Best of cinema by Mad Movies. Part 2: 2002-2005

Every year my favorite magazine for action/horror/thriller/SF (Mad Movies) publishes the list of the best movies of the previous year (and the worst ones), according to its editors and an average for the whole magazine team.
I have gathered them for your here with a few comments. Enjoy!
All parts of this article can be found under this link.

In 2002 Peter Jackson's steamroller continued to succeed with its second installment The Two Towers, while another fanboy Sam Raimi launched his own trilogy with Spiderman.My favorite movies of the year are the unexpected Donnie Darko (excellent story, actors, soundtrack, characters...) and Jeepers Creepers (powerful boogeyman movie by Victor Salva).
Blade 2 by Guillermo Del Toro was taking the black vampire hunter one level up and was deliciously full of action in spite of some lengths.
Other pleasant surprises: Spain began producing better and better horror films, starting with El Espinazo Del Diablo, while in Hong-Kong Stephen Chow was proving his talent in his first and excellent comedy Shaolin Soccer. Nid de guêpes is a good french movie using the unity of space rule, very much inspired by John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13. From Hell (the story of Jack the Ripper) is interesting. Arac Attack (renamed Eight-legged Freaks in the USA because it sounded too musk like Irak Attack!) is a good old-school monster movie that can be seen as precursor to the future Snakes on a Plane and Piranha. Finally Avalon is an experimental live film shot in Poland by Mamoru Oshii, creator of Ghost in the Shell. I bought it in DVD in Poland with only  subtitles in the languages of former russian states, but the dialogs are so scarce that you don't need subtitles.
Deceptions of the year: Men In Black 2, Signs and Bruiser that apparently announced a turn of the tide for respectively Will Smith, M. Night Shyamalan and George A. Romero. Georges Lucas was continuing to deceive with his Episode 2: Attack of the Clones while Steven Spielberg was presenting a nice SF movie inspired by Philip K. Dick: Minority Report.

A poor year that 2003, except for the conclusion of the epic Lord of the Rings trilogy with The Return of the King. A few other movies of interest: Matrix Reloaded and Revolutions dissapointed the fans of the first movie, although they are sometimes visually impressive. The animated Animatrix contains some pretty good segments. 28 Days Later was the first and for me only good 'infected' movie (OK maybe aldo Dawn of the Dead). Bad Boys 2 was not well marked but after the years it got a status of classic over-the-top action movie of the 2000's. Hero was a colorful Chinese Epic that made it to the rest of the world. Identity was a good surprise.
Many average/bad movies that year, quickly forgotten: Dark Water, Gangs of New York, The 25th hour, Mystic River, Underworld, Tomb Raider, Equilibrium, Daredevil, Hulk, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Pirates of the Caribbean, Teminator 3.
One has to look outside of Fantasy and Horror to find interesting movies: Catch me if you Can by Spielberg, Finding Nemo, The City of God showing the terrifying truth of the brasilin suburbs, and the first part of Kill Bill.

2004 sees the continuation of the wave of super-heros movies initiated by Spiderman. This year's big success was Spiderman 2, maybe my favorite of the three.
That year was Asian for me and the best films (that I had seen already at the Far East Film Festival of Udine) were Memories of Murder (or how I realized that to find an excellent thriller one should stop looking towards Hollywood but more to the East),  Infernal Affairs (poorly remade by Scorcese) and Old Boy (my favorite in Chan-wook Park's trilogy of Vengeance).
Other good ones from that year: the touching May, The Incredibles (for me the best Pixar to date, AND the best James Bond-style movie), Dawn of the Dead (what a remake should be), and I, Robot. Ong Bak was of course the revelation for Tony Jaa (even though I prefer the even more extreme Born to Fight), and I am still searching for the original version of the movie, uncensored and without the hip-hop european soundtrack added by Luc Besson!
800 balas was a delight from Spain and Alex de la Iglesia that I knew from Accion Mutante. I liked Jeepers Creepers 2 as a modern bogeyman movie, and how it perfectly completed the first one.
I also loved Kill Bill 2, and I was lucky to see it at a double feature together with the first episode that I had not seen before. So I didn't have to wait months between the two parts. Hellboy by Guillermo del Toro was a bit of a dissapointement. The Chronicles of Riddick was OK, action-packed, but not as nice as the first.
Movies to quickly forget: Catwoman, Blade Trinity, The Punisher (made me want to see again the 80's one with Dolph Lundgren) and Alien vs. Predator.

2005 was an average year is seems. Shaun of the Dead was the best for me: a romantic comedy ... with zombies! King Kong was the hit, and very good, but this is when I started to become tired of Peter Jackson filming style. The first Saw was a good concept. Probably there was no need to film 6 others, but that is another story. The belgian Calvaire showed that we could do a survival movie in Europe, it started a trend. The Descent is a nice clostrophobic movie from UK. I liked a lot Wallace and Gromit and the Curse of the Were Rabbit (a classic horror animation for kids!), The Machinist (excellent Christian Bale and special mention for Michael Ironside), Bang Rajan (historical fresque from Thailand) and History of Violence (Cronenberg is definitely not dead), for different reasons obviously.
Then a lot of OK movies: Hostage (french director but with Bruce Willis), War of the Worlds (seen again recently in Blu-ray, I didn't change opinion), Land of the Dead (ordered by the studios and made by Romero, who did much better in the following auto-produced episodes), Kung Fu Hustle (nice comedy from Stephen Chow), The Island (good action in the not-so-far-future), Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (the end of Tim Burton?), The Fatastic Four (Jessica Albaaaaaargh).
It is funny that Batman Begins is not quoted much, while now Mad Movies says so much good about the trilogy...

Stay tuned for the next episode, Part 3: 2006-2008