In a year dominated by big-budget special effects films, Aardman's feature-length debut stood out as radically different. Nick Park and Peter Lord's celebration of subjugated poultry was more fun than watching a PETA battery hens video (our reviewer was sampling the delights of Amanita Muscaria at the time).Chicken Run quickly became the favourite film of the year for members of the shadowy Church of the Happy Chicken.

Chicken Run featured some wickedly subversive subtexts, from the "produce-or-perish" world of the Tweedy Egg Farm to the feminism esposed by Ginger (voiced by Julia Sawalha). There are also references to Luddite and Socialist philosophies, and the battle of wits between Rocky the Rooster (Mel Gibson) and Fowler (Benjamin Whitrow) drives a thorn into America's stranglehold on global entertainment.

Chicken Run was also significant for reviving interest in animation, since Aardman has retained a craft guild approach (training 300 claymation and puppet animators) in an industry dominated by post-Fordist production methods and nano-second coalitions. Old-style artistry may yet survive in the New 'New Hollywood'.

Hamlet

Michael Almereyda's adaptation of Shakespeare's masterful tragedy shows that there is life after Kenneth Branaugh. Almereyda's brooding vision captures on-screen the urban "ecology of fear" that Mike Davis found in Los Angeles. The noir imagery depicts, far more succinctly than E.O. Wilson could, why modern cities have become alluring hive-societies. Hamlet (Ethan Hawke) is the PoMo anti-hero, adrift in a pixelated landscape that mirrors his anomie. Ophelia (Julia Stiles) and Laertes (Liev Schreiber) are favourably realized by their respective actors. Almereyda's fractured narrative is not equal to the original (unless you can time-travel back to the Globe Theater), but his insights offer hope that the Bard will survive being transplanted to post-classical media.

Some critics detested the film. Dan Jardine observed, "Despite the New York City setting, Almereyda fails to take advantage of the wealth of visual resources at his disposal. Instead, we get product placements and corporate endorsements . . . It isn't hard to dislike a movie that pretends to be studying the effects of consumerism, all the while reaping its benefits."

Look, I loved the BBC versions too, but it's the 21st century. Texts change with the times. Get over it.

X-Men

Director Bryan Singer captured on-screen the complex Marvel Comics universe, and created a parable, with X-Men, about how Outsider subcultures battle for survival and acceptance.

As a bigoted politician, Senator Robert Jefferson Kelly (Bruce Davison) tapped into the American tradition of rumor panics against minorities. The interplay between the charismatic Wolverine (High Jackman) and Rogue (Anna Paquin) exposed how ambiguous "special powers" (a subtext for the hormonal changes and heightened sensitivity of adolescence) can be, and how conventional society will fear genius that is not directed toward understood or "acceptable" ends.

The war-of-wills between Professor X (Patrick Stewart) and Magneto (Ian McKellan) was also an ethics case study. After surviving internment in a World War II prison camp, Magneto decided that humanity had misused its evolutionary potential, and that it was time for higher revolutionary mutations (a motivation that resonated with the CIA's confirmation, in September 2000, of its realpolitik association with ex-Nazi personnel. Faced with a similar destructive scenario, Professor X re-affirmed his faith, like Viktor Frankl and Martin Seligman did, in the creative possibilities of the human meta-mind. The memetic engineer does not embark on a Social Darwinist campaign to annihilate the weak, but allows them to survive so that they can manifest their creative potential under more favourable conditions.

Shadow of the Vampire

Digital film technology enables PoMo-aware studios to plunder the past and rewrite our collective memories in their own image. Directed by E. Elias Merhige, Shadow of the Vampire poses the scenario that F.W. Murnau's silent masterpiece Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922) was a documentary, for actor Max Schreck was really a centuries-old Carpathian vampyre. Murnau is played by John Malkovich, Schreck by Willem Dafoe, and the interplay between them is a delight to watch.

Shadow of the Vampire proved that sometimes the most intriguing histories are the invented ones (like those of occult secret societies). In his Village Voice review J. Hoberman observed: "In a lovely bit of business, the vampire is left alone with the cinematic apparatus and, cranking the projector by hand, makes his own shadow play."

This comment echoes Nina Auerbach's argument in her invaluable book Our Vampires, Ourselves (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995) that the contemporary vampyre reflected the sociopolitical anxieties of when the specific film was created. Auerbach reads Kathryn Bigelow's elegiac western Near Dark (1987), and the lesbian vampires of Tony Scott's The Hunger (1983) as metaphors for AIDS and Reaganite entertainment-through-oppression. "The reversibility of vampirism in 1980s movies . . . suggests that at the end of the twentieth century, vampirism is wearing down and the vampires need a long restorative sleep. They will awaken; they always have; as Stoker's Dracula boasted, time is on their side," she argues (192).

The werewolf film has focused on the eruption in contemporary society of our most bestial impulses (an ambivalent evolutionary legacy) and the commercial exploitation of hypersexuality. However, the vampyre film has revered a cultural archetype, that as a phenomenological form, has the power to transmit noetic knowledge concerning human (and potential post-human) existence. The vampyre mythos, from early manifestations such as Lord Byron's fragmentary novel The Vampire (begun 1816) and John Polidori's The Vampyre (1819) through to Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla (1872) and Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897), was crystallised in the West through Romantic tradition, and sourced from Slavic folklore. The rich tapestry of Romanian, German and Russian myths has remained untapped. Until now.

What Shadow of the Vampire hints at, by playfully manipulating the production mythology of F.W. Murnau's classic, is that these myths, which have sustained communities, will eventually be data-mined by global entertainment conglomerates. It's time to renew your faith in faked pasts and manufactured memories.

American Psycho

When Bret Easton Ellis released his novel in 1990, it provoked outrage and fierce debates. When Mary Harron released her film adaptation, few people raised an eyelid. What more proof do you need that the cultural fringes are no longer marginal?

FBI profilers Robert K. Ressler and John Douglas had already turned hunting serial killers into a tabloid literary genre. Jerry Springer had devolved talk-show television to new lows. Issei Sagawa, Ted Bundy, Henry Lee Lucas, Jeffrey Dahmer and Charles Manson had already infiltrated our imaginations. Natural Born Killers (1994) and Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986) had exalted the malevolent promise of serial killer chic and then demolished it. The heavy metal band Slayer flirted with it. The Scream series parodied it. American Psycho was too late in the cycle to maintain the hypnotic grip that Ellis's novel originally had over its readership.

What redeemed American Psycho was the idea that hero-psychopath Patrick Bateman (Christian Beale) is the logical final product of mercantile capitalist society, a reaper of the dead souls who have been drained, by endless consumption, of any humanity. Like David Fincher's Fight Club (1999), American Psycho suggested that a society that worships at the altar of economic rationalism will breed (literal) predators.