“2003 gave us a lot to gripe about — overblown action pictures, witless sequels, pointless remakes, misbegotten literary adaptations, mopey little art films shot in headache-inducing digital video — but these failures reveal less about the state of cinema than about the fate of most creative endeavors, which is to land in the fat, mediocre middle of the artistic bell curve.

To look at the three top 10 film lists displayed in this section — and at the dozens more that sprout from nearly every printed publication and Web site in the land — is to be struck by the sheer variety and vitality of the movies, which, according to some historians, marked their centenary as a narrative art form this year. The number of good motion pictures released this year is less impressive — and harder to agree on — than their diversity.” —New York Times