After hestitating briefly over Zatoichi and She Hate Me, I finally went with The Manchurian Candidate. It's easily the most intelligent thriller I've seen all year, bearing in mind the fuzzy distinction between "intelligent" and "smart" that I try to outline a few posts below. Even if it doesn't have the raw energy of The Bourne Supremacy, it achieves something even more impressive: it doesn't confine its ingenuity to action sequences and plot points, but it thinks its way out of its genre, and even sends a tendril or two into the brains of the audience. The movie deflates a bit in the last ten minutes, and you can sense it backing away from a truly demonic ending, but even with its flaws, it's the first film so far this year that managed to make me forget, for long stretches, that I was watching a movie, so seamless and frightening are its connections to the real world.

Almost incidentally, it also includes the single most satisfying moment of movie payback since Terence Stamp picked himself up from the street and went back into that warehouse, gun drawn, at the beginning of The Limey. It's a punch in the face so sinfully satisfying that the editor seems to have added an extra ten seconds of footage to the beginning of the following scene, to prevent the audience from drowning out some crucial lines of dialogue with laughter and applause.

Sequels and remakes are supposed to be creative voids, but in light of Spider-Man 2, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Shrek 2, Kill Bill Vol. 2, The Bourne Supremacy, and The Manchurian Candidate, this looks to be the first year ever where my list of the year's ten best will include more than one title with a numeral at the end.