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8. Hedwig and the Angry Inch

Fed up of anodyne musicals, and wish someone would fire a rocket into the midst of them all? Long before The Book of Mormon found its way to the stage, Hedwig and the Angry Inch landed in a few theaters, and it’s been building a small but entirely correct following of fans ever since. It’s based on a stage musical, adapted and directed by John Cameron Mitchell, who also takes the lead role. That lead role sees him as a transgendered East German rock singer, whose sex change operation goes wrong, leaving Hedwig with the ‘angry inch’ of the title.

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The movie has a very human heart to it, but also a collection of off-the-wall songs and narrative turns that mark it out as a feature with no shortage of identity. It’s also, arguably, the kind of movie you watch once, and immediately want to watch a dozen times again afterward. Not to all tastes? Most certainly. But the most interesting, subversive, and moving screen musical of the decade? It’s certainly worthy of a shout.

7. No Man’s Land

We’re always of two minds whether to include films that won an Oscar on these lists, and No Man’s Land did just that. It took home the prize for Best Foreign Language movie and with good reason. Yet, not for the first time, we’re left wondering: who still talks about it? We concluded that the answer to that was not enough people, hence it makes its way here. No Man’s Land is a Bosnian war drama, that spends its time with a trio of wounded soldiers in the trenches during the Bosnian war. They’re not in the safest place anyway, but then we discover that one of them is lying on a buried land mine. If he moves, the mine goes off.

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We then follow the effort to save the trio and diffuse the bomb, but the tensions and horrors are never far away. With a large cast and a running time under 100 minutes, No Man’s Land explores the human beings and the situation they’re in, and emerges as one of the decade’s very best war films. It doesn’t just deserve the Oscar it won. It deserves more people seeking it out. Hence, it’s here.

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6. A.I. Artificial Intelligence

Although the overseas take eventually pushed A.I. into profit, the movie’s $78 million take in the U.S. was something of a disappointment, particularly given the movie’s pedigree and $100 million budget. Adapted from a short story by British author Brian Aldiss, A.I. was famously a project first undertaken by Stanley Kubrick, before Spielberg took over following Kubrick’s death in 1999.

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A.I.‘s critics sometimes used its history as a stick to beat it with, describing it as an awkward collision of Kubrick’s cold intellect and Spielberg’s popcorn sentimentality. Yet it’s this collision which makes the movie so interesting; Haley Joel Osment is a typically starry-eyed, beatific young protagonist from a Spielberg movie, yet the odyssey he goes on is almost unrelentingly dark. A robot on a Pinocchio (or Roy Batty)-like mission to become a real boy, Osment’s David is abandoned by his parents and gradually learns how cruel and harsh the wider world really is. Even A.I.‘s conclusion, dismissed by some as a syrupy coda too far, could also be subjected to a far more somber interpretation, as Roger Ebert pointed out when he rewatched the movie and wrote a new, more sympathetic review shortly after its release. Full of beautiful designs and haunting moments, A.I. is rich with ideas and disquieting notions.

Not only does it ask familiar science fiction questions about the nature of consciousness and our responsibility to our creations, but it also dares to suggest that if we were to make artificially intelligent machines, they’d probably end up being considerably more gentle and humane than us.

5. Ghost World

Barely distributed in American cinemas, Terry Zwigoff’s Ghost World had to make do with a growing cult audience instead. Starring Thora Birch and Scarlett Johansson, it’s a wryly observed and extremely funny account of how painful it is to grow up, especially if you don’t happen to be one of the cool kids at school.

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Thora Birch and Scarlett Johansson are both perfect as the movie’s two leads, Enid and Becky, while Steve Buscemi’s on typically quirky form as Seymour, a lonely single man who befriends the former following a prank phone call. Director Terry Zwigoff, who co-wrote this adaptation of Daniel Clowes’ own comic book, is a master of capturing off-beat, outsider characters from his documentaries, Louie Bluie and Crumb, to the comic anarchy of Bad Santa, his biggest hit. Ghost World is no exception and thanks to its charm and wit, it’s easily the best teen movie of the era.

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4. The Piano Teacher

Although it’s a drama rather than a horror movie, there’s an honesty and brutality to Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher that makes it almost painful to watch. Isabelle Huppert plays Erika, a middle-aged professional pianist who becomes infatuated with one of her teenage students.

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Adapted from Elfriede Jelinek’s novel of the same name, Haneke’s movie hums with tension and unease, and it has certain elements in common with Darren Aronofsky’s more operatic, fantastical Black Swan: both are about lonely women domineered by their mothers and whose buttoned-down facades hide a dark reservoir of violent desire.

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3. Shaolin Soccer

It could be argued that a Hong Kong movie that made $42 million in the U.S. is too successful to be underrated, but that figure’s a drop in the ocean compared with the $213 million made by Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon a year earlier. Besides director, writer, and star Stephen Chow soon eclipsed his own international success with the even bigger Kung Fu Hustle in 2004, although for us, Shaolin Soccer‘s the funnier of the two.

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Chow stars as a kung fu master who marries his martial arts skills with European football, and sets up a team to enter a tournament in Hong Kong. Like a comic book sprung dementedly to life, Shaolin Soccer is stuffed with larger-than-life characters and improbable feats of physicality, and it has to be said that the sheer pace and charm of Chow’s movie is infectious. Suspect tactics, brutal tackles and footballs kicked hard enough to knock opponents down like skittles are just a few of the highlights in what is surely one of the funniest sports comedies ever made.

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2. The Pledge

Sean Penn’s third movie as director features a stunning cast with Jack Nicholson in the lead and Aaron Eckhart, Helen Mirren, Vanessa Redgrave, and Mickey Rourke among the supporting players. Nicholson plays a retired, weary detective who’s drawn into a fresh mystery when a young girl is discovered in the snowy countryside nearby. Despite his better judgment, the former detective gives into the teary demands of the dead girl’s mother, and pledges to track down the killer.

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As the detective pad into the clues surrounding the case, he becomes increasingly obsessed by the murderer’s identity, and stoops to some extremely amoral, disturbing methods in an attempt to catch him. Nicholson’s performance is remarkable here, full of doubt and desperation–and the movie isn’t so much a conventional serial killer thriller, as much as a character study about an aging man willing to go to any length to find what he’s searching for.

1. My Sassy Girl

This. This is just the kind of movie that you hopefully read lists like this for: to find an undiscovered gem that enters the running as one of your favorite ever movies. Let’s deal with the remake first: avoid it as though it were poisoned with the elixir of Brett Ratner. It’s not that it’s awful, in fairness, but it’s much, much less interesting than the movie it’s based on. For My Sassy Girl, the 2001 South Korean vintage, is superb. The genesis of the movie lay in a series of tales that Ho-sik Kim posted on the internet, which he subsequently turned into a novel, and were subsequently adapted for movie. It talks about his meeting of a mysterious and not particularly friendly girl, and the complicated relationship between the pair.

There’s a good deal of ambiguity lying underneath, and the character of the girl herself (we never learn her name, but that’s as much as we’re really going to tell you about her) is layered, interesting, three dimensional, and utterly, utterly one to root for. And that in itself is complicated: few could take such an unsympathetic character as Jun Ji-hyun does and turn her into someone quite the opposite. The writing is a major contributor, of course, but the pairing of Cha Tae-hyun and Ji-hyun is exemplary.

If you had to categorize the movie in a genre, then perhaps romantic comedy is closest. But those two words may well deter a whole bunch of people hunting for a moving, unpredictable movie about two rounded characters. Were this site Den of Geek Korea, then we wouldn’t need to put My Sassy Girl at the top of this list. It’s one of the highest grossing films of all time in its home nation, and a massive hit across much of East Asia. In the UK? It has a few advocates, but not enough.

Ignore the title, and ignore the genre. Just watch it. My Sassy Girl might just become one of your favorite films too.