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I love making lists, especially wish lists. And so I relish the opportunity to make a Top 10 of 2003 films as it will remind me to buy them when (and if) they're released on DVD. Living in Australia means that many of the films I saw this year (like Far From Heaven and Talk to Her) are now too dated to include in this Top 10. Below are my top 10, sorted alphabetically.

Alexandra's Project (Rolf de Heer)
This creepy domestic thriller was sadly overlooked at the 2003 Australian Film Institute (AFI) Awards. Though it was nominated five times (including Best Film), the overhyped Japanese Story took home the proverbial gold. Alexandra's Project is about your run-of-the-mill good-woman-of-suburbia-gone-wrong. Alexandra (Helen Buday) gives her husband (Gary Sweet) the greatest gift of all on his birthday: a monologue of sex and lies, shot on videotape. With coolly minimalist production design and unflinching performances, it's a claustrophobic tale of marital revenge.

American Splendor (Robert Pulcini and Shari Springer Berman)
Based on Harvey Pekar's oddball contributions to comic book subculture by way of Robert Crumb and other illustrators, this is a feel-good film about an utterly unlovable loser. Expanding on other U.S. cinematic excavations of average white men (see Falling Down, American Beauty, and The Man Who Wasn't There), Pulcini and Berman merge biopic and documentary conventions, including comic strip animations and scenes where the actors interact with the subjects they're playing.

Capturing the Friedmans (Andrew Jarecki)
Andrew Jarecki was granted unrestrained access to the audio-visual archives of David Friedman, a professional clown who had "captured" his family's meltdown during the '80s, due to allegations of child abuse. David's home movies stand in contrast to a barrage of other images, most contradictory, rendering it difficult to lay claim to a singular truth.

City of God (Cidade de Deus) (Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund)
The title refers to the poor housing project districts of Rio de Janeiro, where political independence comes at great risk. Gangbangers rule the streets, drug trafficking is rife, and the body count is ever accelerating. Based on the real life story of Rocket (Alexandre Rodrigues), the film tracks his childhood in the projects and dreams of becoming a professional photographer. When he gets access-all-areas photographic coverage of the gang wars, he's literally rocketed him to local, and now international, fame.

In the Cut (Jane Campion)
I've always wanted to slap Meg Ryan for being an American sweetheart. Seeing this film didn't change that; if anything, I wanted to slap her for being too absorbed in her own urban poetry. Campion's best film since Sweetie (1989) pulses with foreboding mood, gorgeous cinematography, and rich characterizations. Though Jennifer Jason Leigh is sadly underused, the film includes this year's best line: "Some people have no sense of cock."

Ken Park (Larry Clark and Edward Lachman)
In Australia, you could get arrested for watching this film. The Australian Office for Film and Literature Classification refused Ken Park classification because its content reportedly offends "reasonable adults." Like much of Clark's previous work, this film is about disenfranchised teenagers whose parents fail them, repeatedly. Clark's documentary realism is a perfect match with Lachman's peachy visual sense.

Man Made: The Story of Two Men and a Baby (Emma Crimmings)
First-time director Emma Crimmings' doco enjoyed a brief theatrical release in Melbourne and screened on Australian television, inciting heated public debate. The film follows a Melbourne-based gay male couple who parent a child with the help of a paid surrogate. Due to Australian laws prohibiting gay couples from legally adopting or organizing surrogacy, they hooked up with a U.S. surrogacy agency, then traveled to the States to hold their surrogate's hand when the time came for baby Alexander to be born. While it shirks an obvious political agenda, the film reveals, more powerfully, an array of emotional complexities.

Morvern Callar (Lynne Ramsay)
My award for cinematography of the year goes to Alwin H. Kuchler for his work on Lynne Ramsay's marvelous adaptation of Alan Warner's novel. Samantha Morton gives her best performance to date as Morvern, a young woman coming terms with her boyfriend's suicide. Movies dealing with grief usually subscribe to a host of melodramatic clichés, but this one focuses instead on a dreamy visual poetry that makes up for Morvern's unreadable silences.

Wildness (Scott Millwood)
Scott Millwood documents two legendary Tasmanian wildlife photographers, Olegas Truchanas and Peter Dombrovskis, whose passion for the natural landscape helped drive a political campaign to protect the Tasmanian rainforests from being turned over to industry. It's a poignant tribute to both photographers who later, at different times, died while on solo photographic expeditions in the wild.