By Susan Gerhard

WHEN I THINK of 2004, I flash back to a film made in 1994, to a scene in which a cat hangs in midair inside a net, crying in misery. Béla Tarr wants you to know it's misery the cat's experiencing in Sátántangó – real misery – because he filmed it in real time so you could suffer too. Five or 10 minutes of the cat got to my friend, and even though he was all geared up for an entire day inside the darkened Roxie Cinema enjoying Tarr's slow-drip tortures, he took his two bottled waters and left the theater. It wasn't that he was going to round up PETA and protest out front – Tarr always claimed the cat wasn't "harmed" – it was just that watching a real cat suffer real pain meant it wasn't fiction anymore; he had to do something. The movie gave him too much reason to disbelieve.

You didn't have to be an oops!-erased-it electronic voter in Ohio to feel that seeing was disbelieving this year; so many movies offered the chance to feel alienation with the comforts of stadium seating. I felt for Chloë Sevigny, Nicole Kidman, and Lauren Bacall in Dogville the way my friend felt for that cat. If Patricia Clarkson hadn't been there to liven things up, I might have actually called the SPCA. Didn't it look like every single character was suffering through his or her part to the point of collapse? It was easy to imagine director Lars von Trier ordering the caterer to deliver the actors gristle for lunch. I've enjoyed the antic sadism of von Trier before, particularly in Breaking the Waves, The Kingdom, and most recently The Five Obstructions – but at some point, the sour legend of von Trier and his unhappy leading ladies seeps into the corners of the screen and smells up the place, even if it's simple urban mythology propagated by the happy obstructionist himself.

Another cross to bear, The Passion of the Christ, actually offered me the best recovered-memory moment of my filmgoing year. Mel Gibson made Catholicism almost as appealing as the Sister Mary Margaret I tried so hard to avoid in my childhood. She was a corporal punisher and a corpulent presence, and I had a very tangible reminder of SMM right there in the movie theater with me. Midday at the Metreon had never looked like this before: an audience mostly dressed in black and smelling of church mustiness and whiskey. The nun seated behind me was perpetually indulging a vice most regular filmgoers had long abandoned: shouting curses at the screen. Every blow struck to her Lord Jesus Christ seemed to hit her in the gut, which then ricocheted off my seat. The nun's many bathroom/tippling breaks allowed the only relief I got in a film that did, truly, bring me back to three-hour Eastertime masses and make me feel like I was walking through those stations of the cross myself. For all that can be said against it, Gibson's horrorscope Catholicism wasn't a perversion of this religion's message; it was an accurate distillation of it – the way I learned it at least – and a timely reminder of the excellent reasons to run screaming from that church. (See also: bad priests, whom Pedro Almodóvar treats extremely generously in Bad Education, his kookily upbeat ex-Catholic noir.)

It's not that the world no longer appreciates bloody rituals. It's just that we have so many to choose from, unfolding before our sad, scared eyes. I agree with so many other people that the best works of the year – beyond the bewildering amazements of Tarnation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind – were antiwar. The obvious (Fahrenheit 9/11) and the less obvious (Alison Maclean and Tobias Perse's Persons of Interest) placed the U.S. government in the crosshairs and artfully elucidated its war crimes for all to see, and maybe some day, to actually act on. They joined Troy, the blockbuster you should be sad you missed, in paying tribute to the most evident of evergreen truths: war is hell, even though it can be reimagined with awesome fireballs and fabulous new designs in Greek metalwear. And, please: do you have to hate Troy because Brad Pitt is beautiful?

Top 10, plus some

1. Tarnation (Jonathan Caouette, USA, 2003)

2. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, USA)

3. The Door in the Floor (Tod Williams, USA)

4. Hero (Zhang Yimou, Hong Kong/China, 2002) and Troy (Wolfgang Petersen, USA/Malta/U.K.)

5. Fahrenheit 9/11 (Michael Moore, USA)

6. Metallica: Some Kind of Monster (Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, USA)

7. Persons of Interest (Alison Maclean and Tobias Perse, USA)

8. Dolls and The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi (Takeshi Kitano, Japan, 2002 and 2003, respectively)

9. Spider-Man 2 (Sam Raimi, USA)

10. Mean Girls (Mark S. Waters, USA)

Special mention: The Brown Bunny (Vincent Gallo, USA, 2003)