter was a breathless (and nearly brainless) action pic that conned you into thinking it was about something more." - Ben Spacek
"In a year when "Uncle Jean" [Godard] so artlessly dissed Spielberg, the most commercially successful director of all time released two superb movies. Minority Report was the far superior of the two and among his best work (which is saying a lot)." - Daniel Wible, Glen Mills, PA
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