The Hidden Gems

Enough with the best-of lists featuring movies with $100 million budgets and all-star casts. There are plenty of great movies you probably missed this year, either because they were in and out of theaters in five minutes, or, more likely, because they had about $25 to spend on marketing. Here are the best of those lesser seen films. Seek them out on video, because you live in New York City, and you don’t have to limit yourself to watching the same movies they get in Des Moines.

10. THE GREAT YOKAI WAR
Directed by Takashi Miike

Japanese madman Takashi Miike has made so many horror movies that the last thing anyone expected was a kiddie flick, but “Yokai” was a top tier popcorn muncher that pit digital monsters against an army of funky folklore demons with a child of divorced parents trapped in the center. Surprisingly, Miike was willing to embrace the melancholy fact that every adventure has an ending and every little boy turns into a jaded adult. Amid the burning fusion of ridiculous ideas you could take a moment and hear the small sound of a child’s heart breaking.

9. THE HEART OF THE GAME
Directed by Ward Serrill

A cleansing shower for your soul disguised as a documentary about a girls’ basketball team, this movie drained your tear ducts and clamped jumper cables to your heart. Full of teen pregnancies, lawsuits, revoked scholarships, vicious rivalries, and rape, it forces you to stare hard in the mirror and ask yourself: Do you have the iron-hard ethics and moral character of this flick’s pizza-faced, foghorn-voiced 16-year-old girls? The answer is probably “no.”

8. IOWA
Directed by Matt Farnsworth

This crystal meth scare screed about kids hooked on the Devil’s Dandruff was the worst movie of the year, and consequently far more entertaining than a lot of the benign timewasters that clogged the multiplexes. A modern day “Reefer Madness” made with boneheaded sincerity, its characters castrated one another with acid and fished dead babies out of toilets in a video version of a Jack Chick comic book tract, lacking only a concluding shot of Satan tormenting their souls in hell and bellowing “Haw Haw!”

7. LINDA LINDA LINDA
Directed by Nobuhiro Yamashita

Four Japanese girls form a band to play the high school talent show. They learn two songs, and that’s the movie. But this tiny synopsis hides the massive heart and fall-on-the-floor deadpan humor of a flick that rages hard against the unfairness of the world. They can put us in uniforms, break our hearts, and destroy our dreams but no one can stop us from starting a band.

6. LITTLE FISH
Directed by Rowan Woods

“Lord of the Rings” King and Queen of Elf-land (Hugo Weaving and Cate Blanchett) retire to a sun-scorched Australian suburban hell in this pop art junkie drama. It’s usually best to steer clear of movies in which actors play smack addicts, but these two justify their big paychecks as tormented, scarred souls trying to find some peace from the screaming junk monkeys on their backs.

5. REQUIEM
Directed by Hans-Christian Schmid

This German arthouse flick is best viewed cold — the less you know the stronger and stranger it becomes. But for those who like their movies unsurprising, read on. “The Exorcist” stripped of special effects and transformed into something truly harrowing, “Requiem” is as claustrophobic and suffocating as damp wool. Excising the music, visual flash, and ham-handed attempts at suspense from the horror genre, what remains is a film built in a monk’s cell: sparse and spare but possessing a near spiritual attention to detail. It’s the cinematic equivalent of a Zen garden.

4. SOMETHING NEW
Directed by Sanaa Hamri

This movie’s musty 1950s story hook about a black woman dating a white man smelt like mothballs and kept audiences away, but “Something New” was undoubtedly the best romance of the year. Romantic comedy lives or dies on the strength of its actors, and in the case of “Something New”they knocked it out of the park with their kamikaze commitment to sincerity: no zingers, no postironic hipness, no attitude, just an absolute belief that love matters. And whatever variety of Grinch you are, by the end of the movie they make you believe it too.

3. TORO NEGRO
Directed by Carlos Armella and Pedro González-Rubio

Out in rural Mexico, away from the posh crowds and the slick managers, there’s a bullfighting circuit where dirtpoor matadors in threadbare costumes are worked to the bone by managers who buy them in bulk and throw them away like Kleenex. This documentary was ostensibly about Fernando, one of these hand-to-mouth matadors, who drinks to find the courage to get in the ring, gets injured in the ring because he’s drunk, then drinks even more to numb his injuries before the next bullfight. But the film was actually a sobering lesson in poverty that taught us that there is no bottom. There’s always farther to fall.

2. EVERYTHING AT TWO BOOTS

In a city full of Starbucks and AMC multiplexes, it’s easy to forget that New York City isn’t just another urban-sprawl mall. The programmers at the Pioneer Two Boots theater are determined not to let that happen. Throwing caution to the wind, they regularly give new filmmakers chances they’d never get in Iowa. Movies like “Automatons,” “Blood Tea and Red String,” “Frankenstein’s Bloody Nightmare,” “Puzzlehead,” and “Mad Cowgirl” aren’t strong enough to get on this list by themselves, but seen onscreen at the Pioneer Two Boots, these iconoclastic, Hollywood-proof visions are living proof that New York City still rocks.

1. YAJI AND KITA: THE MIDNIGHT PILGRIMS
Directed by Kankurô Kudô

A no-holds-barred blast of pomo joycore, this is the musical “Idlewild” would have been if it had had gay samurai scream-singing songs like “Born To Be Gay” and hauling asphalt on their Harley Davidsons. A sinus-clearing dose of anarchy that hit your brain like amyl nitrate, this period comedy also took time out for beautiful surrealism, like a digression to trace the source of the River Styx to a suicide’s tears.