Nr.10: Afterglow (Alan Rudolph). I know little of Rudolph's films, but I remember a comment by Roger Ebert that Rudolph makes films about characters who live on the fringe and are naturally outsiders. This film was stunning in its portrayal of a strange marriage between two people, played by Julie Christie and Nick Nolte, who have been broken by life. The rules of the marriage seem transparent: the husband cheats on his wife and nothing comes of it. What intrigued me about the film was the level of acting called forth from Christie and Nolte, the intelligent script by Rudolph, and the revelation about the source of their brokenness that was called forth at the end of the film--but left tantalizingly unresolved in its calling forth. I was attracted to the yearning that was at the heart of these characters. NR 9: Kundun (dir. Martin Scorsese). The first half of this long film was visually stunning in every way. All of Scorsese's impulses for visual metaphor were in evidence. I watched the story of the monks who chose the latest Dalai Lama in Tibet (in the 1930s) with increasing fascination. Through the visuals I came to understand the boy's special character and holiness. But when he becomes a young man, and faces exile from Tibet, the film seems to waver and grow longish. I did not feel that Scorsese was able to sustain the energy and movement of the early scenes. Only at the end, when the young man escapes into India in 1959, does the film regain its lost momentum.

NR 8: Oscar and Lucinda. Gillian Armstrong is one of my favorite directors. I loved The Last Days of Chez Nous (1992), a story about a middle-aged woman's struggle to find herself, and in this 1997 film Armstrong takes on an even more complicated story of two young nineteenth-century rebels, one from England and the other from Australia, whose lives and fortunes become entangled with their bizarre and unwieldy dreams. One is a gambler, and one is an heiress. The acting by Ralph Fiennes and Cate Blanchett is wonderful. This film, like several on my list, is a tragedy that is determined by the interaction of these characters and their dreams. NR 7: The Wings of the Dove (Iain Softley). Another tragedy, based on the Henry James novel. I was impressed with the beautiful direction, the script by Hossein Amini (who also wrote the screenplay for Michael Winterbottom's Jude), the lush cinematography, and the impeccable acting, especially by Helena Bonham-Carter. The film dredges up all that is worst about the rules of the upper-class in England and focuses on a strange manage et trois of one man and two women. The schemers are the man and woman who plot to earn a comfortable life through the manipulation of another woman, an heiress who is dying. Bonham-Carter's work was exceptional in this film, and the climactic scene between her and her ersatz lover is chilling to the bone in its revelation of her alienation, loneliness, and despair. The last few shots in the film are an exercise in the visual art of filmmaking.

Nr. 6: Boogie Nights (Paul Thomas Anderson): This film was a stunner. Anderson's Hard Eight (1996) was a good introduction to his skills as a director. That film explored the netherworld of professional gambling in Las Vegas and introduced a theme developed further in Boogie Nights--the skillful elder who mentors a young stud and introduces him to a a world that exists like a parallel universe to ours. The porno world of Boogie Nights is as original as that parallel universe of Pulp Fiction (1994). I was mesmerized by the first half of this film--especially the cold-hearted reality of the porno world. I thought Anderson went more than overboard toward the climax of the film (especially the firecracker scene); still, I realized I was watching a new visionary in American cinema, and it was an exciting ride.NR. 5: As Good as It Gets. (James Brooks). This was a brilliantly funny film. Not since Terms of Endearment (1983) and Broadcast News (1987) has he found a project this effective in its insight into the human condition. He found a good screenwriter, Mark Andrus, and he put together a perfect cast, including Jack Nicholson, Helen Hunt, and Greg Kinnear. Hunt is the surprise here, because she makes her move from the television screen to the cinematic screen with just the right amount of intensity. Nicholson is an American treasure, one of our great actors, and the odd-couple portrayals of Nicholson and Hunt and then Nicholson and Kinnear are, quite simply, endearing. I would watch this film if I had the flu and had to stay home--because it would make me feel better. It is the perfect leaven for the depressing (but true) tragic elements in so many of the other films on this list.

NR 4: The Ice Storm (Ang Lee). This film, like Boogie Nights, creates a strange parallel universe--upper-class suburban life in Connecticut in the early 1970s. Alienation and estrangement are in the air among the teens and their parents. Lee's direction is as sure-handed as his work in Sense and Sensibility (1995). In the latter film he recreated nineteenth-century England and English manners; in The Ice Storm he recreated the sensibility of an era on the verge of a bigger ice storm--Watergate and the resignation of President Nixon. The costume design, the interior design of the upper-class suburban glass houses, the woodsy acreage surrounding those min-estates--all were rendered perfectly and contributed to the irony of their wealth and privilege. The work of Kevin Kline, Joan Allen, Sigourney Weaver, Tobey Maguire, and Christina Ricci was nuanced and perfectly in tune with the characters and their times. The pairing of adults at a "key" party is as painful to watch as many of the sexually explicit scenes in Boogie Nights. But this film practices a restraint that is much more nuanced and heartfelt. This film made me a believer in Ang Lee--now I'll watch almost everything he directs. NR. 3: Wag the Dog (Barry Levinson). This is one of the most brutally humorous films of the year. Levinson found the right mix of dark humor, social and cultural satire, and the emptiness at the heart of the manipulative power of political insiders. Robert DeNiro plays the role of the manipulator of the media, called in to rescue a President who has made a foolish misstep that may bring him down. Like so many good films on this list, Wag the Dog creates a parallel universe that exists in our suspicions about entrenched political power in Washington. We see just enough of the workings of this manipulative world to make it credible in a chillingly convincing way. If DeNiro is the mastermind, then Hoffman plays the stooge, the Hollywood producer who thinks he is in control of his destiny, but realizes too late that he is simply a pawn in the hands of the true manipulators. Levinson pitches the film at just the right pace and timing to pull off the trenchant humor required in the interactions between these characters.

NR. 2: The Sweet Hereafter (Atom Egoyan). Based on Russell Banks' brilliant novel, this film reveals Atom Egoyan as a major director. The story is about a town that suffers deadening grief when a school bus slides off the road and partly sinks in the ice of a lake. Several school children drown. One of them becomes a paraplegic. The film revolves around the main character, a lawyer (Ian Holm) who arrives in town and tries to convince the families to sue the bus company for manufacturing faulty equipment. His storyline: someone is to blame for this accident; if everyone joins in a class-action lawsuit then we will find out who is to blame and make that party pay. Egoyan has an amazing talent for camera placement, uninflected shots, scene creation, and telling the story through careful movement from present-past-present.. Watching one of his films is like going to film school. He knows how to elicit strong emotional performances from his actors. I remember watching this film and waiting for that awful moment when the bus accident occurs. Several times he showed aerial tracking shots of the bus on the highway. When I least expected it, the accident occurred. It was like watching a plane crash and being perfectly helpless in the face of uncontrollable circumstances. I agonized for Holm's character and his own plight; his daughter is a teenage runaway, and he is divorced. This film is filled with unresolved family lives. I agonized for Holm's character and his own tragedy--a teenage daughter who is a runaway and a drug addict. It was also painful to watch the dynamics of the paraplegic's family. She was the subject of an incestuous relationship with her father, and that was relationship was a secret from her mother and younger sister. Everyone lived with a private pain, and the deaths of the children only brought that pain into focus in the foreground.

NR. 1: Washington Square. Agnieszka Holland, born in Poland, is a French director who has made excellent films in France and in the USA. Her two French films Europa, Europa (1990) and Olivier, Olivier (1992) are two of the best films of the 1990s. Her film The Secret Garden (1993) was a wonderful retelling of the classic children's story. She has shown versatility and talent as a director, but I think Washington Square is even better than what came before. Her version of the Henry James novel works because the world she creates is three-dimensional, brutal in its limitations and restrictions, an impenetrable maze to those who would seek escape from it. I was reminded of the best work of Merchant and Ivory productions as well as the perfect recreation of the Jane Austen era in Ang Lee's Sense and Sensibility (1995). The main character, daughter of the physician, is played by Jennifer Jason Leigh. Leigh's character is the ugly duckling daughter of a wealthy New York physician. She yearns for happiness and freedom from her narrow-minded and restrictive father. Albert Finney, one of the greatest British actors of the past forty years, plays the controlling father-figure with just the right pitch of egoism and self-satisfaction. He can not imagine losing his daughter to dangerous new ideas. I was impressed with this film because it offers many significant perspectives on the constricted lives of women at the end of the nineteenth century in America. It remains true to the woman's story and allows us to understand the nature of her problem. She can not marry for love. She can not leave home and find a job. She is trapped. What she does with her entrapment makes sense in the context of all that happens to her. The key moment in the film is when Leigh's character falls to the cobblestones in a rainstorm and writhes on the street in utter agony. She can not exact her will on the forces that oppose her. I appreciated the film's insight into the struggles faced by women under these circumstances. Contemporary audiences should find much to relate to in her story. A last note: the first shot of the film is a long tracking shot that reminded me Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954) or Altman's The Player (1992)--the tracking shot introduced viewers to the location (setting as character) and drew us into the confining space of the main character's beautiful home on Washington Square.