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It was mostly a year of small pleasures, strange disasters, and huge disappointments--and that's even before you get to the movie theatre.

KEN EISNER

It was mostly a year of small pleasures, strange disasters, and huge disappointments--and that's even before you get to the movie theatre. Politics and weather aside, if we added up all the terrific scenes from Kinsey , Ray , House of Flying Daggers , and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (so, so close)--not to mention faux-mainstream items like Mean Girls and The Incredibles --we'd never want to go home. As it is, one could simply settle on the seldom-flagging winners listed below.

The Aviator
Proof that giant Hollywood movies can still have a lot of heart--and some brains, to boot--Martin Scorsese's intermittently accurate look at the early life of Howard Hughes is crammed with movie lore and love. And it boasts a knockout turn from Cate Blanchett as Katharine Hepburn. Golly!

Before Sunset
From the mammoth to the microtonal: Richard Linklater picked up the accidental romance between self-questioning travellers Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy almost a decade later and found them fascinatingly grown-up.

Sideways
Is Alexander Payne's paean to wine-quaffing losers a great film or does it only seem great because every male critic over 40 identifies so strongly with Paul Giamatti's unpublished writer? Let's open another Pinot Gris and talk about it.

Vera Drake
The immaculate Imelda Staunton gave the performance of the year in Mike Leigh's latest, about a back-alley abortionist going by instinct in the grey U.K. of the 1950s.

Bon Voyage
The French still know how to make big, expensive historical dramedies, as evidenced by this fleet-footed eve-of--World War II romance, starring Isabelle Adjani as a fading movie star with Gérard Depardieu's venal government minister and every third man following after her.

The Fog of War
Fahrenheit 9/11 may have had more press (if not quite enough impact), but Erroll Morris's documentary about the rationales behind beginning, and sustaining, the Vietnam War seems more useful than ever, as the U.S. commits itself to at least a decade of incomprehensible stupidity in Iraq.

Good Bye Lenin!
"Hello, McDonald's" is the corollary to that sign-off (unless you are Morgan Super Size Me Spurlock) in this mordant slice of Ostalgie for an East Germany that never was.

We Don't Live Here Anymore
It wasn't exactly a Valentine's card to married moviegoers, but this darkly incisive look at people who can't grow up was a superb vehicle for the acting of Mark Ruffalo, Naomi Watts, Peter Krause, and (especially) Laura Dern.

Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter...and Spring
Well, Grasshopper, it was hard to choose between the Buddhist- and Tibetan-themed films ( What Remains of Us , Samsara , and Story of the Weeping Camel , among others), but this South Korean parable about a monk's life cycle was the simplest, and therefore most open to interpretation. Main message: "Don't tie a rock around your heart."

A Silent Love
Of all the overlooked Canadian flicks, this trilingual tale of an aging Montreal film professor, his mail-order bride from Mexico, and her even sharper mother, was the tenderest and most keenly intelligent effort to drift quickly through theatres this year.

JANET SMITH

The year was full of movies that had brilliant moments but never sustained the dazzle. Think Dawn of the Dead 's riotously anarchic opening 15 minutes of suburban zombie mayhem, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind 's brain-tweaking setup of memory erasure, or Hero 's blizzard of arrows perforating a Zen-calligraphy haven. The films below were the ones that actually prolonged the magic.

Maria Full of Grace
Joshua Marston's artful look at the casualties of the drug war put a human face on one of the world's most desperate professions: the lowly mule. Catalina Sandino Moreno's taut characterization anchored the film, but also consider the naked panic the director built into her scenes of gagging down 62 heroin packs, holding it all in over a long-haul flight, and then running the horrific gauntlet of U.S. Customs.

Open Water
Masterfully turning a tiny budget into an advantage, director Chris Kentis transformed a simple shark tale into an existential nightmare. The hand-held digital-video camera, seasickness-inducing water shots, and hyperventilating anxiety of two stranded divers made you think twice about going into the water on your next tropical vacation.

Super Size Me
Morgan Spurlock's giddy binge diary set against a road trip across the Fast Food Nation had audiences saying one thing: I'm lovin' it. But the special sauce on top was that his guerrilla doc on the very real dangers of eating at Rotten Ronnie's actually shook up the burger industry enough to make changes.

Kill Bill: Vol. 2
Caked in dirt and dried blood, Uma Thurman made for a new kind of heroine with her mix of vulnerable mom and ass-kicking vixen. But it was David Carradine's reptilian, enticingly evil Bill that helped Quentin Tarantino's dust-bowl sequel both better the original and make the original better.

Touching the Void
The best mountain-climbing movie ever made reinvigorated the docudrama form in exciting new, and terrifyingly realistic, ways. Touching the Void was an operatic exploration of hubris for anyone who ever wondered what it was like to be trapped in an icy crevasse or delirious from dehydration to the torturous strains of Boney M.

Sideways
From full-bodied gut laughs to subtle insights on the pathetic pangs of middle age, Alexander Payne's thoughtful, eccentrically original script offered as many different pleasures as the wine list at the Hitching Post.

The Machinist
In a year when few films took any real risks, this one stood out like emaciated lead actor Christian Bale's ribs. Part cubist-futurist painting come to life, part Dostoyevskian tribulation, The Machinist 's surreal tale of one man's disintegration ended up having a surprisingly human heart.

Before Sunset
Its prequel, Before Sunrise , is kid stuff by comparison. This time, all of Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy's conversations are tinged with the bittersweet regrets that come with age. Who hasn't wondered what his or her life would be like if different choices had been made? It all culminates in an ending as transcendent, oddly romantic, and open to interpretation as Bill Murray's inaudible whisper in Lost in Translation .

Closer
As "moral issues" ruled a U.S. election and a nation reeled from an overblown wardrobe malfunction, it was refreshing to see a film so unabashedly filthy. Clive Owen was the rotten core of Mike Nichols's coolly controlled exploration of sex and revenge--one that managed to get down and dirty without showing anyone sinking the pink.

The Aviator
Martin Scorsese has made better films, but his soaring epic about a man and his flying machines brought the excesses of 1930s and '40s Hollywood to lush life. It also restored a kind of dignity to Howard Hughes, remembering the brilliance that came before one of the most mentally disturbed figures in American history pulled out the Kleenex boxes.

MARK HARRIS

Because 2004 was not a great year for film, only the first four of my top 10 picks would, in a cinematically richer season, have placed. Conversely, 2004 did gift us with a reasonable number of pretty good movies, so picking the bottom six was fairly hard. Here, then, in descending order of merit, is the hybrid list resulting from this rather unusual state of affairs.

Machuca
This Chilean coming-of-age story, set at the time of the CIA-supported coup against the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende, is a touching, shrewd, heartbreaking evocation of youthful vulnerability and dashed social dreams. No other recent film can touch it when it comes to deeply felt emotion.

House of Flying Daggers
Zhang Yimou's latest martial-arts epic is a genre masterpiece as well as a landmark in the art of eye-popping cinematography.

The Saddest Music in the World
Guy Maddin might not be Canada's best director but he is unquestionably the most original. His latest fantasy, a mock-expressionist fable about power and beer that unfolds in Depression-era Winnipeg, shows us why.

Zatôichi
Reigning Japanese polymath Kitano Takeshi took a stock figure from chambara (a blind masseur whose talent for gambling is exceeded only by his skill with a sword cane) and gave this perennially popular character the A treatment. The super-gory swordplay ends with a brilliantly choreographed Riverdance -style stomp.

Broken Wings
This entirely convincing slice of Israeli life has nothing to do with the political passion plays of which the nightly news is so fond.

Fahrenheit 9/11
Not really a documentary, or even a filmed essay, this cri de coeur from Michael Moore could probably be best defined as a motion-picture op-ed. The polemics are as funny as they are impressive, even if the film ultimately failed to deny George W. a second shot at wrecking the world.

The Triplets of Belleville
The first 40 minutes of this animated feature are among the most extraordinary ever drawn. Unfortunately, the movie's second half is less impressive.

Good Bye Lenin!
This comedy from newly reunited Germany is now seen as the centrepiece of a phenomenon known as Ostalgie , the desire of a growing number of disgruntled East Germans to turn back the clock to Communist days.

Carandiru
A frighteningly lucid account of a real massacre in an overcrowded Brazilian prison.

The Motorcycle Diaries
Walter Salles's road movie about Ernesto "Che" Guevara's 1950s ride through Latin America is a quiet journey but an affecting one nevertheless.

RON YAMAUCHI

You'll notice, or not, that I left Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind off my list. My wife rented it while I was playing a hockey game and assured me afterward that it was the shits--even worse than Adaptation. Consequently, I never got around to seeing it, so I can devote more space to pimping other movies, especially given that I've had to leave off Kill Bill 2 , Super Size Me , Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence , Friday Night Lights , and The Bourne Supremacy . (Not to mention the guilty pleasures that, in an alternate universe where I have bigger balls, might be my actual top 10: Cellular , The Girl Next Door , Napoleon Dynamite , Mr 3000 , Shaolin Soccer , Hellboy , Team America: World Police , Ella Enchanted , The Passion of the Christ , and New York Minute .) The year's worst? The Whole Ten Yards , a shockingly inept and unasked-for sequel comprised entirely of greed and flop sweat, or Shark Tale , an offensive, gratingly Shrek -ified rip-off of Finding Nemo .

Fahrenheit 9/11
Liberal qualms about this inspired screedumentary suggest that it be blamed for the failure to elect that talking tree. It's still a convulsively funny middle finger in the face of the retard-elect and his pious enablers.

The Incredibles
Only the plucky geniuses of Pixar could fully realize Brad Bird's dream project about a family of superheroes. Exhilarating yet oddly realistic, this fantasy is rooted in real-world struggles of good versus evil, amiable versus superior.

Saved!
A Christian schoolgirl loses her cherry, status, and blind faith in this stunningly irreverent teen comedy, which led the year in "I can't believe they're doing this" moments. It cries out for a sequel at a school for fervent Muslims.

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
The best of Jude Law's starring roles in 2004 was as the blue-eyed diva of a blue-screen fantasia. Robots, air battles, Gwyneth Paltrow, Angelina Jolie--wow! Produced on a relative shoestring, Sky Captain is visual hot chocolate. Law's impassiveness makes the movie more impressive than satisfying--closer to Tron than Raiders of the Lost Ark --but that's only saying that it isn't one of the best movies of all time.

Miracle
Sport at its most ephemeral and distracting (qualities that it shares with its synonymous drink, beer) is celebrated in this terrific biography of Herb Brooks, coach of the 1980 Olympic men's hockey champions, Team USA. Brooks's sadistic methods are gripping in themselves, but the deal-closing element is the on-ice cinematography.

Code 46
Filming on digital video, often without permits, in far-flung lands like Singapore and Dubai, Michael Winterbottom strips cyberpunk of Matrix -y flourishes, resulting in William Gibson--style SF-noir. Samantha Morton's performance is outstanding.

Touching the Void
The anti--mountain climbing movie of all time, this re-creation of Joe Simpson and Simon Yates's 1985 debacle on Siula Grande is so suspenseful as to be nearly unwatchable. You'll be agog with disbelief that anyone would do this as a sport.

Shaun of the Dead
This wacky Brit send-up of zombie movies seamlessly evolves into a gripping action epic and a moving parable about loyalty.

Zatôichi
In the return of this chambara staple, Takeshi Kitano presents its pleasures--poverty, gambling, subtitles, decapitation, tap-dancing, et cetera--with such style and humour that the results are sidesplitting (har).

Sideways
As a stinging portrait of 40ish dorkdom, Sideways stars the excruciatingly believable Paul Giamatti as a dysfunctional wine geek on a hellacious vacation with his incorrigibly horny best friend. It's sitcom booze porn, yet charming.

BETH MCARTHUR

Stellaaaaaaah! Sorry. Still mourning. In what was an unusually lame year--can you name an obvious Academy Award contender?--Marlon Brando lumbered off to the great streetcar in the sky. Then the year's most emotionally charged tragicomic historical drama arrived on screens...and it was a Stella Artois beer commercial about a soldier's homecoming. Documentaries were huge in 2004, and biopics were popular, and of course there was Will Ferrell. My favourites were a mix of the above. In no particular order, they are:

Fahrenheit 9/11
He's a slob and you'd be unwise to leave the man alone with your fresh-baked apple pie or Republican grandpa, but with this comical and horrible Bush bash, ambush documentarian Michael Moore proved (again) he can be trusted to snap us out of our political complacency. Man, it's funny. Worse, it's scary. Even those already using Bush's face on a dart board will get chills as Moore tugs harder at George W.'s mask in this biased exposé.

The Fog of War
In Errol Morris's engrossing interview with living historical figure Robert McNamara, the 88-year-old former US secretary of defense under presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson unemotionally comes clean on some "mistakes". Like the Bay of Pigs. And Vietnam. A fascinating insight into the machinations of American political administrations, The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons From the Life of Robert S. McNamara is as disturbing for what McNamara doesn't say about his high-powered career as for what he cops to.

The Corporation
Deep down, most of us suspected that corporations were equivalent to psychopaths. But local filmmakers Jennifer Abbott, Mark Achbar, and Joel Bakan had the gumption to point it out. That they've done it so cleverly--through interviews with industrial spies, repentant CEOs, and the likes of Noam Chomsky and Michael Moore--and offered us some hope for a cure make their three-hour dissertation a compelling one. I felt smarter afterward.

Osama
Could there be anything more repugnant than a little girl married off to a decrepit bigamist because she had the misfortune to be born female under a Taliban dictatorship? Siddiq Barmak's excruciating story is not technically a doc, but the trials Marina Golbahari, as Osama, endures are likely suffered by real Afghans. Oh-so-miserable to watch, Osama is an open-handed slap to those of us sitting around in movie theatres, and it tries to make a positive change in the world.

The Notebook
At the opposite ends of the spectrum is Allie, a rich, white, beautiful American teenager enamoured of life, and Noah, a poor but honest lad. Nick Cassavetes's big ol' gooey tearjerker serves up everything romantics crave: enduring, if conflicted, love between an adorable couple whose respect for each another matches their carnality. The Notebook is three scoops of a vanilla in a waffle cone.

Seducing Dr. Lewis
Director Jean-François Pouliot has done the near-impossible: made a happy Canadian film. Charming and quietly irresistible is this gentle film about the lying, thieving, and eavesdropping employed by the residents of an economically crippled fishing village as they try to secure a resident physician. You can take your folks to this one.

Shrek II
This year, the giddy Shrek II 's wee gingerbread man leaping off a castle turret in anguished bravado loosed more audience chagrin than did The Aviator 's Leonardo DiCaprio peeing into empty milk bottles as his character's mental illness progressed. Forgetting Antonio Banderas's saucy Puss in Boots--with his enormous pool-eyed (and fake) pathos--isn't going to be easy either.

Sideways
They're losers, both of them, but Alexander Payne ( About Schmidt , Election ) makes us care deeply about his flawed protagonists as they embark on a significant California wine tour. Will Miles, the divorced, failed novelist, find love again? Will the irredeemably sluttish Jack learn to love (ergo, respect) himself? They say people, like wine, improve with age. The best vintage here hails from 1967, the year that produced Paul Giamatti, whose gloriously pessimistic turn as Miles gives us hope for our muddled selves.

Ray
By the time the opening bars of Ray Charles's '60s hit "You Don't Know Me" melt your heart, you're hooked on cowriter-director Taylor Hackford's engaging biopic of America's foremost blues singer. Charles is a creep. No, wait, he's brilliant. And tragic. Oh, and sly. As riveting as Charles's story is that of erstwhile goofball Jamie Foxx, who, in case you haven't yet heard it shouted from the rooftops, makes a startling dramatic transformation into the complex Georgia native.

Anchorman
When they handed out the decorum gene, Will Ferrell was probably on the toilet. So therapeutically hilarious is the SNL er's uninhibited depiction of a vain newsreader that Anchorman could be classified as medicinal. As such, it should be mandatory viewing for anyone a) in the self-pitying throes of a romantic breakup, b) considering a career in broadcasting, or c) in danger of taking themselves too seriously. When Ferrell bawls with grief in a phone booth after a personal tragedy, it's head-holdingly funny.

JOHN LEKICH

Call 2004 the year of the big-screen biography. With sparkling movies centring on the lives of everyone from Ray Charles to Che Guevara--not to mention that primer-reading Texan in the Oval Office--biopics were all the rage. (Okay, we won't dwell on Colin Farrell as a bottle-blond conqueror in Alexander .) If Hollywood takes on real people aren't your thing, there were more than a few worthwhile alternatives by seasoned and committed directors. Here are my picks, in alphabetical order.

The Aviator
Leading man Leonardo DiCaprio exhibits baby-faced star power in Martin Scorsese's dazzling biopic of the young Howard Hughes. Watch for Jude Law's rakish Errol Flynn and Cate Blanchett's spot-on portrayal of Katharine Hepburn.

The Bourne Supremacy
Matt Damon goes to the gym and reinvents himself as a spy suffering from amnesia. Featuring a savagely realistic fight scene and car-chase sequence worthy of Bullitt , this taut sequel to The Bourne Identity is bracingly tough.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
A subtle Jim Carrey is remarkably convincing in Charlie Kaufman's script about a man of quiet desperation confronted with the tantalizing option of actually erasing his memories of a painful love affair.

Fahrenheit 9/11
You can argue all you want about the partisan nature of Michael Moore's Bush-bashing documentary, but he still makes the film equivalent of a flashlight in the dark. My vote goes here for the most necessary film of the year.

Finding Neverland
Ever since I was a kid, just thinking about Tinkerbell and crew has depressed me. But this biopic of Peter Pan author J. M. Barrie--starring Johnny Depp in a performance that's as gentle as it is wise--may end up changing my mind.

The Motorcycle Diaries
Based on the journals of a young Che Guevara (Gael García Bernal), this chronicle of a motorcycle trip across South America is actually a journey of self-discovery that teaches us all a few things along the way.

Napoleon Dynamite
Movies about nerds caught in the perpetual misery of the high-school pecking order have become all too predictable, but this ultra-low-budget winner--starring newcomer Jon Heder--gives new meaning to geek chic.

Sideways
Red-hot director Alexander Payne had the guts to cast such underappreciated veterans as Paul Giamatti, Virginia Madsen, and Thomas Hayden Church in this winningly bittersweet romance. Watch as they rocket to the A list.

Spider-Man 2
This is everything a comic-book movie should be. The year's ultimate popcorn flick, this deliciously angst-ridden sequel tops the original in just about every way you can name. Thrilling, endearing, and packed with action.

Vera Drake
There's a lot to admire about Mike Leigh's tale of a selfless woman who performs clandestine abortions against the conservative backdrop of 1950s England, but nothing tops Imelda Staunton's touching performance in the title role.

WORST 5

Hey, it wasn't all vin rouge and aviator goggles out there! The public, not to mention jaded critics, had to wash down a lot of swill this year, too.

So what's it gonna be? Moronic popcorn fodder like Intern Academy or grossly misguided "art" like The Baroness and the Pig ? These are the two directions Canadian tax dollars seem to go, moviewise. The latter proved that Patricia Clarkson, leading a sheepish-looking international cast, is fallible, if that's worth anything.

In The Chronicles of Riddick , all the stunning visuals in the world couldn't elevate this ridiculous Rambo-in-space flick, starring (lest we forget) Vin Diesel and Dame Judi Dench. Bernardo Bertolucci may have thought that The Dreamers was about love, sex, and politics in 1968 Paris, but it was really about an aging artist's attempt to freeze the past and lionize his part in it.

There was no question mark in the title of When Will I Be Loved , possibly because James Toback sensed the answer. Finally, Spike Lee's title She Hate Me pretty much summed up our feelings toward this mass of thrown-together bits of nonsense from a once-promising director. At least it didn't have Dame Judi Dench among its "lesbian" sperm receivers. Maybe she wasn't asked nicely enough.