1. Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind
Focus FeaturesCreated by the decade's most intriguing partnership in writer Charlie Kaufman and director Michel Gondry, our number one is a not-so-straight-forward story of boy (Jim Carrey, at a career best) meeting girl (Kate Winslet, ditto), boy and girl falling in love, boy and girl falling out of love and having each other erased from their respective minds. Phew. With a narrative that is a splintered exploration into why this relationship went wrong (or right?), Gondry throws everything at us to enhance our experience. Using a mixed bag of visual tics (Winslets hair is a neat visual indicator for where we're at on the film's fractured timeline) and magicians tricks (best employed in Carrey's digression to childhood, where old fashioned camera perspectives are brought in to play) Gondrys frenetic style and the scripts warm core keep everything exciting and, in a genius twist of its own, not confusing. In a year where sci-fi wasn't hitting the heights (I, Robot) and the only half decent rom com was 13 Going On 30, Eternal Sunshine takes both genres, rides them until they crash and lets us pick up the pieces and put the story back together again. Breathless.