The best movies of 2004

While many retrospective looks at cinematic years past find plenty dividing the current state of movies from all that came before, 2004, in many ways, still feels representative of our idea of the modern film industry. Superheroes, sequels, and superhero sequels dominated the box office, while the award shows favored an onslaught of middlebrow biopics and a respectable sports drama. The A.V. Club may have taken a couple years off from our 20-year reassessments, but 2004 proves a fascinating point to resume our tradition—even if the movies themselves were caught between the masterpieces of the new millennium and the sweeping changes coming towards the end of its first decade.In 2004, animation both grotesque (The Polar Express, Garfield: The Movie) and forgettable (Shark Tale) clogged theaters, with a single thoughtful exception (The Incredibles) tiding us over until Howl's Moving Castle finally came to the U.S. in 2005. Meanwhile, a culture war raged at the theater, even omitting its goriest combatant in Mel Gibson’s gruesome Christian endurance test The Passion of the Christ. Disney’s milquetoast, conservative cowardice was on full display as they refused to release their own movie, Fahrenheit 9/11, opting instead to drop it and put out the rah-rah American road trip doc America's Heart & Soul the same weekend.And yet, there were plenty of differences between 2004 and now. Those documentaries, for instance, not only played in theaters, but made a ton of money there. Fahrenheit 9/11, Super Size Me, and What The Bleep Do We Know!? (a nutty New Age piece of nonsense from some disciples of a cult leader now big in the QAnon world) all made bank on minimal budgets, playing to audiences who were going to the big screen for nonfiction conversation starters. 2004 was also the last year that a Shrek movie would premiere at Cannes. C'est la vie.Just like today, though, some great movies still defied studio odds or transcended their indie origins through word-of-mouth and undeniable genre premises. American auteurs Richard Linklater, Quentin Tarantino, Michael Mann, Wes Anderson, Alexander Payne, and Martin Scorsese all played to their strengths, while a new era was dawning for film comedies. Anchorman, Mean Girls, Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle, and Napoleon Dynamite became cultural touchstones beyond their endlessly quotable dialogue. Edgar Wright exploded onto the scene with his first Cornetto trilogy genre riff, while Jonathan Glazer asked us an icy variation on “Would you still love me if I was a worm?” And those blockbuster superhero movies? Well, 2004 is in the running for the best-ever year of superhero movies…and, with the way things look now, it might stay competitive for that title for a long while.To narrow things down, we followed the typical parameters, limiting ourselves to films released in America sometime over the year in question. That means, once again, that a few holdovers from the previous year’s festival circuit (see, for example, number 3) were deemed eligible—as were some that premiered earlier in their home countries but didn’t make it stateside until 2004 (like number 19)—but also that a few that premiered at 2003 festivals but didn’t hit theaters by New Year’s Eve were disqualified. The list below reflects the taste of our voting contributors (though number 1 does match up with our “best of the decade” ranking from 2009), and would probably be different if you asked us to do this again next month. [Jacob Oller]25. Metallica: Some Kind Of MonsterMetallica was at a crossroads when they entered the studio to record their eighth LP, St. Anger. Having just lost their second bass player, Jason Newsted, the band quickly looked to regroup and show the world they were better without him. Riding the lightning, however, wouldn’t be so easy this time. Capturing the band as they write, record, and release their worst album, directors Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky make art out of bad decisions, flaring egos, and the weight of being the world’s biggest band. The dramatic irony of knowing Metallica is crafting their artistic nadir turns the film into tragedy, but for all of St. Anger’s failures, Some Kind Of Monster is a testament to the importance of a healthy work environment as this frayed trio produces nothing but feedback and distortion. The film shows Metallica at the height of their powers making all the wrong moves—from nixing guitar solos, to a kickball drum sound, to playing the record for Lars’ dad—and spotlights each one. Like Julie Salamon’s The Devil’s Candy did for Bonfire Of The Vanities, Some Kind Of Monster allows viewers to glimpse the creative process of a group with all the resources but none of the vision—all the power and, thankfully, none of the P.R. foresight. For the first time since 1979, Metallica looked like people, not rock gods or masters of puppets. Metallica dies for our sins in Some Kind Of Monster, offering audiences a radical honesty, revealing that their lifestyle does determine their deathstyle. [Matt Schimkowitz]24. UndertowGeorge Washington and All The Real Girls are still signature achievements for filmmaker David Gordon Green, perpetually namechecked, sometimes mournfully, in the wake of whatever genre experiments he’s concocted lately. But before he worked with bigger stars, in 2008’s Snow Angels, and/or comic stoners, in the same year’s Pineapple Express, Green reached an early apex with Undertow, a lyrical thriller that sets a menacing ex-con (Josh Lucas) after his impoverished nephews (a young Jamie Bell and Devon Alan) in pursuit of family treasure. Though barely seen and still not exactly a perennial rewatch, it’s arguably Green's best and most fully realized film. In crystallizing his thematic interests—most obviously, how people band together to navigate a post-industrial landscape without the help of traditional institutions—it calls back and forward in his career: To the Malick-influenced (and in this case, Malick-produced) natural reverie of his early films, to the dialogue-based goofiness of his comedies, and even, in this film’s clear riffing on Night Of The Hunter, to his inventive classic-tinkering sequelization of Halloween. (There’s some memorably gory violence here, too.) In retrospect, the weird melting pot of Undertow feels like the point where Green’s work revealed itself as deeply and quintessentially American. [Jesse Hassenger]23. Million Dollar BabyClint Eastwood has wished us a fond farewell perhaps more times than any other actor or director; at this point, he has half a dozen movies that make perfect sense—sometimes more sense—as elegiac swan songs: to westerns, to his on-screen persona, to various ways of American life. 20 years and at least 15 films later, Million Dollar Baby feels less like a perfectly sustained final piano-plunk than it did as 2004’s late-breaking Best Picture contender (and eventual champion). Instead, it’s the movie’s professional simplicity that lingers as it shows lady boxer Maggie Fitzgerald (Hilary Swank, who deserved her second Oscar, dammit) becoming like a daughter to her elderly, initially reluctant trainer Frankie (Eastwood)—who then must face down a tragedy in the ring. So many of the movie’s best moments happen in hushed moments between Eastwood, Swank, and Morgan Freeman, as Eastwood’s confidante; other characters pop momentarily, but this is an unusually intimate sports drama. No wonder even performers as talented as Margo Martindale and Riki Lindhome can’t humanize Maggie’s stereotypically white-trash family. The movie is communicating, however crudely, that they don’t have a place in this movie’s delicate heartbreak. Eastwood has gone on to make thornier, more ambitious, and definitely weirder movies in the decades since; bless him for it. But there’s something immensely satisfying in the knowledge that he crafted an old-fashioned Hollywood tearjerker first. [Jesse Hassenger]22. The Five ObstructionsWhile Danish director Lars von Trier might be better known for his psychosexual surveys of the human condition (Antichrist, Melancholia, The House That Jack Built), the ever-shifting formal rigor of this hybrid doc merits substantial praise. Inspired by the constraints of the Dogme 95 movement he helped spearhead (though only his 1998 film The Idiots technically qualifies), von Trier approached his mentor Jørgen Leth to remake Leth's short film The Perfect Human five times, with each production requiring a different obstacle for Leth to overcome. These disparate parameters involve traveling to Mumbai’s red light district, employing a rotoscope animator, and even errantly assuming credit for someone else’s film. Sometimes Leth rises to the occasion, other times he fails and is subsequently “punished” by von Trier. Documenting Leth’s various attempts as well as showcasing each final product, The Five Obstructions is singular among von Trier’s wider filmography, more interested in how collaboration can painstakingly hinder or heighten an artwork compared to his other angst-ridden existential fare. It’s too bad that we’ll never see the fruits of von Trier’s rumored challenge to Martin Scorsese to remake Taxi Driver in a similar exercise. [Natalia Keogan]21. PrimerMade for just $7,000 with a crew composed primarily of one man, Primer is the blueprint for how to do micro-budget sci-fi right. Without the budget to create it visually, films like this one depend entirely on their writing to create and sustain a world. And Primer is famous for assuming a high level of intelligence among its audience, plunging viewers into a jargon-heavy river of scientific dialogue almost from the first scene. The short version of what happens in this movie is that engineers Aaron (writer-director-editor Shane Carruth) and Abe (David Sullivan) have reached a turning point in the experiments they’ve been conducting in Aaron’s garage, and the implications are reality-altering. That being said, the structure of this film i