Best Movies of 2002
Ranked by our critic's grades, best first.
City of GodTwenty years of a favela's history clocked at the speed of a chase, and it never trips.Read the review
The PianistPolanski films the destruction of Warsaw through the window of a man who survives mostly by luck, and refuses to make him a hero.
Catch Me If You CanA chase picture so relaxed that you can miss how precisely it is built, with a small sad story about fathers underneath.
Gangs of New YorkDay-Lewis builds a monster worth the ticket price while the revenge story wrapped around him keeps running out of road.
The Lord of the Rings: The Two TowersHelm's Deep and Gollum, carried by a middle chapter that has to end without ending.
Insomnia (2002 Remake)Nolan's least personal film and his best directed actors, with Pacino falling apart in daylight.
The Good GirlAniston's best performance sits inside a deadpan comedy that loses its nerve and reaches for a thriller ending it has not earned.
Laurel CanyonMcDormand and Bale are excellent in a film that observes its four people beautifully and then declines to conclude.
The Slaughter RuleMorse and Gosling circle each other for two hours in a film too elliptical to close its own argument.
Moonlight MileThree actors doing honest, unsentimental work on grief, undone by a third act that wants a courtroom to tie every knot.