2. RUSSIAN ARK
 
Russia
dir. Aleksandr Sokurov
world premiere 2002
U.S. release 2002
 

 
Because Sokurov posed two huge, impetuous questions, about coming to grips with his country's painful history and about the lean chance that narrative cinema had anything truly new to attempt. Or was it cinema's history and the country's future that inspired him? Either way, he brilliantly pulled off a real experiment, and new horizons gleamed in every direction.