Top 2004 Movies

1994. In Rwanda, the classification of the native population into Hutus and Tutsis, arbitrarily done by the colonial Belgians, is now ingrained within Rwandan mentality despite the Rwandan independence. Despite the Belgians having placed the Tutsis in a higher position during the Belgian rule, they have placed the majority Hutus in power after independence. Paul Rusesabagina, a Hutu married to a Tutsi, Tatiana Rusesabagina, is the House Manager of the Hotel Des Milles Collines in Kigali. The Milles Collines, owned by Sabena (the national airline of Belgium), is a four-star hotel catering primarily to wealthy white westerners. Paul, who knows how to work the system to run the hotel effectively for its guests and for Sabena, is proud that most of the Caucasians who he meets in this professional capacity treat him with respect. After a specific incident, the relative calm between the Tutsi guerrillas and government-backed Hutu militia takes a turn. Paul's thought that the native population as a whole who are not directly involved in the conflict will be protected as the UN peacekeeping forces and thus the world is watching doesn't happen as the western world largely evacuates from Rwanda and abandons the natives. Such begins what will become a genocide of the Tutsi population. Paul, who is able to get his immediate family to the hotel which is still largely seen as a place of sanctuary, will have to use the considerable skills he has used to run the hotel as well as he has instead to keep himself, his family and any others taking refuge at the hotel alive, whether they be Hutu or Tutsi. Meanwhile, Colonel Oliver, a Canadian heading the UN peacekeeping forces, and Pat Archer with the Red Cross do what they can to assist Paul and to get people to safety first to the hotel then out of the country, while field journalists, like photographer Jack Daglish, try to bring the genocide back into the global media to have the world once again care about what is going on.

Set in Paris in 1919, this biopic centers on the life of late Italian artist Amedeo Modigliani, focusing on his last days and his rivalry with Pablo Picasso. The Jewish Modigliani has fallen in love with young, beautiful Catholic Jeanne. They have an illegitimate child, whom Jeanne's bigoted parents send to a faraway convent to be raised by nuns. The distraught Modigliani needs money to rescue and raise his child. The answer arrives in the shape of Paris' annual art competition. Prize money and a guaranteed career await the winner. Neither Modigliani nor his dearest friend and rival Picasso has ever entered the competition, believing that it is beneath true artists like themselves. But push comes to shove with his child's welfare on the line, and Modigliani signs up for the competition in a drunken and drug-induced tirade. Picasso follows suit, and all of Paris is aflutter with excitement about who will win. With the balance of his relationship with Jeanne on the line, Modigliani tackles this work with the hopes of creating a masterpiece, and knows that all the artists of Paris are doing the same.

On the Kurdish refugee camp on the Iraqi-Turkish border, the boy Satellite is the leader of the kids. He commands them to clear and collect American undetonated minefields in the fields to sell them in the street market and he installs antennae for the villagers. He goes with the local leader to buy a parabolic antenna to learn the news about the eminent American invasion but nobody speaks English and Satellite that knows a couple of words is assigned to translate the Fox News. When the orphans Agrin and her armless brother Hengov and the blind toddler Riga come from Halabcheh to the camp, Satellite falls in an unrequited love for Egrin. But the girl is traumatized by a cruel raid in her home, when her parents were murdered and she was raped. She wants to leave Riga behind and travel with her brother Hengov to another place, but he does not agree with her intention.

The factual story of Spaniard Ramon Sampedro, who fought a 28 year campaign in favour of euthanasia and his own right to die.

An FBI profiler is called in by French Canadian police to catch a serial killer who takes on the identity of each new victim.

When India and Pakistan decide to end their hostilities, there is one army person in India who is unhappy, because of his son's death in the Indo-Pak war. He decides to launch terror attacks and bring an end to peace, and for this purpose he shoots and gravely injures an Indian army officer, then decides to do away with the man's daughter Sanjana, who is studying at university. Raghavan and his men descend on the campus and hold over 100 students hostage. There is only one student who can save them, and his name is Ram, he claims he is a student, but is here on a mission--a mission that when told will reveal his real identity and two plans which he must carry out simultaneously.

Mort Rainey is a successful writer going through a rather unfriendly divorce from his wife of ten years, Amy. Alone and bitter in his cabin, he continues to work on his writing when a stranger named John Shooter shows up on his doorstep, claiming Rainey stole his story. Mort says he can prove the story belongs to him and not Shooter, but while Mort digs around for the magazine which published the story in question years ago, things begin to happen around Shooter. Mort's dog dies, people begin to die, and his divorce proceedings with Amy continue to get uglier. It seems that Shooter has Mort over a barrel, but perhaps Mort has his own ideas on how to resolve all the problems that plague him lately.

After an unsuccessful mission, FBI agents Kevin and Marcus Copeland fall into disgrace at the agency. They decide to work undercover on an abduction case disguised as Brittany and Tiffany Wilson, the vain, spoiled white daughters of a tycoon.

A remake of the 1955 comedy, the story revolves around a Southern professor who puts together a group of thieves to rob a casino. They rent a room in an old woman's house, but soon she discovers the plot and they must kill her, a task that is more difficult than it seems.

Set in modern day India, Swades is a film that tackles the issues that development throws up on a grass root level. It is to this India, which is colorful, heterogeneous and complex that Mohan Bhargava (Shah Rukh Khan), a bright young scientist working as a project manager in NASA, returns to on a quest to find his childhood nanny. The film uses the contrast between the highly developed world of NASA, which has been at the forefront of advances in space research, and this world back home in India, which is at the crossroads of development. Mohan's simple quest becomes the journey that every one of us goes through in search of that metaphysical and elusive place called "home".