From AwardAnnals
Results of the Saturn Award in the year 2002. For a ranked list of films, try the honor roll.
Memento
Christopher Nolan
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…
Black Hawk Down
Ridley Scott
Ridley Scott’s
Black Hawk Down conveys the raw, chaotic urgency of ground-force battle in a worst-case scenario. With exacting detail, the film re-creates the American siege of the Somalian city of Mogadishu in October 1993, when a 45-minute mission turned into a 16-hour ordeal of bloody urban warfare. Helicopter-borne U.S. Rangers were assigned to capture key lieutenants of Somali warlord Muhammad Farrah Aidid, but when two Black Hawk choppers were felled by rocket-propelled grenades, the U.S. soldiers were forced to fend for themselves in the battle-torn…
The Man Who Wasn't There
Ethan Coen, Joel Coen
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…
Mulholland Drive
David Lynch
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…
Brotherhood of the Wolf
Christophe Gans
If you crave an over-the-top historical kung fu-fantasy epic with a good dose of voluptuous nudity, bravura machismo, and passions so intense they verge on ridiculous, then
Brotherhood of the Wolf is your movie. Based (loosely) on an 18th-century legend, this French film follows a hunky scientist (Samuel Le Bihan, who’s sort of a second-string Christopher Lambert) and his Iroquois sidekick/spiritual partner (Mark Dacascos) as they pursue a monstrous wolf ravaging the French countryside. Along the way Le Bihan gets entwined with a beautiful noblewoman…
Joy Ride
John Dahl
It’s all fun and games whene two brothers (Paul Walker and Steve Zahn) take off cross-country to bring home a pretty college friend (Leelee Sobieski). But the jokes end when a prank backfires and they find themselves stalked by a vengeful trucker who won’t give up his relentless chase until somebody pays with their life.
