The Year in Film

The question, year after year, was the following: Can we include movies in our Top 10 if they haven't come out in Austin yet? Year after year, the answer was no. So that meant limited-release films -- which opened in larger cities in time for Academy Award consideration and national critics' lists but weren't released in Austin until January or later -- couldn't be included in our Top 10s until the following January. To boot: The Sweet Hereafter topped half our critics' lists in 1998 -- almost a year after it came out. Goofy, we know.

It was time for a change. This year, the list of holiday films that don't open until January in Austin -- Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; O Brother, Where Art Thou?; Traffic; State and Main -- was positively daunting, some of our favorite films of the year. We caved.

The films included in the following lists are "2000" films, which means they came out somewhere -- New York, L.A., Kalamazoo, Michigan -- in 2000. This also means that some of us, the ones with actual jobs and families and no time to sit in a freezing cold theatre with a bunch of burnt-out critics at 10am on a Wednesday, missed a few of the press screenings. Big whoop. These were the best movies we saw last year -- a year that, like life, managed to be impressively crappy and disappointing, until -- just when you were ready to give up -- it started getting good. -- Sarah Hepola

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The Austin Chronicle Top 10 Films of 2000

1. Traffic

2. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

3. Dancer in the Dark

4. Almost Famous

5. O Brother, Where Art Thou?

6. (tie) Chuck & Buck

Snatch

Beautiful People

9. (tie) Chicken Run

Cast Away

Before Night Falls

Marjorie Baumgarten

1. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
Ang Lee synthesizes a number of traditions into this seamless work of art and entertainment.

2. Traffic
This smart narrative essay would have been my No. 1 choice if I hadn't been lucky enough to see an earlier cut that I liked even better, as it created greater sympathy for the character played by Catherine Zeta-Jones.

3. Dancer in the Dark
Lars von Trier's counterplay of the inherently incompatible forms of the musical and the tragedy results in a work of uncommon edginess and singularity.

4. Chuck & Buck
Never has a movie exposed as well as this one does the social amenities we blindly depend on in order to cover up our awkward embarrassments.

5. Set Me Free
A young French girl learns that she alone is responsible for her fate and that Anna Karenina can serve as an inspirational guidepost.

6. Requiem for a Dream
Speed kills, and Requiem for a Dream takes us along for the harrowing ride.

7. Beautiful People
Jasmin Dizdar creates a love song to chaos.

8: Beau Travail
Spare, ascetic film about a French Foreign Legionnaire in Northern Africa is deceptively dreamlike and stirring.

9: Cast Away
Tom Hanks rules.

10. Almost Famous
Cameron Crowe's loving testimony to his past strikes a universal chord.

Robert Faires

1. O Brother, Where Art Thou?
The Coens, back in Raising Arizona mode, embrace everything from Homer to hillbilly music to Howard Hawks in their deliriously giddy odyssey through the Depression-era South.

2. Almost Famous
Cameron Crowe's saga of coming of age on the bus with the band, lovingly told with a touching generosity toward musicians, fans, moms, and nice guys.

3. High Fidelity
Obsessions, in music and romance, categorized and numbered in hilariously arch fashion and high style by director Stephen Frears and a high-octane John Cusack.

4. Joe Gould's Secret
Understated -- and underappreciated -- gem about a journalist's trying relationship with a madman of the Manhattan streets, played with exhilarating ferocity and poignance by Ian Holm.

5. My Best Fiend
A contemplative Werner Herzog steps before the camera to pay memorial tribute to his longtime collaborator Klaus Kinski, movingly revealing the actor's genius and madness.

6. Chicken Run
Poultrified spoof of WWII prison camp escape pictures ultimately transcends parody through wit, charm, character, and endlessly inventive gags.

7. Erin Brockovich
Your typical Tinseltown feel-good fight-the-power drama reinvigorated with sass, smarts, and director Steven Soderbergh's savvy style, plus a slew of strong performances.

8. The Perfect Storm
Your typical Tinseltown natural disaster drama reinvigorated with an authentic working-class ethic by screenwriter Bill Wittliff and harrowing action sequences by director Wolfgang Petersen.

9. The Fantasticks
Utterly enchanting throwback to the movie musicals of yore, a valentine to moonstruck young lovers and theatre, lovingly and beguilingly staged by director Michael Ritchie.

10. Unbreakable
M. Night Shyamalan smartly crafts a comic book movie for the real world, where powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men inspire doubt, mystery, and wonder.

Sarah Hepola

1. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
What's not to gush about? Performances from Michelle Yeoh and Chow-Yun Fat, action scenes masterminded by Matrix fight choreographer Yuen Wo-Ping, and a cello score performed by Yo-Yo Ma. But with this elegant, exhilarating kung fu epic, the director of The Ice Storm and Sense and Sensibility proves he can pretty much do anything. Simply put: Ang Lee rocks.

2. Almost Famous
Cameron Crowe's love letter to rock & roll is full of those perfect, heartbreaking moments as only Crowe can write them and performed by the hands-down best ensemble of the year.

3. Traffic
With this incisive, engrossing tale about the country's failed war on drugs, Soderbergh offers his smartest and most assured film since he debuted with sex, lies, and videotape over 10 years ago.

4. Dancer in the Dark
Lars von Trier's musical melodrama about an innocent woman on death row was simply devastating, a soulful testimony to the ability of music to move the spirit.

5. You Can Count on Me
Writer-director Kenneth Lonergan's film about two orphans reunited as adults is deceptively simple: Lonergan has folded all the complexities, heartbreak, and intimacy of brother-sister relationships into this tale of two siblings still trying to find their way in the world.

6. Cast Away
Aided by one of the best performances of Tom Hanks' career and the confidently restrained screenplay by Bill Broyles, Robert Zemeckis creates a moving and resonant island epic that cuts to the heart of what it feels like to be alone.

7. The Virgin Suicides
Sofia Coppola's feature film directing debut, a fascinating and faithful adaptation of Jeffrey Eugenides' novel, was one of last spring's most welcome surprises -- a coyly mysterious story about the power of the fantasy that men -- or anyone -- can project onto women they don't know.

8. Snatch
Word was that Guy Ritchie's latest film was just as good as Lock, Stock, & Two Smoking Barrels. It's not: It's far superior, a cleverly modulated mix of great performances (from Brad Pitt, no less), hilarious plot twists, and celluloid tricks.

9. State and Main
David Mamet spoofs Hollywood -- but the acid tongue of his earlier works (Glengarry Glen Ross, Sexual Perversity in Chicago) has been replaced by ... a little romance. Philip Seymour Hoffman, one of the most gifted and interesting actors working today, plays the unlikely romantic lead, while Alec Baldwin, David Paymer, and William H. Macy turn in top-notch supporting roles.

10. Jesus' Son
Understated, utterly believable performances from Billy Crudup and Samantha Morton anchor this film, directed by Alison Maclean and based on the book by Denis Johnson, about a gentle, lost soul who finally finds his way into daylight.

Kimberley Jones

1. Dancer in the Dark
Björk quietly bedazzles as the near-blind heroine in Lars von Triers' tragi-musical. With her saucer-cup eyes and shy smile, she turns even death row into something magical.

2. Before Night Falls
Director Julian Schnabel makes a Cuba so palpable you can almost taste the mambo sweat in his biopic of exiled writer and persecuted homosexual Reynaldo Arenas.

3. Snatch
A caper film that's fast, furious, and funny. And, above all, smart as hell.

4. Traffic
Steven Soderbergh takes a sprawling narrative and somehow manages to seamlessly bring it all together in this gritty, piercing film about drug trafficking.

5. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
So it has revolutionary special effects. So the fight scenes are really cool. The real kicker? At the heart is a story of unrequited love that stuns more than the CGI.

6. The Claim
Barren, wintry vistas mimic the ravaged spirit of a Gold Rush town in 1867 California. No one does muted pain like Michael Winterbottom.

7. Chicken Run
It's The Great Escape for the feathered set. Goofy fun, whip-smart stuff.

8. Almost Famous
Cameron Crowe's autobiographical tale of his days as a Rolling Stone young pup is sweetness without saccharin, nostalgia without sentimentality, and the best damn feel-good movie in years.

9. Requiem for a Dream
Forget D.A.R.E.: Try locking teens in a room with this antsy, astonishing speed freak of a film and see if they still think addiction looks good.

10. Wonder Boys
An affectionate film by writers, about writers, for writers. Michael Douglas gets casual (in his best performance in years) as a schleppy professor with a stalled pen.

Marc Savlov

1. Traffic
Simply one of the best films of the past decade. Soderbergh, a director who knows exactly where he wants to go and exactly how to get there, has outdone himself with this multilayered ensemble piece that manages to be both heartrending and wildly exciting. The fact that the film takes a politically unpopular stance on the timely topic of America's woefully backward war on drugs only adds to the emotional suckerpunch.

2. O Brother, Where Art Thou?
The Coens' return to comic form after 1998's disappointing The Big Lebowski is as cracked a slice of Americana as we're likely to see for some time. And the Soggy Bottom Boys' tune "I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow" is now one of Napster's most popular downloads. Unfathomably sublime.

3. Beautiful People
Jasmin Dizdar's compelling, seriocomic meditation on Croats, Serbs, and emotional refugees of all stripes came out of nowhere, and featured a brilliant Danny Nussbaum as a junkie soccer hooligan accidentally airlifted into the middle of a battlefield while on the nod.

4. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
Ang Lee reinvents himself and the cliché-ridden kung fu drama simultaneously. You'll believe a woman can fly.

5. Hamlet
Michael Almereyda updates the Dane in modern NYC, making him scion of the Denmark corporation and fan of lo-tech indie filmmaking. No one can brood like Ethan Hawke, and Steve Zahn and Dechen Thurman's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are wonderfully clueless. Bill Murray as Polonious? Getouttahere!

6. Chuck & Buck
Like a beating on the noggin with a sick-stick, Miguel Arteta's film may have left you feeling as though you'd just been emotionally slimed, but you haven't forgotten about it either, have you? Make the bad man go away now, please.

7. Shadow of the Vampire
Director E. Elias Merhiage has been incommunicado since 1991's squirm-fest Begotten, but judging from this minor masterpiece he hasn't exactly been loafing either. Blood-soaked kudos to whoever thought to cast John Malkovich, Willem Dafoe, and Udo Kier -- the three creepiest actors working today -- in the same film. Boo, scary.

8. The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg
Aviva Kempner's documentary on the Detroit Tigers' legendary first baseman-cum-superJew Greenberg is nearly as fun as having been in the stands. Kempner's film gives not only a stirring portrait of Greenberg but also perfectly evokes baseball's salad days; it fairly oozes the scent of fresh-mown outfield and Grape Ne-Hi.

9. The Virgin Suicides
The once-gawky Sofia Coppola reappears from out of the past with a subtle, surreal adaptation of the Jeffrey Eugenides novel -- Kirsten Dunst inflames teen hormones. Film at 11.

10. Cast Away
Any actor who can make you tear up over a volleyball is a man to be reckoned with. Tom Hanks is that man. (And Wilson is that volleyball.)