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The films released in the last quarter of 2002 made it one of the most satisfying moviegoing years in recent memory. Suddenly, there was so much worth seeing, from Punch-Drunk Love, Solaris, Far From Heaven, Adaptation, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, The Hours, Motvern Callar, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Gangs of New York, Love Liza, and 25th Hour to Spider (released this year but given a one-week Academy run in L.A. in December). None of these films, though, offered much in the way of comfort--which is exactly why Chicago, a luxuriously wrapped box of dark chocolates, was Hollywood's favorite gift to itself in the holiday season.

But where Chicago melts in the mouth and disappears from the memory, some of those other titles leave a strange aftertaste. They nag at us like troubling dreams or presentiments we can only half-remember and would be just as happy to forget: Where do the people played by George Clooney (Solaris), Samantha Morton (Movern Callar), and Philip Seymour Hoffman (Love Liza and 25th Hour) go to next? Why is it upsetting that the Susan Orlean character (Meryl Streep) should be left suspended in fictional space at the end of Adaptation? How can we just sit there and let the Edward Norton character face gang rape in prison in 25th Hour?

We don't have to, of course--we can let him go off to the West to create a new life for himself, as his dad (Brian Cox) suggests he should, introducing the tantalizing what-if sequence that Spike Lee dangles before us as the movie draws to a close. This mutability aligns Lee's film with the brand-spanking-new self-reflexive metacinema that has been well noted by critics. The realities a Adaptation and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (both written by Charlie Kaufman), Russian Ark 24 Hour Party People, Ararat, and Safe Conduct are fluid and open to debate: These are movies that call attention to their own structural conceits even as (in most cases) they implode.

While The Hours isn't part of this group of films, it is no more fixed in the here and now. Its sequences could be played backward (as in Gaspar Noe's Irreversible) without detracting from its resonance--Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman) would still die at the end--or damaging its temporal logic and intimations of what Milan Kundera described, in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, as "eternal return." Reflecting on The Hours can make your own hours stretch before you as much as they seem to stretch behind you--the film is that elastic in its effects.

Why many of these films are troubling, though, is because they throw up ghosts, literally or implicitly, that haunt the protagonists and threaten to haunt us: Mrs. Woolf and the Ed Harris character in The Hours, Joy Division's Ian Curtis in 24 Hour Party People, George Clooneys dead wife in Solaris, Samantha Morton's dead boyfriend in Movern Callar, Philip Seymour Hoffman's dead wife in Love Liza, the artist Arshile Gorky in Ararat (all seven are suicides) and even the spirits of slain warriors in the Dead Marshes in The Two Towers. J.R.R. Tolkien must have had his own experiences as a young soldier on the Somme in 1916 in mind when he wrote of the Dead Marshes in The Lord of the Rings triptych. The movie, for better or worse, chooses not to linger there.

Then, of course, there are the ghosts of mid-19th-century Manhattan and those of 9/11 raised in Gangs of New York and 25th Hour, respectively. Ever since I saw Hoffman's teacher (in 25th Hour) gliding along a nightclub landing after planting a forbidden kiss on the mouth of his student (Anna Paquin), and thereby mortifying himself, I've considered it the most electrifying single shot of 2002-but the cutaways to the floodlit Ground Zero in that film defy all artifice. Here is our own Somme, our own Dead Marshes, all too real.

I suspect that few of the movies I've mentioned (beyond the two Kaufman films) spring from a definable zeitgeist--they are the outpourings of radically different sensibilities. (If this were a trend, we could drop the recently released Australian film Till Human Voices Wake Us, about a psychoanalyst haunted by the ghost of his long-dead teenage girlfriend, into the lot, but it's really a throwback to the Australian New Wave of the '70s.) And yet they all, of course, inform general feelings of unease and collective vertigo. Why? Because if art isn't permanent, then nothing is.

Graham Fuller is Interview's Film Writer at Large.

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