Fahrenheit 9/11
Fellowship Adventure Group
Lions Gate Films
IFC Films

In a year boasting more timely political documentaries than anyone could ever hope for, seasoned publicity slut Moore offers what might well be his best film anyone could ever hope for. Presidential campaigns and arguments over the McCain-Feingold Act notwithstanding, Moore's film has tremendous insight into the media politics of Karl Rove's America, thanks as much to its cable news outtakes as to its gratuitous cheap shots (which are as low as any neo-con talking head could make). It's an angry film, and for this the movie may not be remembered so much for its extensive facts and research as for its reaction to and presentation of them. As with most of the political documentaries this year, it's staunchly partisan and about as timely as they come, raising the question of whether the honorific "Best Picture of 2004" places too much emphasis on subjective ideas of "Best" and not enough on "of 2004." — Tony Nigro

Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle
New Line Cinema

Harold & Kumar is, like most of the funniest films, deeply wrong in many ways. It celebrates the weekend quest for weed, the subsequent craving for proletarian delicacies and the conversion of gastric distress into a game called Battleshits. It features illogical and intrusive fantasy/dream sequences. It enthusiastically invokes racial stereotypes, and never really bothers to debunk them. Some of the plot twists drop in from Mars, but no attempt is made to justify them. It would be nice to say that, like Go, it matches manic drive with intricate plotting, but it doesn't. Harold & Kumar makes a journey out of the flimsiest pretense, hangs innumerable great gags of all sorts from its gossamer skeleton, changes course and reverses itself more often than this metaphor and remains delightful and hilarious. It surprises, shocks, convulses and satisfies. It includes Doogie Howser snorting coke off a stripper's ass — because nothing less would do. Don't see it with your mother, unless she's on chemo. In that case schedule repeat showings for 4:20. It just might save a life.— David Essex

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
New Line Cinema

Osama
United Artists

There are often some token signs of political awareness during Hollywood awards season, amounting to very little. This year, Don Cheadle's nomination for Best Actor in Hotel Rwanda will raise the specter of the United States' reluctance to involve itself in genocides that do not directly threaten its interests. Despite that film's argument that America has a moral imperative to intervene in far-away holocausts, the talk generated by the film's inclusion in the award pool is how this is another Year of the Black Actor, not about how the foreign affairs media continues to ignore the events in Sudan that parallel Cheadle's movie.

Buried deeper is Osama, a film that reminds not just of why we fought in Afghanistan, but who we fought for and why it's important. In Osama's skillful narrative about a girl who wants to make a better life for herself, we see the face behind the Presidential platitudes about freedom and tyranny. A 12-year-old girl's father and brother are killed in the war that leads to Taliban rule. The Taliban closes the hospital in which her mother and sister work, and declare that all women must remain in their homes. Left with no other choice, the mother cuts the girl's hair and sends her into Kabul as a boy. Rather than force any sentimentality or unnecessary politics at the audience, first-time director Siddiq Barmak concentrates on Osama and lets the simple narrative and documentary style take us into the inhumane world of the Islamic fundamentalists. The film opens with a mass of women in blue burqas being hosed down by the Taliban before they are shot in the street. From here, we see how despotism degrades the psyche of an entire culture: The women soon begin hating their womanhood, rather than hating the Taliban. Barmak keeps the audience engaged by creating small dramas within this larger context. For instance, when Osama enters school, she learns how to properly purify herself after nocturnal emissions. When the boys have to cleanse themselves in cave pools, how will Osama hide the fact that she has no penis? These human mini-dramas make this distant land seem a lot closer, all the while communicating the cruelty of the Taliban. — Stephen Himes

Spider-Man 2
Columbia Pictures

When is a comic book movie not just a comic book movie? When it's Spider-Man 2. Sam Raimi's sequel was built on that most solid of foundations that its peers miss: a scintillating script, cooked up by the likes of Oscar winner Alvin Sargent and Pulitzer winner Michael Chabon. Even the usually rote exposition is enchanting, and it only gets better from there. The unmasking of Spidey was the ace up their narrative sleeve, and man, did it get played. For Raimi, who proved his big-budget mettle in the 2002 original, this is like bringing the fences in 100 feet for batting practice. He let Alfred Molina stretch his wings while keeping Dunst, Franco and Maguire square on the mark. Spider-Man 2 outdistanced expectations so severely that it makes other Marvel projects — even the good ones, like X-Men — look silly. Each part of the project excelled so well that the sum of the parts smacks of cinematic unity, the type only visited upon a blockbuster once every few dozen years.
— Andy Stilp