Ty Burr: The year in movies

The two most controversial movies of 2004 -- and to many the most important -- were Mel Gibson's ''The Passion of the Christ" and Michael Moore's ''Fahrenheit 9/11." You won't find them on the list below. In a world where civil discourse has become a social crime and all that is demanded of a person is to know what side he or she stands on in the culture wars, those two films had no interest in doing anything but preaching to the choir (no matter that ''Passion" was better made than many critics gave it credit for, and ''Fahrenheit" was sketchier on the facts than many of its fans wanted to hear about). Nor did any films responsibly reflect a divided country at war with itself and the world -- it takes years, sometimes decades, for the cinema to be honest with its audience in such matters.

Instead, the movies that moved this critic in 2004 were largely small-scale films that gave voice to personal doubts, anxieties, and hopes, that turned away from certainty, and that explored the cracks we often rush to paper over. Some saw the cream of the jest in this worldly muddle, others saw social struggle, still others a chance for lovers or families to reconnect. All came as a welcome surprise, and a reminder that life, like movies, is not lived in black and white.

BEST

SIDEWAYS

A long-awaited breakthrough for both director Alexander Payne and actor Paul Giamatti, a comeback for costars Thomas Haden Church and Virginia Madsen, and a lifeline thrown to audiences desperate for grown-up entertainment, ''Sideways" hits on so many cylinders that you don't know who to be grateful to first. No CGI effects, no jacked-up soundtrack music, just two middle-age men on a road trip into wine country and their own increasingly unavoidable irrelevance. As comedy, it's not very pretty -- some viewers can't get past Giamatti's Miles swiping money from his own mother -- but as recognizable male truth about recognizable male lying, the film is distressingly funny. Madsen's midnight monologue about wine and life is a rapturous high point, but there's also the best giant-naked-man-running-down-the-street scene in movie history. Payne and company, this pinot's for you.

MILLION DOLLAR BABY

Clint Eastwood cleaned up in 2003 with ''Mystic River," so everyone expected him to take the year off and go play shuffleboard. Instead, he sucker punched us with an out-of-nowhere masterpiece about a grizzled fight manager (Eastwood) and a hillbilly lady boxer (Hilary Swank), and if that sounds like one of his old orangutan movies, rest assured that the first two-thirds of ''Baby" are as confident, smart, and playful as commercial entertainment gets. The last third, by contrast, risks losing us with a twist that goes deeper and darker until it scrapes up against a nihilism rarely seen in Hollywood movies. A hard, unyielding instant classic, with career performances from both stars and an autumnal understanding of death and loss. (Opens in Boston on Jan. 7.)

BEFORE SUNSET

If ''Sideways" gleefully pulls the rug out from under male vanity, Richard Linklater's reunion with the actors and characters of his 1995 Gen-X romance ''Before Sunrise" lets us believe that maybe, possibly, love can bloom once more, older and wiser, on the streets of Paris. In their first meeting since that long-ago one-night stand, a 30-something Celine (Julie Delpy) and Jesse (Ethan Hawke) walk and talk and talk and talk, and that's the sound of a self-absorbed generation exhausting all possibilities until the only thing left is connection itself. And Nina Simone songs. And an ending as ephemeral and sweet as a freshly baked madeleine.

MOOLAAD

As difficult as the film is to sell to audiences -- say, honey, let's go see that African movie about female genital mutilation tonight -- that's how warmly engaging it is to actually watch. The 81-year-old Senegalese director Ousmane Sembene, in the sunset of his career, has made a rich, humane fable about a rural Mother Courage (Fatoumata Coulibaly) who shields four girls from a village ''purification" ceremony and in so doing brings an entire social structure down around her ears. The colors are soothingly bright, the music as insistent as a river current -- and the stakes as high as the tower of burning radios in the town square.

THE INCREDIBLES

I've already lost track of how many times I've seen this -- yes, I have kids -- but each time I get lost in the wit of the details, the sharpness of the comic timing, the sheer tactile pleasure of the computer-generated surfaces. And that's not counting the resonance of the story, an optimistic fantasia on how best to deal with middle-age compromise (drop the weight, get a new outfit, follow your bliss). The first Pixar movie to conform to the auteur theory, this is writer-director Brad Bird's baby all the way, with the same high spirits, love of things going boom, and nagging doubts as his underrated ''The Iron Giant." A joy.

KILL BILL, VOL. 2

Yes, it's better than Vol. 1, and do you want to know why, you Generation Z sensation-junkies who prized the carnage overkill of QT's first installment? Because it's about the consequences of emotions -- love for one's mentor, hate for one's mentor, love for one's child -- instead of the consequences of actions. And riffing off old Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns is, long-term, more rewarding than recombining the DNA of Hong Kong grindhouse flicks. If Vol. 1 reminded us why Tarantino's a movie-geek genius, Vol. 2 restaked his claim as an artist.

A HOME AT THE END OF THE WORLD

It opened and sank without a trace, but Michael Mayer's adaptation of the Michael Cunningham novel is a lovely, inarticulate little thing about the families we build by necessity as we go through life, and the entropy that overtakes all families in the end. Dallas Roberts and Robin Wright Penn are fine as two sides of the central menage, but Colin Farrell is unexpectedly moving as a hippie-era man-child whose tragedy is that he only knows how to give. Forget about ''Alexander" -- this and ''Intermission" are why Farrell is the real deal.

KINSEY

An old-school biopic about a hero scientist who changed the world, Bill Condon's film ain't exactly ''The Story of Louis Pasteur." For one thing, it's a lot more entertaining, even as it digs into the methods and madness by which Alfred Kinsey (Liam Neeson) shone a light on America's sexual practices in the mid-20th century. For another, it shows the personal costs to Kinsey, his wife (Laura Linney), and his colleagues, even as it insists that the societal costs of repression and ignorance are infinitely worse. Directed with charm and confidence, ''Kinsey" is a message movie with bite.

DIG!

As though she were making a cruel soap-opera version of ''Behind the Music," San Francisco filmmaker Ondi Timoner trains her camera on two B-level rock bands -- the Dandy Warhols and the Brian Jonestown Massacre -- and watches them alternately rise and implode over the better part of a decade. A healthy reminder of the part played by sheer dumb luck in a group's fortunes, the movie also watches helplessly as Massacre leader Anton Newcombe caves into his demons just as the record industry is prepared to hail him as a savior.

I [HEART] HUCKABEES and SPRING, SUMMER, FALL, WINTER . . . AND SPRINGTwo sides of Zen Buddhism, one a great big Hollywood mess (I mean that as praise), the other a spare, rigorous Korean fable about the cycles of man and nature. As such, they're a mischievous/serene open-ended alternative to the strident dogma of certain other religious-themed films released this year. Just remember, we're all part of the blanket.

RUNNERS-UP

''A Very Long Engagement," ''Baadasssss!," ''Bad Education," ''Blind Shaft," ''The Blind Warrior: Zatoichi," ''Bright Leaves," ''Bukowski: Born Into This," ''Closer," ''Control Room," ''The Door in the Floor," ''Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," ''The Forgotten," ''Good Bye Lenin!," ''I'm Not Scared," ''Intermission," ''Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle," ''Hotel Rwanda," ''House of Flying Daggers," ''Primer," ''Riding Giants," ''The Saddest Music in the World," ''Time of the Wolf," ''Vera Drake."

WORST

ANATOMY OF HELLCatherine Breillat's fable about sex, gender, and Tampax-tea plays like a brutal parody of French deconstructionism, except that it's completely serious. Stick with the director's ''Sex Is Comedy" instead.

THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERAFans of the long-running Broadway show seem to like it, but if you're not into Andrew Lloyd Webber -- i.e., long, tuneless songs delivered at maximum volume -- Joel Schumacher's film soars beyond kitsch into the actively painful.

THE BUTTERFLY EFFECTIn which Ashton Kutcher discovers he can change the past by furrowing his brow really hard and stoned teenagers all over America get blown away by a plot that was done better 30 years ago on ''The Twilight Zone."

CHRISTMAS WITH THE KRANKSOK, let me get this straight: Luther and Nora Krank (Tim Allen and Jamie Lee Curtis) are to be commended for taking a break from fake Christmas cheer and their neighbors are to be thanked for browbeating them back into submission?

DOGVILLETake away the hype and what's left? Stick-figure characters, tediously reductive anti-humanism, and pseudo-Brechtian staging that might seem daring in an undergraduate college production. Nicole Kidman aside, it's the kind of glib nonsense that gives pessimism a bad name.

Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com.