1) In the Mood for Love. Unrequited love is like going to the movies: you get all the gratification and pain and none of the responsibility. It was more pain than gain this year in films, with a few exceptions like this elegant, subtle, devastating effort from Wong Kar-wai, in which spurned spouses in 1960s Hong Kong limp toward each other but never quite connect. For Wong, the mood for love is at best nostalgia; even if consummated, love is gone before you know it, an absence never filled.

2) The Road Home. Zhang Yimou's pared-down period love story is a masterpiece of simplicity and humanity that transcends language, culture, and even the lack of culture. Set in contemporary China, shot at first in a starkly beautiful, wintry black and white, the film follows a man who travels from the city to his native village for his father's funeral. A photo of his parents when they were young and first in love bursts into color and motion; so begins the story of their romance. Not much happens on this road, but its measured rhythms and subtle detail take one back to what movies are all about.

3) Mulholland Drive. Even as world events have grown nightmarish, films have been playing with the line between reality and dreams -- and none did it better than this release from the grandmaster of the genre, David Lynch. The basic elements are here: a car crash, amnesia, a love story. But it's not just a cinematic Rubik's cube -- moments of astonishing beauty and inexplicable emotion, plus a superb performance from Naomi Watts, transfigure the screen. Mulholland Drive beats almost every other film now out there in its passion and vision.

4) L.I.E. Few filmmakers have re-created modern suburban malaise or teenage anomie and rage as dismayingly as Michael Cuesta in his debut film. Paul Franklin Dano is wry and heartbreaking as a latter-day Holden Caulfield, but it's Brian Cox's kindly pederast, Big John, who's one of the great creations of American cinema, a perverse amalgam of cornball normality and nihilist scorn, creepy menace and touching vulnerability. Lacerating and tender without being exploitative or sentimental, Cuesta's remarkable film humanizes the unspeakable. And it gives the lie to the current ratings system, which slapped it with an NC-17.

5) The Circle. Iran is the hotbed of feminist filmmaking in the world today. That might seem a dubious assertion about a country ruled by a patriarchal, fundamentalist theocracy. But compare Jafar Panahi's aching, neo-realistic gem with, say, what you get from Meg Ryan in Kate & Leopold and there's no contest. A La ronde of iniquity, The Circle is inspired but never manipulative -- a scene with a little girl in a red hat will break your heart. Not only does Panahi condemn oppression, he vindicates both the human spirit and the art of film.

6) The Gleaners & I. The year 2001 offered slim pickings in most categories. The exception was documentaries, and in that regard none was better than septuagenarian French New Waver Agnès Varda's petite masterpiece of found and fondly preserved art. This free-associative essay explores the world of the gleaners, those permitted by French law to pick up the remnants in a harvested field after the landowners have taken their fill. The film's style is a kind of gleaning too: bits and pieces of images of rural indigents and artists who find subsistence and inspiration in what the rest of society has abandoned. Like Varda herself in this witty and eloquent meditation on mortality and rebirth.

7) Memento. Christopher Nolan's bold, coldly brilliant thriller opens with a Polaroid photo of a killing; as time passes backwards, the image fades to a blur and the deed is undone. Or is it? Nothing is certain for Guy Pearce's short-term-memory-challenged protagonist. The last thing he remembers is his wife's murder, which he seeks to avenge by using his body as a giant post-it note. He can't trust anyone, not even himself, and certainly not the filmmaker, who re-creates his hero's malady by telling the story backwards in brief overlapping episodes. More than a gimmick or a murder mystery, Memento is a philosophical inquiry into memory, identity, and obsession, concluding that though we may forget, we never forgive.

8) Ghost World. The notion of the teenage wasteland has reverberated for every generation since the Who celebrated it in song more than three decades ago. Terry Zigoff's adaptation of the Daniel Clowes comic book is one of the best of the year's several films exploring that slough of adolescent despond (see L.I.E.) as Thora Birch of American Beauty fame portrays Enid, a powerless superhero in the postmodern suburban dystopia who finds companionship with a fellow outcast, a middle-aged geek played by the inimitable Steve Buscemi. Precise, oblique, heartbreaking.

9) Keep the River on Your Right. If nothing else, David and Laurie Gwen Shapiro's documentary is completely original. How many other films feature a septuagenarian gay Jewish cannibal? Tobias Schneebaum, a painter and proto beatnik of the '50s Manhattan bohemian scene, decided to explore his own heart of darkness by walking into the jungles of Peru and New Guinea. He kept the river on his right but momentarily lost track of civilization. Similar in style and subject to the documentaries of Werner Herzog, Keep the River on Your Right is by turns hilarious, startling, and touching.

10) Vanilla Sky. It's hard to fathom the critical antipathy to Cameron Crowe's best and most ambitious movie. Certainly it's an improvement over the original, Alejandro Amenábar's drab oddity Open Your Eyes. Maybe the post-September 11 backlash has hurt this lurid, sardonic look at the nature of 21st-century narcissism and the culture of solipsistic consumption. Cruise plays a variation on his own image as a rich playboy who falls in love but crosses the wrong woman, crashing into a world of disfigurement, paranoia, and illusion. Crowe puts more wit and intelligence into a single layered image than most of this year's movies offer in their entirety.

Issue Date: December 28, 2001 - January 3, 2002