2004's Best Movies: 20 Years Later

In keeping with previous polls, I've gone with the contenders in the top 2,000 films, but they now offer the entire starting spreadsheet. Here are the titles that carry through through the top 5,000 films ever.

2051	2026	Oh! Man	Gianikian, Yervant & Angela Ricci Lucchi	2004	Italy	71
2058	2073	Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy	McKay, Adam	2004	USA	94
2152	2281	Birth	Glazer, Jonathan	2004	Germany	100
2204	2180	Bad Education	Almodóvar, Pedro	2004	Spain	105
2229	2408	3-Iron	Kim Ki-duk	2004	South Korea	88
2248	2190	Village, The	Shyamalan, M. Night	2004	USA	108
2254	2460	Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, The	Anderson, Wes	2004	USA	118
2283	2423	Mean Girls	Waters, Mark	2004	USA	97
2376	2409	Throw Down	To, Johnnie	2004	Hong Kong	95
2427	2349	Hat Wolff von Amerongen Konkursdelikte begangen?	Friedl, Gerhard Benedikt	2004	Germany	73
2479	2482	Napoleon Dynamite	Hess, Jared	2004	USA	82
2480	2406	Turtles Can Fly	Ghobadi, Bahman	2004	Iran	97
2500	2537	Notre musique	Godard, Jean-Luc	2004	France	80
2524	3399	Man on Fire	Scott, Tony	2004	USA	145
2539	2465	Visite au Louvre, Une	Straub, Jean-Marie & Danièle Huillet	2004	France	49
2540	2778	Team America: World Police	Parker, Trey	2004	USA	108
2541	3124	Mysterious Skin	Araki, Gregg	2004	USA	105
2581	2502	Muertos, Los	Alonso, Lisandro	2004	Argentina	78
2582	2614	House of Flying Daggers	Zhang Yimou	2004	China	111
2593	2514	Innocence	Hadzihalilovic, Lucile	2004	France	115
2654	2761	Primer	Carruth, Shane	2004	USA	78
2771	2684	Triple Agent	Rohmer, Eric	2004	France	115
2780	2766	Downfall	Hirschbiegel, Oliver	2004	Germany	156
2786	2700	Kings & Queen	Desplechin, Arnaud	2004	France	152
3141	3082	Passion of the Christ, The	Gibson, Mel	2004	USA	126
3306	3186	3 Rooms of Melancholia, The	Honkasalo, Pirjo	2004	Finland	106
3330	3217	Darwin's Nightmare	Sauper, Hubert	2004	Austria	111
3347	3229	Pont des Arts, Le	Green, Eugène	2004	France	126
3470	3370	Anatomy of Hell	Breillat, Catherine	2004	France	77
3568	3453	Motorcycle Diaries, The	Salles, Walter	2004	UK	125
3583	3471	Trilogy: The Weeping Meadow	Angelopoulos, Theo	2004	Greece	170
3629	3820	Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban	Cuarón, Alfonso	2004	UK	142
3652	4284	Mind Game	Yuasa, Masaaki	2004	Japan	103
3662	3702	DiG!	Timoner, Ondi	2004	USA	115
3666	3911	Collateral	Mann, Michael	2004	USA	120
3673	3630	Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence	Oshii, Mamoru	2004	UK	99
3684	3718	Sea Inside, The	Amenábar, Alejandro	2004	Spain	125
3736	3628	In the Dark	Dvortsevoy, Sergei	2004	Finland	41
3817	3706	Whisky	Rebella, Juan Pablo & Pablo Stoll	2004	Uruguay	98
3887	3763	Fahrenheit 9/11	Moore, Michael	2004	USA	122
3914	3798	Bourne Supremacy, The	Greengrass, Paul	2004	Germany	108
4000	3890	Crash	Haggis, Paul	2004	USA	112
4252	4402	Spider-Man 2	Raimi, Sam	2004	USA	127
4267	4238	Adam & Paul	Abrahamson, Lenny	2004	Ireland	83
4368	4426	Metallica: Some Kind of Monster	Berlinger, Joe & Bruce Sinofsky	2004	USA	141
4369	4321	Aviator, The	Scorsese, Martin	2004	USA	170
4471	4484	Vera Drake	Leigh, Mike	2004	UK	125
4515	4490	Consequences of Love, The	Sorrentino, Paolo	2004	Italy	100
4590	4444	Marseille	Schanelec, Angela	2004	Germany	95
4775	7158	Night Watch	Bekmambetov, Timur	2004	Russia	114

(ILX fave DUMPLINGS! fell just outside the top 5K, at #5053)

most of the best ones are below the cut here

Hard to decide between Nobody Knows and Tropical Malady. Howl's Moving Castle would be a candidate for the first half, but the story wanders off who knows where once he starts diverging from the source material. For all his genius Miyazaki isn't exactly a strong plotter - other than maybe Princess Mononoke his films kind of meander digressively towards a conclusion.

For me, not great, either list. I still remember Sideways positively, but haven't seen it for years, and I'll almost always like my #1 more than that. When I go back to an actual list I put together for rockcritics.com, my #1 was Mayor of the Sunset Strip. Don't know how I'd feel about that, either. I've always wanted to see Star Spangled to Death.

Top 7:

Tropical Malady (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand)
Light is Calling (Bill Morrison, USA)
Kings and Queen (Arnaud Desplechin, France)
Before Sunset (Richard Linklater, USA)
Anatomy of Hell (Catherine Breillat, France)
Bad Education (Pedro Almodóvar, Spain)
The Case of the Grinning Cat (Chris Marker, France)

my head says Malady but my heart says Hustle

Team America & Dead Man's Shoes are my fave movies from 2004. Out of the list above, I'd vote for Sideways

The Ken Jacobs and James Benning films are supposed to be amazing. I was holding out for a theatrical screening I could attend, but it's been years. Jacobs has his on Vimeo so maybe I'll just stream it.

KUNG

FU

HUSTLE

Kung Fu Hustle, w/2046 the runner up

would've voted for the village

Not feeling this list at all. I hated Sideways and have a hard time seeing now it gets even tepid acclaim.

LOVED King Bill v 2

Kill lol

Kill Bing

i accidentally typed King Bing first! i saw Kung and RAN with it

L'intrus and Tropical Malady I admired as much as one can movies where you say "impressive, but I have no idea what that was, or meant". Martel's film was interesting but she would continue to improve.

From the lower list, Rois et Reine was really well-directed (and not just in a flashy, surface way), but over the course of the film, as the mechanics of the set-up for the "big scene" at the end became clear, I really resented it, and haven't been inclined to see any other Desplechin films since.

I'll vote for The World, which is a lot warmer and more hopeful than your typical Jia Zhangke film, especially in the years since. Moolaadé is a very close second and is a great proof that a social "propaganda" film (in this case, against female circumcision) can be multi-layered and explore a lot of subtleties that you wouldn't expect from a mere description of the action.

Kung Fu Hustle, with Tropical Malady very close

The World, Moolaadé, and Tropical Malady haunted me after watching them, so much so that I haven't watched them again.

voted for the incredibles. i'm not even a pixar stan or animation nerd but it's possibly the best pixar movie in their hot run. i remember loving eternal sunshine and kung fu hustle but haven't rewatched them recently enough to vote for them now in good conscience.

Kung-Fu Hustle is a classic, Kill Bill 2 I loved when it came out, but it didn't age well for me (not least because I'd become well-versed in the kung fu films that inspired the Pai Mei sequence, including actual Pai Mei films, and it retroactively ruined the Gordon Liu bit for me).

loved Million Dollar Baby at the time, I suspect ILX probably hated that movie and still does. it was definitely Oscar-bait.

enjoyed Incredibles, not opening up that 'debate' here again about the libertarian ethics etc etc.

Shaun of the Dead absolute classic, and quotable but not in the mega annoying way other similar movies are.

Sideways I also expect ILX probably hated/hates, I found it hilarious and it temporarily turned me onto wine drinking. I understand the objections to Thomas Hayden Church not getting any comeuppance and it's valid, though at the same token "No, I'm not drinking fucking MERLOT" still makes me laugh.

still never seen Eternal Sunshine. can't vote until I've seen more of these, so time to queue up.

The list I came up with a few years ago:

Moolaadé (Ousmane Sembène)
Before Sunset (Richard Linklater)
Vera Drake (Mike Leigh)
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry)
Goodbye, Dragon Inn (Tsai Ming-Liang)
I ♥ Huckabees (David O. Russell)
Ray (Taylor Hackford)
The World (Jia Zhangke)
Mean Girls (Mark Waters)
Notre Musique (Jean-Luc Godard)

I ♥ Huckabees

Now there's a movie whose standing has diminished over time

it does matter if you use petroleum

I'm not sure it was ever beloved. It stands up as a screwball comedy, i.e. your favorite genre.

nothing was funnier to me than the Mark Wahlberg ranting politics at Christian businessman's dinner table and upsetting the dude's kids

which very closely resembled conversations around the Neanderthal family dinner table around that timeframe

xp true, I mistakenly remembered it winning the FC poll in '04. It didn't (tho it made the top 20)

https://www.filmcomment.com/article/best-films-of-2004/

Both Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and I ♥ Huckabees had really interesting premises that I didn't feel were worked out especially effectively.

Huckabees was one of the most unpleasant films I turned off after 20 minutes, it was like a smart npr version of those terrible MST3K live skits or something

sorry to be mean it just really hurt my soul

I don't deny it. I haven't watched it again since 2005. I didn't like what Russell made Huppert endure. But the film's also a farewell to the Russell I liked.

kung fu hustle and altho i like plenty from this list its not close for a seconf

God, I saw Huckabees on election night 2004 when it was clear that W was getting re-elected (or might the night after election night), and somehow it felt profoundly about the red/blue-state divide, but haven't seen it since.

I don't remember seeing Eternal Sunshine, but after watching The Truman Show and Man On the Moon I realized that as much as I love Jim Carrey's over-the-top comedic performances (especially in Dumb and Dumber), I'm not quite inclined to take him as seriously as a dramatic actor. I guess the film must be good since it is so highly rated. I will see it at some point

Tropical Malady is beautiful and mysterious, but I agree with Halfway there but for you, it is hard to understand. L'Intrus is the most bizarre and inscrutable of all of Claire Denis' films, but it is interesting.

I watched Eternal Sunshine two weeks ago for the first time in 20 years too: my students were writing about it. The slapstick stuff with Tom Hiddleston, Frodo, and Mark Ruffalo holds up, and Kate Winslet disembowels the Manic Pixie Girl cliche.

Where's Academy Award nominee SHREK 2?

Nobody Knows is an excellent film if you are in the mood to curl up and want to die afterwards (based on a true story no less!)

It is my favorite Kore-eda film

the 14-year old boy Yûya Yagira won the best actor prize at Canes that year

*Cannes

The first part of Tropical Malady is about the burgeoning love between Keng a soldier stationed in a rural village in northern Thailand and Tong a villager, and about their courtship. The rural location is idyllic, and the nature sounds overwhelm the soundtrack. They are amplified in the most incredible way.

There is an interlude. The next day we see a soldier examining a room and a bed that a boy has slept in and the photos he has kept, but it’s not clear that it is Keng and Tong.

The last part is the most mysterious. The soldier is tracking a tiger. “As the inner worlds of both man and man-tiger draw closer together in their shared desperation, the world of the forest becomes dreamy and ghostlike, filled with monkeys that seem on the verge of speech and spirits that rise from dead cows”

Of all of the reviews I have read, the one by Tash Aw makes the most sense of it. “We realize how they must have felt, because we feel it now too: love is dangerous, love will consume us; we are powerless before our desire.”

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/11/13/the-hypnotic-threat-of-apichatpongs-tropical-malady/

As per usual it isn't the film that's on trial here

There's no way it's not Howl's

theres every way, I'll tell you two, with a bonus specific moment-

- the first time the axe gang visit pig sty alley

- the second time the axe gang visit pig sty alley

bonus- the moment the landlord floats down with the musical assassins

Tropical Malady

I need to rewatch Kung Fu Hustle now that I've seen a fair amount of the films it's riffing on.

There was a list online (probably still is?) that detailed every reference in both Kill Bills and it wasn't a half bad guide for me getting into world genre cinema.

those lists can be helpful!

The Incredibles is incredibly underrated, and despite some absolute classics in this list that I adore, it ended up getting my vote

The slapstick stuff with Tom Hiddleston

Wilkinson!

darragh otm about the gap

Yeah, duh, lol

I'd love to slap Tom Hiddleston with uh

As per usual it isn't the film that's on trial here

― Morris O’Shea Salazar (Noodle Vague), Friday, March 8, 2024

on trial? don't understand this post

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2021/04/11/painting-trial/

Does anyone still believe in objective quality?

A visitor to the Louvre in Paris viewed the renowned Mona Lisa and stated loudly, “That painting is nothing special. I am unimpressed.” A curator who was standing nearby said, “That painting is not on trial; you are on trial.”

“This novel is boring; it contains too many details about whale hunting,” insisted a student. The teacher replied, “Hermann Melville and his tour de force are not on trial. You students are on trial.”

This attitude doesn't serve to elucidate or educate, it's just a reinforcement of the snobbery of the so-called judge.

We are all on trial, and of course we're guilty as hell.

Does anyone still believe in objective quality?

No, but in a miraculous coincidence my personal tastes match the standards of objective quality perfectly

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

voted The World, haven't seen it in 19 years but it has really stuck with me

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Extremeley satisfactory