'Million Dollar Baby' Tops Ebert's Best of 2004

1. “Million Dollar Baby”

Hilary Swank stars as Maggie, a waitress who dreams of becoming a boxer. She's 31, too old to start professional training. That's what Frankie (Eastwood) tells her. Besides, he doesn't approve of women boxers. He owns a run-down gym and runs it with the help of his oldest friend, Eddie (Morgan Freeman). Maggie will not listen to discouragement. She comes back every day, and finally Eddie takes mercy and shows her a few moves, and finally Frankie breaks down and agrees to train her.

So now you think you know where the movie is going, but you are wrong. It's not a boxing movie; it's the story of these people and what happens to them, and it goes deeper and deeper, never taking a wrong step, never hitting a false note. It touched me like no other film this year.

2. “Kill Bill: Vol. 2”

Uma Thurman stars as The Bride, whose fiance and entire wedding party are massacred by Bill; seeking revenge, she did battle with the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad in “Vol. 1.” Now we see her early training under a legendary warrior master, and her deadly conflicts with Elle Driver (Daryl Hannah), one-eyed expert of martial arts, and Bill's beer-swilling brother Budd (Michael Madsen), who buries her alive. Her final confrontation with the legendary Bill (David Carradine) is great filmmaking, illustrating how Tarantino's dialogue uses graphic description to set up scenes so that the action isn't the point, but the payoff.

3. “Vera Drake”

Abortion is illegal, although Mike Leigh's film shows how easily one can be obtained by the wealthy, whose doctors sign them into private clinics. For poor and desperate women, there is Vera. Leigh creates the woman and her family with gentle perception and an eye for small details that build up the larger reality; the scene where the police come to call has an urgency in which silence, shame, grief and love struggle for space in the small lives of these people.

4. “Spider-Man 2”

5. “Moolaade”

6. “The Aviator”

Leonardo DiCaprio embodies this mercurial legend, and Scorsese re-creates a lavish Hollywood world of glamour and power. At the same time, they show Hughes battling obsessions that finally overcome him; the king of the world becomes the captive of his own fears. DiCaprio doesn't look much like Hughes, but we forget that as he embodies the character's obsessions. He leads a lonely life, playing a public role as a successful winner while knowing, deep inside, that he is going mad. There is a scene at the height of his glory when he stands inside the door of a men's room, afraid to touch the doorknob because of a panic attack about germs. Against this dark side, Scorsese balances a glorious portrait of a fabled era, and Cate Blanchett does an impersonation of Katharine Hepburn that's just a smile this side of wicked.

7. “Baadasssss!”

The production was fly-by-night on a shoestring, and Mario, who was present for most of the original film and played Sweetback as a boy, doesn't sugar-coat his memories. Melvin did what was necessary to get the film made, and never has there been such a knowledgeable portrayal of how money, personalities, compromise, idealism and harsh reality are all part of any movie -- but especially those that cost the least.

8. “Sideways”

In 1994 in Rwanda, a million members of the Tutsi tribe were massacred by members of the Hutu tribe, in an insane upheaval of their ancient rivalry. Based on a true story, Terry George's film shows how the manager of a luxury hotel (Don Cheadle) saved the lives of his family and 1,200 guests, essentially by using all of his management skills, including bribery, flattery, apology, deception, blackmail, freebies and calling in favors. His character intuitively understands that only by continuing to act as a hotel manager can he achieve anything. As the nation descends into anarchy, he puts on his suit and tie every morning and fakes business as usual, dealing with a murderous Hutu general not as a criminal, but as a valued client; a man who yesterday orchestrated mass murder might today want to show that he knows how to behave appropriately in the hotel lobby. With Nick Nolte as a U.N. peacekeeper who ignores his orders in order to help Cheadle and the lives that have come into their care.

10. “Undertow”

His style has been categorized as “Southern Gothic,” but that's too narrow. There is a poetic merging of realism and surrealism; every detail is founded on accurate observation, but the effect is somehow mythological. Listen to his dialogue; his characters say things that sound exactly like the sort of thing they would really say, and yet are like nothing anyone has ever said before.

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“The Assassination of Richard Nixon,” which opens wide in January, stars Sean Penn as a man whose demons have destroyed his marriage and now threaten his job as an office supplies salesman. Whatever his problem, his symptom is to decide what is absolutely right, and then to absolutely insist upon it; he doesn't know when to shut up, and has little idea of his effect on other people. Under unbearable psychological pressure, he marches steadfastly toward madness.

“Closer” is Mike Nichols' story of four characters who fall in and out of love and betrayal in various combinations, complicated by their tendency to tell the truth when it doesn't exactly help anyone to know it. Natalie Portman is luminous in her first grown-up role, as a New York stripper who comes to London and falls in love with Jude Law, a journalist who writes a novel about their affair and then falls in love with Julia Roberts, as his publicity photographer. She in turn meets Clive Owen, a doctor who, in his turn, meets Portman. These four people richly deserve one another; seduced by seduction itself, they play at relationships that are lies in almost every respect except their desire to sleep with each other. Based on the play by Patrick Marber.

“The Dreamers” is Bernardo Bertolucci's long song to a vanished era, the film-worshiping, politically radical, sexually liberated Paris of the late 1960s. A naive American student (Michael Pitt) meets twins (Eva Green and Louis Garrel) and is absorbed into their world of obsession with movies, drugs and sex. It all seems wonderful, for a time, in a movie that places their story against a backdrop of a brief season when it did seem as if cinema could change the world.

“House of Flying Daggers,” by Zhang Yimou, is an audaciously beautiful, improbable, exuberant martial arts romance set in Chinese medieval times, as an undercover cop falls in love with a beautiful woman who leads a band of revolutionaries. There are extraordinary feats of combat and marksmanship, in a film not so much about action as about transcending the laws of physics. There are passages of remarkable beauty and grace, including a battle in a bamboo forest that combines conflict, choreography and syncopation. With Zhang Ziyi (from “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”), Takeshi Kaneshiro and Andy Lau.

“Kinsey” stars Liam Neeson in a bravura performance as a scientist who studies human sexuality while discovering almost nothing about human nature. Kinsey's best-selling books revised conventional thinking about what people do sexually, how they do it, how often they do it, and with whom. Neeson plays Kinsey as a man who takes pure logic perhaps further than it needs to go in personal relationships; Laura Linney is wonderful as perhaps the only woman in the world who could both understand and love this impossible man. Directed by Bill Condon.

“The Merchant of Venice” is yet another reminder of what a versatile and powerful actor Al Pacino is, and how he continues to grow. Shakespeare's play is classified as a “comedy,” and indeed the farce of Portia's courtship is funny, but the story of Shylock, which it contains, is a tragedy. The film, directed by Michael Radford, creates a Shylock who is strangely, perversely sympathetic; Pacino's readings of the famous speeches vibrate with fierce, wounded pride, and the cinematography creates a Venice of night, shadow, decadence and deceit, to set beside Portia's sunny world.

“The Passion of the Christ” is accurately titled; Mel Gibson's movie is not about the teachings of Jesus, not about theology, miracles or parables, but about how he suffered and died. One of the most violent films I have ever seen, but what would be the purpose of softening the anguish? Christians believe Christ died for our sins; this is above all the story of what happens to the man, to the physical body. The film was divisive and controversial. How you related to it depended on what you brought into the theater, on your own beliefs and background. Some found it anti-Semitic. I did not and tried to explain that in my review.

“The Polar Express” was decisively defeated at the box office by “The Incredibles” when the two films opened almost simultaneously, but it didn't fold up and go away. Instead, week by week, it has been discovering its audience, and its 3-D screenings at IMAX theaters are always sold out. Tom Hanks voices five of the characters, and provides a model for their body movement, in the story of a boy who boards a train to the North Pole and witnesses great wonderments there. Creepy in that teasing way that lets you know eerie things could happen; a shivery tone, instead of the mindless jolliness of the usual Christmas movie.

“Ray” stars Jamie Foxx in a virtuoso performance as Ray Charles, the blind musical legend who largely created soul music and embraced all the pop genres. The movie doesn't sugar-coat his womanizing and drug usage, but shows him emerging from addiction to become a supremely creative force; Foxx is uncanny in his ability to evoke Charles' body language, which seemed to reflect and even conduct the music.

“The Saddest Music in the World” is a film beyond strange, by the quirky Canadian genius Guy Maddin. Isabella Rossellini plays a glass-legged brewery heiress who summons entries for a Depression-era contest to find the saddest song. Not silent and not entirely in black and white, but it looks like a long-lost classic from decades ago, grainy and sometimes faded; Maddin shoots on 8 mm film and video, and creates images that look like a memory from cinema's distant past. The effect is peculiar and delightful.

“Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.” Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow and Angelina Jolie star in a tour de force by Kerry Conran, who uses real actors and creates almost everything else on the screen with digital effects that look like Flash Gordon's daydreams. If Tom Corbett, Space Cadet had gone to film school, this would have been his first movie.

“The Terminal,” by Steven Spielberg, starred Tom Hanks as a man without a country -- or at least, without a visa. His nation ceases to exist just as he lands in America, and a customs and immigration officer (Stanley Tucci) tells him he's free to remain in the terminal, but forbidden to step outside. Hanks creates a man of boundless optimism and great lovability, who makes friends, fashions a life and even begins a romance in the terminal; inspired by the French comedies of Jacques Tati, Spielberg and Hanks find comedy not only in characters but in places and things and the oddness with which they fit together.

“Touching the Void” was as unsettling and disturbing a film as I saw all year, telling the story of two men who set out to climb a mountain. One falls and shatters his leg, the other tries to help him down, they find themselves in an impossible situation, the rope must be cut, and the injured man falls into a deep crevice and incredibly, agonizingly, despairingly, fights for his survival.

“The Twilight Samurai” stars Hiroyuki Sanada as a samurai in the dying days of the samurai era, who works as a bookkeeper and then is assigned to perform a murder, to his immense reluctance. Intercut with a poignant love story, and involving an extraordinary conversation between the samurai and his intended victim, it is a bittersweet masterpiece.

“When Will I Be Loved,” perhaps the best film by the mercurial James Toback, stars Neve Campbell as a rich girl with a scruffy boyfriend who essentially tries to sell her favors to an Italian millionaire. The catch is, she doesn't need the money -- something not known by the Italian (Dominic Chianese) as they enter into a financial and psychological negotiation involving some of the smartest and most agile dialogue of the year.

Copyright The Ebert Co 2004, All Rights Reserved.