2002 Retrospective: The Best Films of 2002

2002, if nothing else, was a stellar year for genre reinvention. While audiences were lining up in doves for fantasy epics and superheroes way back in 2002 with The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, and Spider-Man, there were many other genre-driven films that finally found their audience in the years to come. All around, 2002 was a stunning year for cinema, a year that offered so many great memories of many titles that live in our memories and subconscious because of how the filmmaker’s transcended genre. These artists did it in very effective and humanistic way. Here are the following 16 haunting films, which I haven’t been able to get out of my mind since the first time I saw them, which was 20 years ago. Each of these films holds great staying power and plays extremely well on repeat viewings. Here are the best films of 2002:

1. Gangs of New York (d. Martin Scorsese)

Years later this film is still being championed today. Martin Scorsese’s gigantic historical epic combines great passion, rich history, and bold vision that captures a portrait of American history that many filmmakers have failed to go. With its astonishing directing, stunning art-direction, elegant camera movements, along with an uncanny and masterful performance by Daniel-Day Lewis, Gangs of New York is Scorsese’s sprawling magnum opus that advances the epic genre that unfolds with Scorsese’s trademark stylistic touches, from whip pans to elegant tracking shots. What s truly remarkable about this picture is how bold and ambitious the film is. To this date it remains Scorsese’s most ambitious.

2. Adaptation. (d. Spike Jonze)

An audacious mishmash of satire, character study, self-indulgence, and the creative process, director Spike Jonze’s and writer Charlie Kaufman’s adaptation is nothing short of brilliant with its meta-adaptation of Susan Orlean’s non-fiction book The Orchid Thief. It’s a crazy film, so crazy that Charlie Kaufman writes himself into his own story as an insecure screenwriter, played by Nicholas Cage in one of his most skillful performances of his career. Cage also plays Donald Kaufman (who is credited as co-writer in Adaptation), a fictional character who is inspired by Charlie’s screenwriting, and ends up taking screening classes to develop a formulaic thriller. Charlie, on the other hand, is struggling to adapt Orlean’s screenwriting, which takes the film on a highly inventive journey filled with meta genius and equal amounts of pure human pathos. Structurally and thematically, Adaptation is an essential moment of its time that’s still innovative today. With a highlight performance by Nicholas Cage, as well as layered performances by both Meryl Streep, who plays Susan Orlean, and Chris Cooper, who plays Orlean’s subject, a orchid conversationalist and poacher named John Laroche.

3. Punch-Drunk Love (d. Paul Thomas Anderson) 

Oddly charming and whimsical with its off-beat humor and a melancholic exploration of loneliness being empowered by the power of love, P.T. Anderson’s follow-up to his sweeping 1999 masterpiece, Magnolia, didn’t disappoint. P.T. Anderson once again delivered a artful portrait of an outsider in Punch-Drunk Love, which feels like an abandoned subplot that didn’t make it into the final draft of Magnolia. The film explores the anguish and isolation of a warehouse business owner named Barry Egan (Adam Sandler), who deals in a supply chain of plungers, holds a lot of anger issues, and is quick tempered from the constant harassment that he still endures from his older sisters.

In his most complex and sympatric performance of his career, Anderson weaves some affecting psychological and emotional details into an energetic and vibrant film topped by Sandler. Anderson was inspired by an article he read about a business owner who found a fine-print loophole in Healthy Choice’s frequent flyer mile campaign that encouraged him to spend over $3000 on pudding that led to one million frequent-flier miles, which is basically free flights for life. With a bold stylistic visual style that consists of mostly hues of blue and a brisk pace of 95 minutes, this is easily one of P.T. Anderson’s most enjoyable films of his career. It’s also one of his most tender, as Barry is a loner, who is quick-tempered, lashes out at people, and very weak when pressed with confrontation–including the events where Barry calls a sex-phone line number during a lonely night, only to become a victim of distortion and threats. But Barry ends up becoming a transformed person once he encounters Lena (Emily Watson), a co-worker of one of his sisters, with whom he ends up developing a relationship that enables him to become a confident and more secure person. Punch-Drunk Love unravels as a beautiful ode to the need for human connection as it gains sheer emotional resonance and remains one of P.T. Anderson’s most joyful films.

4. Y Tu Mama Tambien (d. Alfonso Cuarón)

Just as Cuarón returned to Mexico with “Roma” after two bigger Hollywood productions (Children of Men, Gravity), he did this as well with the 2002 released film Y Tu Mama Tambien that came right after Great Expectations (1998) and A Little Princess (1995). Clearly Cuarón has personal things to say about his roots. The film was released Unrated, and it’s Cuarón’s most sensual and erotic film of his career. While explicit with full frontal nudity, the film is far from being pornographic or exploitative. The film is very thoughtful and honesty, thanks to the casting of Gabriel Garcia Bernal and Deigo Luna, who both generated their careers here with some fearless and honest performances, but it was Maribel Verdu as Luisa that truly drives the theme and material into a level of maturity, thoughtfulness, and grace. She truly elevates every scene as she teases, drills, observes, and gives the young men lectures about love, dating, intimacy, and romance that they are still novice to. She follows the tropes of the “wiser and sexier older woman”, that Hollywood has drained from us, but here Cuarón elevated that archetype into a character that is sophisticated, complex, gorgeous, and conflicted. Overall, the film is a richly made and engaging road movie that offers great laughs, warmth, and melancholy.

5. The Pianist (d. Roman Polanski) 

Revisiting Spielberg’s Schindler’s List should lead everyone back revisiting this masterpiece, and with neo-Nazism and fascism rising around the world, and in America this film should be prioritized viewing in history classes.  Roman Polanski’s The Pianist is a triumph of hope and survival. A film about courage, determination, and agony during the holocaust that never once caves into cheap sentiment or manipulation, Polanski’s approach here is quite gripping and harrowing throughout. Adrien Brody’s performance here is also bold and expressionist, a truly haunting and humane work of art.

7. Talk to Her (d. Pedro Almodovar) 

I revisited Pedro Almodovar’s visually sublime and highly intoxicating 2002 film Talk to Her recently just after Parallel Mothers and wow its indeed a masterpiece that truly holds up. Every film buff and lover of cinema needs to watch this film. Almodovar was nominated for Best Director and Almodovar Best Original Screenplay that year. The film is a very intimate, layered, and all around a very thoughtful one that covers many issues about love, friendship, desire, and the line between love and obsession. All around it’s an achingly absorbing film, filled with so many pathos and vibrant colors of deep reds, purples, oranges, and greens. The film is about a male nurse named Benigno (Javier Camara) who is deeply infatuated with a dancer Alicia after he discovers her dancing in a window across the street from his mother’s apartment. Once Alicia is deeply wounded from an injury that leaves her in a coma, Bengino ends up being her nurse. The film also chronicles a woman bullfighter who is also injured and placed into a coma after a bullfight goes awry, she is brought to the same facility, her boyfriend, writer Marco (Dario Grandinetti) ends up building a strong friendship with Bengino where both men exchange their feelings, longings, and emotions they hold for the women they love. The film casts a melancholic spell that remains endless well after the credits have rolled. One of the most delicately rendered and compassionate on-screen odes to longing ever created.