More risks, more voices

It’s been a great year for high-quality Hollywood movies and for foreign films.

South Korean cinema is fresh and exciting right now but has yet to break out of noncommercial and festival venues. Its highly touted Oscar entry “Oasis,” a tale of outcast lovers, may change all that.

European cinema remains healthy, Iran continues to produce risky -- politically and artistically -- pictures, and minority voices are being heard in national cinemas the world over.

With “Lan Yu,” Hong Kong veteran Stanley Kwan set a heartfelt gay love story against Tiananmen Square and its aftermath that had such scope and meaning it was as relevant to straight audiences as gay ones.

On home ground, “Real Women Have Curves” and “Barbershop” emerged as inspired, insightful ethnic comedies that included everyone in their warm embraces.

There have been so many exciting documentaries this year that it would be hard to list them all, but in light of the current and high-profile “Bowling for Columbine,” such earlier 2002 releases as “The Cockettes” or “The Kid Stays in the Picture” should not be overlooked.

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Kevin Thomas’ best of 2002

1. “Far from Heaven” and “The Good Girl”: Audacious, fully realized portraits of American wives in the process of self-discovery, luminously played by Julianne Moore and Jennifer Aniston, respectively.

2. “Y Tu Mama Tambien”: A bold coming-of-age road odyssey traveling through the heart of contemporary Mexican society, culture and sexual mores.

3. “The Piano Teacher” and “Merci Pour le Chocolat”: Isabelle Huppert in full glory as a dangerously repressed piano instructor and as a cool, collected Claude Chabrol villainess, respectively.

4. “Ararat”: Atom Egoyan’s complex meditation on the Turkish genocide of Armenians, circa 1915.

5. “24 Hour Party People”: A frenetic, innovative portrait of storied Manchester rock entrepreneur Tony Wilson, played with wit and passion by Steve Coogan.

6. “Real Women Have Curves” and “Barbershop”: The warmest, most emotionally nourishing and all-embracing American comedies of the year. The first boasts a career best for the formidable Lupe Ontiveros as a tradition-bound Latina housewife and mother, the second has Cedric the Entertainer’s hilarious and controversial take on African American icons.

7. “Tully”: A wrenching family drama, an example of the regional film of such quiet power as to transcend its genre.

8. “Safe Conduct”: Bertrand Tavernier’s sweeping, suspenseful homage to those French filmmakers who held on to their integrity during the Occupation.

9. “Les Destinees”: The traditional multigenerational family chronicle is alive and well. Among other superb performances is yet another from Huppert as a proud, unjustly rejected wife.

10. “Chicago”: The musical is also alive and kicking -- and was a singing-and-dancing Richard Gere ever better?

Honorable mention: “Lan Yu”; the amusingly kinky Japanese “Warm Water Under a Red Bridge”; “Late Marriage,” a ribald ethnic comedy turned dark, a most atypical Israeli movie; and “Auto Focus,” Paul Schrader’s darkly witty satire on shallow celebrity and compulsive sex, with a brilliant Greg Kinnear as ill-fated TV star Bob Crane, with Willem Dafoe as his creepy Pied Piper.