2. Happiness
A lonely man addicted to making obscene phone calls; a psychoanalyst who fantasizes about gunning down innocent people in the park and who seducin his young son's friends with sandwiches (and his deluded wife who thinks she's never had it so good); a marriage falling apart ("We're not getting a divorce!"); a woman named Joy living a life about as joyless as you can get - could Todd Solondz's Happiness be the most anti-Valentine's Day movie on the list yet? The search for happiness - however misguided or perverse it may be - runs throughout the film, a sharply-observed ensemble feature revolving around the lives of three sisters in suburban middle America. While the brief summary of characters above might suggest a film with a cold heart there is a surprising amount of warmth and humanity on display, not least because the uniformly excellent cast (including Philip Seymour Hoffman, Lara Flynn Boyle and Jane Adams) deliver performances of subtle complexity. The controversy the movie faced upon its release - not least because of the subject of paedophilia, on account of which the Sundance Film Festival refused to screen it - might not be quite as legendary as Oshima's In the Realm of the Senses, but it certainly overshadows Solondz's accomplishment - a film which is considerably maturer than the sum of its more sensationalist parts.