Clever hobbitses, for climbing so high.

The first two Lord of the Rings films tied for second in 2001 and took a dizzying spill to sixth in 2002, but there is absolutely no denying the power of this return. The Return of the King is working on an entirely different order from every other film on my list this year, although this list is blessed by some of the finest films I've ever seen. King beats them all. The Return of the King is the Citizen Kane of fantasy filmmaking - a manifesto, a blueprint, and a gigantic leap forward. It's nothing short of a rallying cry - "Hey guys, here's what we can do now, so let's go do it!"

Unaccountably, indescribably epic in scope, the heartbeat of King falls into perfect sync with our own. It's a simple story about one very simple thing, and two very simple men who must do that thing - and it gets the biggest emotional reaction I've ever had in a theatre. King, one hopes, is the beginning of a new order of fantasy cinema, where not only the technological tools, but the literate attention to character, and the whimsical desire to entertain, all continue to mesh as well as they have here. It would be a shame if everything Peter Jackson has wrought doesn't, somehow, rub off on other filmmakers as much as it has rubbed off on me. But hey: if no one else is going to do it, I sure as hell will.

An astonishingly powerful film from this year's Toronto International Film Festival. I earmarked it early on as a film I'd like to see, but I never expected to be so transported or utterly accessed by it - and that access is, in the end, one of its greatest tricks. Temps plays at emotional bleakness, yet it is one of the most heartfelt films I've ever seen. It packs the ultimate emotional whallop, in spite of its seemingly spare emotional geography. In ways that only cinema can, it soaks is in the darkest darkness and then finds the few, fragile points of light.

Could we call it one of the greatest science fiction films ever made? It deals with post-apocalyptic survival, yet bears none of the trappings of "genre," not even bothering to explain how or why this society has come to be living off its own scraps. Better then just to focus our vision in the same light as the film itself - on the survivors, and how they survive.

Anyone who reads this blog knows full well that I didn't have any more fun at the movies this year than I did with Cap'n Jack Sparrow, so this placement should come as no surprise. "Suprise" is the operative word for POTC; few tentpole summer flicks in recent memory have looked so dead in the water before going in. Fortunately, this film only takes about thirty seconds to establish that it's the best film of the summer - a foggy expanse of water, a creaky old ship, and a spooky little girl singing "Yo Ho" as a dirge.

And then Johnny Depp shows up, and it becomes a completely different movie. Depp is to acting what Return of the King is to cinema - a whole different level. And it's in Pirates - not Dead Man, not Ed Wood, not even Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - that he best demonstrates that fact.

And here's the fourth film on this list which, in any other year, would have been number one. I'm telling, you, 2003 was a great year, and this delight from France - we've all been calling it the anti-Amelie - is just fabulous, and fired me up so much when I saw it at the fest that I was literally jumping up and down with glee after leaving the theatre.

In 2003, I really connected with cinema as cinema, and Jeux is a perfect cinematic fairy tale, leaning on all the great attributes of the medium to tell a story that could not be done justice in any other form. Gleefully dark and breathlessly quick, Jeux d'Enfants embraces is mordant humour fully, becoming a fantastic crowd-pleaser. Sweet, slick, funny, romantic, operatic... I hope this film gets released in North America soon, cuz I'm longing for another bite.

My estimation for this film knows almost no bounds. In many ways, it's Tarantino's best yet; in many other ways, that doesn't matter at all. As far as I'm concerned, this is a perfect film. It is one of the most relentlessly satisfying filmgoing experiences I've ever had - and the fact that it falls at the end of a 6-year, ever-increasingly-unsettling absence from filmmaking for Quentin Tarantino makes it all the more worthwhile. So many great directors have come back after long sabbaticals, only to flop with their over-hyped projects... while QT has pretty much established no one should ever doubt him, ever again.

Bring on Vol. 2, one of the three films I'm looking most forward to this year! But in this case, as with all great films that are part of multiple-film sagas, it won't matter of Vol. 2 is a complete turkey. Vol. 1 stands on its own as a classic of cinema.

An absolutely brilliant sophomore showing from Sofia Coppola, Lost in Translation lingers on the palate long after we've left the theatre, like a pleasant memory of a really good day. What continues to attract me to Lost in Translation is its simplicity, its use of silences both aural and emotional. In a year when Hollywood's leading dramatic non-couple, Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise, attempted to create sweeping character studies with emotional resonance, it was two lost souls in a Japanese hotel that fully managed the trick for all of us.

Talk about "execution dependent:" pairing Scarlett Johansen with Bill Murray was nothing short of a casting masterstroke, because without them, the material is too spare to work. Fortunately, both are giving the finest performances of their career, which is saying a lot for newbie Johansen, and a lot more for veteran Murray. For both actors, this is hopefully only the beginning of where they might go.

I begrudged Peter Pan mightily before I saw it, thinking it just another misguided attempt at a book that few filmmakers actually understand. Peter and Wendy is one of my favourite novels, a riot of imagination and subtext, and every version of the story committed to film has been a vapid sideshow of pirates, indians and naughty little boys.

Well, I was way, way wrong, and I'm so glad I was. Look at what P.J. Hogan has wrought here - the beginnings of the aforementioned payoff on Lord of the Rings' manifesto on what fantasy filmmaking can do. This is a digital achievement, using the complete paintbox of visual effects to create a magical adventure that has a beating heart and soul. Intelligent and literate, with wit and whimsy to spare, Peter Pan is an utter transportation. I defy you not to lift a few inches off your seats when Wendy, John and Michael follow Peter out into the night sky.

I admit, I never would have pegged Gus Van Sant as a filmmaker who could hold place on my list for two years in a row, but in the past eighteen months, this guy has become one filmmaker I pretty much can't do without. So for 2003, he restages last year's Gerry with the same spare emotional canvas, merely switching landscapes from a desert wasteland, to the wasteland of a high school on the brink of unspeakable violence. It's remarkably effective, not in how it restages those horrible events of 1999 (although that, too, is a work of artistic brilliance with courage beyond measure), but in how simply it captures the unique emotional environment of its teenagers, from the lowliest unpopular bookworm to the dispassionate psychopaths at the story's center.

Van Sant seems very much to be an artist back in his zone, and having pulled this film off, there isn't anywhere I won't follow him.

Thrills! Chills! Comedy! Romance! Roller-coaster intrigue and a surprise ending! And it's... about ... spelling.

Yeah. What else can I say. It's an astonishment, in that Spellbound is quite simply one of the most entertaining, dollar for dollar, films I've ever seen. It's an absolute nail-biter, pulling the audience completely under its thrall, and boasting more bang for its buck than almost all the other summer releases. And it's about kids spelling. Will wonders never cease?

Unjustifiably excoriated, Matrix 2 will now further vanish into the ether thanks to the franchise-destroying nastiness of Revolutions. Hopefully, someday, someone will drag it out of the rubble and give it a fresh chance. It's a hell of a smart sequel, and fabulous science fiction to boot. Reloaded surprised the hell out of me in the breadth and scope of what the Wachowskis were willing to do with a franchise which they could just as easily have turned into a series of shlocky re-treads. Suffused with vast integrity of plot, theme, structure and character running riot in its very bones, Reloaded is mythically scaled, yet far more human than its predecessor. Reloaded is better than its own trilogy, and believe me, someday, when you've forgotten all about Matrix 1 and 3, you'll think so too.

(Additional note: my trio of Matrix reviews, all of which I wrote this year, are my actual favourite bits of reviewing for the site for 2003. You can read all three in sequence, starting with the first film, right here.)

"DVD Fixes Everything" Award:

2003 came very close to being a year in which two Lord of the Rings featured in my Top Ten, because there's almost no reason not to include The Two Towers: The Extended Edition. Not only is it just that good, but it was also released theatrically in 2003, and is a substantively different film from its 2002 predecessor. And it's one of the finest "extended edition" revisions I have ever seen, undoing so many of my problems with the original cut that it essentially becomes not only its own film, but the only real incarnation of The Two Towers in my heart. If Return of the King had sucked, Towers: Extended would have had a decent shot at the top of the top ten.

"Now Who's Stupid?" Award:

Never before has the spirit and intent of a film been so vastly misunderstood by so many people as it was in Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle. To everyone who railed "it's stupid!" this summer, let me respond in like maturity: "No, you are."

"Yay for Superheroes" Award:

It was a big year for comic books, from the adventures of Murdock to the gripings of Pekar. The only unqualified success of the lot was X2, which ascends to be the best comic book movie of the past ten years. Payoff on the promise of the lesser X1 - a big, showy, even operatic tale of mutant misanthropes and the crazy shit they get into. X2 dumps the subtlety and ups the operatics, but when you're dealing with a blue demon BAMFing his way through the White House, how else would you have it?

"Destroyer of Cinema" Award for Worst Film of the Year:

Is anything else even close? Good Bye, Dragon Inn is one of the most pathetically self-indulgent and pointless wastes of celluloid I've ever seen. If I turned on a video camera in my living room and left it rolling for an hour and a half, not only would I end up with a surprisingly similar film, but my version would also be a) better and b) include nudity.

Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary is a close second. And I thought I was on board with so-called art cinema, but maybe the problem isn't me. Neither of these films are part of any categorization of "cinema" that I would agree with.

"Drink Up, Me Hearties, Yo Ho" Award for Best Original Score:

Great year for movie music - on the albums front, Lost in Translation and Kill Bill were some of the most listenable CDs in a long, long time. But for score? Let's give it to Pirates of the Caribbean. Silvestri left the flick, and about a dozen composers took over, lead by Klaus Badelt but ruled by Hans Zimmer, and such a hodgepodge is nothing short of astonishing in its resultant greatness, a flawless mating of cinematic intent with orchestral bravura. Yes, there are better score CDs this year - Return of the King, Peter Pan - but Pirates takes the taco because it's the music that best supports the film that is playing over top of it.

"Like on Tederick.com, Content is Everything" Award for Best DVD:

Surprisingly, it's not The Two Towers: The Extended Edition. While TTT has everything that made the Fellowship extended set the winner last year, and even though the new cut of Towers presented on the disk is, as mentioned, exempliary... the DVD package still isn't quite as good as The Alien Quadrilogy. Nasty neologism in the title notwithstanding, AQ is a milestone DVD that will be a treasured part of any fan's collection for years to come. Absolutely exhaustive and authoritative, the set showed me stuff about the making of Alien and Aliens that I had never seen before. And the real glory of the set is that, further to Towers' success, it presents a new cut of Alien³ which drastically improves that much-maligned film. This is the Alien set to end all sets. In fact, it's almost too damned much - by the time I reached the 9th disk, I was just about as sick of Alien as I ever expected to be in my life. I am, however, still waiting for my David Fincher signature edition of Alien³... the candour on the third film in this set is excellent, but Fincher's absence is unacceptable.

"Discovery Channel" Award for Retroactive Greatness in Film

Every year I name a film that was made in a previous year that I only saw for the first time this year, and would have been list-worthy in the year in which it was release. This year, it's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, in spite of the fact that I'd already seen it. I even liked it, the first time. But never before has a film screamed "multiple viewings" like this one. It doesn't just get better every time, it actually improves by a factor of four. I've seen it six times; do the math.

Well. That was even longer and bloodier than last year. Let's continue, shall we?