28 Days Later (2002)

Even though the zombie action here is tried-and-true - an apparently lone survivor stumbles across other survivors, they argue about what to do, and eventually agree to seek out the source of radio-broadcast messages about a safe haven -  director Danny Boyle keeps things stylistically and visually fresh with rapid, rabid zombies - not the slow-moving hordes - and a gritty British rock aesthetic, right from the start, for example, pairing anti-establishment thrash with frenzied scenes of a virus breach at a research lab before cutting to a lengthy sequence of unnerving silence as Cillian Murphy wakes in a hospital in a completely deserted London.

★★★★☆

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Insomnia (2002)

Because there is so much to cover - the Alaskan environment, its community and way-of-life, the effect the extended daylight hours of the region has on Al Pacino's cop and his investigation into a girl's murder, not to mention his tense relationship with his partner and his burgeoning one with an eager young Alaskan cop-in-training played by Hilary Swank - Christopher Nolan's exceptionally well-acted thriller, with its fine production values, ends up feeling thin as ice where it really demands to be grand and sweeping.

★★★☆☆

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Murder By Numbers (2002)

Hitchcock's Rope, based on a play, was a chamber thriller focused with icy precision on its chilling pair of Leopold-and-Loeb intellectual killers, whereas Barbet Schroeder's Murder By Numbers might be its dopey cousin 'Fray': it starts strong, in a Hitchcockian world that extends out the window to the horizon - more Rear Window than Rope - but descends into mess as its two killers (Ryan Gosling and Michael Pitt) turn on each other, with the film asking us to care about too many extraneous things - the cop's sex life, her traumatic past, one killer's love interest, and even a monkey - until the murdering pair, in the end plodding here and there in plastic body suits and swim goggles, look less icy and more and more like the bungling burglars from Home Alone.

★★★☆☆

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Queen Of The Damned (2002)

The last embarrassment - the last nail in the coffin, so to speak - is the sight of Matthew Newton in a Paddlepop Lion wig trying to explain, in his only line right near the end, why one of the other vampires has turned to stone; I didn't hear what he said (the audio throughout is terrible) and, like me, you won't care anyway after this dreary adaptation of Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles book has everyone (notably Aaliyah and Keira Knightley -- oops I mean Stuart Townsend) trying so hard to be slinky, sexy vampires that watching it is like being the fully-clothed party guest at an orgy suddenly underway - you're not sure what you are still doing there, and everyone is so intent on what they are doing no one seems very interested that you're watching; filmed in part at an impressive-looking Mont Salvat in Melbourne, the Australian production forgets you are there and, worse, forgets to tell you what or who you should be rooting for: Lestat, the vampire who has woken himself up in the Noughties to become a nu metal rockstar, or humankind represented briefly by a beach violinist, a redheaded vampire researcher, and enthusiastic throngs at a metal concert - and no-one else - or perhaps we are supposed to care about some of the vampires and not others - Matthew Newton's, maybe, or the jazz-ballet-miming ones throughout?

★☆☆☆☆

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Infernal Affairs (無間道) (2002)

This is an exciting Hong Kong action movie bolstered by terrific performances of Tony Leung, open and warm, and Andy Lau, cool and sinister, playing fellow police academy recruits, one who ends up working for years deep undercover as a member of an international drug ring, the other rising through the ranks of the police force while working as a mole for the drug ring's "Mr Big" - a scenario so good this original spawned two sequels (not yet viewed) and a long and boring Hollywood remake, Scorsese's The Departed in 2007.

★★★★☆

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D-Tox (aka 'eye see you') (2002)

Cops in a snowed-in detox facility are being picked off one-by-bloody-one in this movie, more mindless slasher than intelligent whodunnit despite the classic Agatha Christie set-up, with Sylvester Stallone playing a cop undergoing treatment for trauma after his own wife fell victim to an eye-poking serial drill killer with a ridiculous sprawling, poorly defined modus operandi, naturally still on the loose.

★☆☆☆☆

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The Quiet American (2002)

The Quiet American

"They say you come to Vietnam and you understand a lot in a few minutes, but the rest has got to be lived," says the central character of Graham Greene's book, played here by Michael Caine, Thomas Fowler, an English reporter in Vietnam whom it is very hard not to think of as Graham Greene himself because like Fowler, Graham Greene sat at The Continental Hotel in Saigon overlooking Lam Son Square writing articles for The Times about the breakdown of French colonialism in the north of Vietnam, and the fact this adaptation, one more loyal to the book's political angle than the 1959 original adaptation, is able to seamlessly blend Greene's fiction (a love story and political thriller) into actual world history shows just how acute an eye for human nature and world politics Greene developed as he lived his Vietnam experience.

★★★★☆

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Dirty Pretty Things (2002)

When Okwe, a cleaner at The Baltic Hotel in London, discovers a human heart in the blocked lavatory of room 510, he embroils himself in a grubby urban crime drama and in doing so comes to realise the extent of the bind he and his fellow illegal immigrant workers are in and just how much the city will take advantage of them, the dirty pretty things servicing the systems that fail them.

★★★☆☆

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(The) Man On The Train (L'homme du train) (2002)

In this terrific, slow-burn French crime thriller, cool but full of heart, two men, one a slippered, pipe-smoking retired literature teacher and the other a leather-jacketed former stunt double, meet by chance in the week both men face a potentially life-changing Saturday - the teacher is scheduled to have triple bypass surgery, the Fonzi is robbing a bank - and both men are of an age that they are starting to contemplate the life paths they didn't follow, that the other did.

★★★★☆

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Ripley's Game (2002)

You can easily imagine this is Matt Damon's Tom Ripley grown up and comfortable in his sociopathic skin, no longer scared of what he can't control, now living in Italy with his wife and surrounding himself with frescoes, antiques, harpsichords, Baroque music and art and eating soufflés and truffles and still manipulating the people around him to achieve his own goals which, in this adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's third book in the Ripley series, is simply to avenge a neighbour's slight at a party - the high body count, the trips back and forth across Europe, a siege with Balkan gangsters, are all just part of that sociopathic game of revenge that fills time while really we watch this wonderful thriller to see if John Malkovich's Tom Ripley will make it to his wife's harpsichord concert or not.

★★★★☆

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Enough (2002)

Based on an Oprah's Bookclub book surely better than this, Enough is a domestic violence thriller and a daft one given it is broken up into unhelpful chapters by Frasier-style titlecards (one scene opens with a shot of the Golden Gate Bridge and then 'San Francisco' appears written on the screen, for example, and other titles announce stages in Slim's relationship with the abusive Mitch when, really, the white dress or the home reno scene, etc. etc., are pretty good signposts alone) and what really makes Enough, well, Not  Enough is the fact Slim, played by Jennifer Lopez, extracts herself from her violent marriage with help from "Jupiter, all-mighty powerful king of the gods", a white saviour father figure and bankroller of cars and homes, self-defense lessons and wigs, detracting from the otherwise tantalising concept of a helpless, resourceless, battered woman learning to fight back.

★★☆☆☆

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Panic Room (2002)

This thriller opens on Jodie Foster's Meg Altman inspecting a big empty shell of a NY brownstone which she promptly buys and discovers has a panic room just in time for three thieves to break in, and from there, this big empty shell of a movie with a neat concept boxed up deep inside becomes a long stalemate with Meg and her daughter inside the panic room, the thieves at a loss outside, and no amount of tricksy camera work sweeping in and out of keyholes, through walls or meaninglessly zooming in on torch bulbs and gas pipes can raise the tension to anything close to panic-levels given the whole situation is a mess no-one is in control of.

★★☆☆☆

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Bad Company (2002)

Chris Rock is an uncharismatic good-for-nothing enlisted by Anthony Hopkins' Government spy boss to step into his dead twin brother's shoes in this romance-, drama-, and joke-free romantic action comedy which I suspect Jerry Bruckheimer and Joel Schumacher chose in the end to self-title rather than use other equally apt titles, "Bad Acting", "Misguided Project" or "Pedestrian Plotting".

★☆☆☆☆

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Adaptation (2002)

Adapting US journalist Susan Orlean's novel The Orchid Thief for the big screen causes screenplay writer Charlie Kaufman an existential crisis because it is a largely narrative-free contemplation on flowers and disappointment, but by inserting himself into the story and finding parallels between his own midlife crisis and the article's eponymous hero Laroche's obsessive work hunting the elusive ghost orchid, Kaufman succeeds in creating a thought-provoking and often funny, self-referential drama that won Meryl Streep an Oscar for her performance as Orlean.

★★★★☆

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Maid In Manhattan (2002)

Better examples of this sort of "rising above one's station" comedy include The Secret of My Success, Working Girl and even, kind of, The Devil Wears Prada but self-conscious performances by J Lo, Stanley Tucci and Bob Hoskins and uninspired writing keep this a middle-of-the-road romcom, one about a maid mistaken for an upper crust socialite and chased around town by a Senatorial candidate.

★★☆☆☆

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Swimfan (2002)

In Australia, one woman is killed by a male partner or former partner a week (1), but in movies like this wholly unintelligent psycho-melodrama from Australian director John Polson, it is the women who obsess and plot against and try to kill their male partners...but only for about 90-minutes before they are summarily and "deservedly" dispatched, either impaled on a picket fence, dropped from a height onto a glass table and then really properly killed by a falling chandelier, killed in a bath and then shot pointblank, or, here, in the case of Madison the psychopath who can't swim but manages logistically difficult pool sex, left to drown.

★☆☆☆☆

1. Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC), 2015 (source: http://www.ourwatch.org.au/understanding-violence/facts-and-figures)

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Minority Report (2002)

Philip K Dick's 1956 sci-fi short story, The Minority Report, about three future-seeing "pre-cogs", is brought to the big screen by Steven Spielberg who wrangles the themes and details into his own uneven creation - an occasionally engaging, occasionally ridiculous (especially the video-upload-at-a-gala-dinner denouement) crime mystery with Tom Cruise not in top form as Detective John Anderton, Head of the Pre-Crime Division and - according to the precogs - murderer-to-be of a man he is yet to meet!

★★★☆☆

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Wordplay (2002)

The success of the documentary Spellbound, about kids participating in a high-stakes spelling competition, demonstated the marketability of word-nerd entertainment and this 2006 effort, a cheaply and not especially well-made but engaging documentary about cruciverbalists features famous constructors like Will Shortz, Trip Payne and Merle Reagle, famous crossword doers like Jon Stewart, and other less famous but equally obsessed users who congregate at an annual competition.

★★★☆☆

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Solaris (2002)

This American remake of the 1972 Russian 'Solyaris', about a psychologist summoned to a space station-in-distress, starts well by adopting the original's mesmerising tone with a sleek, sexy new look, and it certainly doesn't hurt that George Clooney's, um, natural acting talents are on regular display, but too quickly the movie starts spelling everything out, characters hurry to articulate their emotional crises, and the profound philosophical puzzle that was the original movie ends up a fairly monotonous, superficial romantic space drama here.

★★☆☆☆

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Eight Legged Freaks (2002)

This 2002 creature feature manages on its low budget to be reminiscent of Arachnophobia, Gremlins, and even The Goonies during its more inventive, comic moments; in other formulaic, less interesting scenes, viewers can marvel at a young Scarlett Johansson - a long way off 2012s The Avengers - and the forever-the-same-age David Arquette - not so far off his 1996 Scream, although someone else is playing his goofy cop here while he steps up as the hero.

★★☆☆☆

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