Annal:2002 Edgar Allan Poe Award® for Best Motion Picture
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Edgar Allan Poe Award® in the year 2002. For a ranked list of films, try an honor roll:
- 2002 Edgar–Video winner
- 2002 Saturn-Action winner
- Score: 20.52
Guy Pearce (L.A. Confidential) and Joe Pantoliano (The Matrix) shine in this absolute stunner of a movie. Memento combines a bold, mind-bending script with compelling action and virtuoso performances. Pearce plays Leonard Shelby, hunting down the man who raped and murdered his wife. The problem is that “the incident” that robbed Leonard of his wife also stole his ability to make new memories. Unable to retain a location, a face, or a new clue on his own, Leonard continues his search with the help of notes, Polaroids, and even homemade tattoos…
- 2002 Edgar–Video nominee
- 2002 Golden Globe-Musical/Comedy nominee
- 2002 Oscar-Picture nominee
- Score: 18.52
Gosford Park finds director Robert Altman in sumptuously fine form indeed. From the opening shots, as the camera peers through the trees at an opulent English country estate, Altman exploits the 1930s period setting and whodunit formula of the film expertly. Aristocrats gather together for a weekend shooting party with their dutiful servants in tow, and the upstairs/downstairs division of the classes is perfectly tailored to Altman’s method (as employed in Nashville and Short Cuts) of overlapping bits of dialogue and numerous subplots in…
- 2002 Edgar–Video nominee
- 2002 Golden Globe-Drama nominee
- 2002 Saturn-Action nominee
- Score: 18.52
Pandora couldn’t resist opening the forbidden box containing all the delusions of mankind, and let’s just say David Lynch, in Mulholland Drive, indulges a similar impulse. Employing a familiar film noir atmosphere to unravel, as he coyly puts it, “a love story in the city of dreams,” Lynch establishes a foreboding but playful narrative in the film’s first half before subsuming all of Los Angeles and its corrupt ambitions into his voyeuristic universe of desire. Identities exchange, amnesia proliferates, and nightmare visions are induced, but not before…
Series 7: The Contenders
- 2002 Edgar–Video nominee
- Score: 6.52
Series 7: The Contenders takes a look into the formula that has recently topped television polls; the reality game show. Modern culture has come so close to fulfilling the prophecies of films like Rollerball, Death Race 2000 and The Running Man that this rerun of the future game show plot is mounted as a satire rather than a prophecy, with an aesthetic drawn from American reality-TV shows like Cops or Survivor. In a society where the media and the authorities have absolute power, contestants in “Series 7” of The Contenders are chosen…
- 2002 Edgar–Video nominee
- 2002 Golden Globe-Drama nominee
- 2002 Saturn-Action nominee
- Score: 18.52
For all of its late-1940s cold war paranoia, pulp fiction dialogue, and frenzied greed, Joel and Ethan Coen’s The Man Who Wasn’t There is their most cool and collected film since Blood Simple. An unassuming barber with a scheming wife (Frances McDormand) and a serious smoking habit, Ed Crane (Billy Bob Thornton) is an onlooker to his own life, a ghostly presence set against a silver-toned film noir backdrop. Only when he decides to alter his fate by blackmailing his wife’s lover (James Gandolfini) in order to invest with a traveling salesman (Jon…
