In the waning days of World War II, infertile couple Josef and Marie Čížek (Boleslav Polívka, Anna Šišková) risk their lives to hide young Jewish prison camp escapee David (Csongor Kassai) in their storeroom -- right under the noses of the Nazis occupying their small Czech town and pre-war pal and current collaborator Horst Prohazka (Jaroslav Dušek). When Marie rejects Horst’s advances and he begins to suspect David’s presence, the spurned would-be lover decides to get even by moving an emotionally shattered German officer into their flat, only to be told that against all odds Marie is pregnant. Based on a true story, Divided We Fall (the original Czech titles means something along the lines of "we must all help each other") is not only a masterfully balanced mixture of black comedy and life-and-death drama (a hallmark of the newly-invigorated Czech cinema), but a bravura  showcase for Polivka, who gives a tour-de-force performance as the comically combustible but forlornly dignified Josef. Director Jan Hřebejk and screenwriter Petr Jarchovský have followed up their 1960s-set comedy-drama Cozy Dens (Pelísky) with a memorable, emotionally draining film that was a hit at home and one of the Best Foreign Film Final Five in the 73r^d Oscar sweepstakes.

The rap against Michael Mann’s biopic charting one tumultuous decade (roughly 1963-1974) in the life of boxer Muhammad Ali is that it’s cold and distant, never really getting inside the mind of the blustery, immensely talented fighter. Well, anyone who could claim that kind of intimate access to one of the era’s most manipulative and straight-talking celebrities would be a liar, which is part of the point. Employing the same hyperreal veracity he brought to the acclaimed -- and Oscar-nominated -- The Outsider, Mann harnesses the extraordinary lead performance of Will Smith to tell a story of individuality in an age of hot-button civil rights issues and the saga of one man’s fight for respect in a milieu where men are treated like meat. Note the letter-perfect, real-time recreations of a number of pivotal bouts; the first Liston fight’s leisurely, deliberate pacing is a tip-off to Mann’s deliberate approach (there’s apparently so much unused footage that a few television trailers for the movie are composed primarily of unused sequences). And the much-maligned original score, by Dead Can Dance’s Lisa Gerrard and Pieter Bourke, is a terrific evocation of the propulsive soul music of the decade. Close on the heels of his turn as Franklin Delano Roosevelt in Michael Bay’s punishingly heavy-handed Pearl Harbor, Jon Voigt is nothing less than spectacular as Ali’s genial nemesis and staunch supporter, broadcaster Howard Cosell. 

In a waterfront town in Maine, Matt and Ruth Fowler (Tom Wilkinson, Sissy Spacek) look on as their only son Frank (Nick Stahl) is involved in a tragedy through his relationship with older woman Natalie (Marisa Tomei). Making his directorial debut, director Todd Field presents a lacerating, agonizing portrait of a family on the skids, victims of cruel fate and their own agendas of frustration and loss. While established vet Spacek is attracting all the heat for her performance, the true star of In the Bedroom and the foundation upon which the entire film is built is Wilkinson’s Matt, the vehicle by which revenge is delivered. The English-born actor starred in the ensemble of the populist hit The Full Monty, but little of his subsequent work has hinted at the depth and skill of the grief-stricken Matt. Here’s a question to ponder: how can In the Bedroom be a kudos magnet, when the not dissimilar and equally powerful The Pledge -- directed by Sean Penn and starring Jack Nicholson -- founders in relative oblivion? It’s the fickle nature of the box office, one supposes, tempered with the sheer joy of discovering a mature, thoughtful, provocative drama amidst the end-of-year commercial fireworks. 

As this is written Somalia is creeping back into the news as a potential haven for al-Qaeda forces, imbuing busy director Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down (his third film in roughly eighteen months, following Gladiator and Hannibal) with a fresh urgency over and above the visceral narrative. An earthy yet ambivalent telling of the disastrous 1993 mission by American forces to extract a local warlord from downtown Mogadishu in the middle of the afternoon, the film is so ambivalent in presentation that hawks will be pumped by the show of military force, while doves will flinch at the human miscalculation and cruel fate that resulted in the deaths of some eighteen American servicemen. By any reading, Black Hawk Down is powerful, superbly crafted stuff, the first really important film from producer Jerry Bruckheimer and a movie that has all the earmarks of being in the right place at the right time. 

One way to look at the 2001’s bounty is that it was such a good year for adventurous, risk-taking independents that among the very best of them got lost in the shuffle. Certainly that’s the case with the spooky and intermittently terrifying Donnie Darko, the noteworthy debut of talented writer-director Richard Kelly. In 1988 Virginia, the title character (played to spooky perfection by Jake Gyllenhaal) is haunted by bizarre hallucinations while dealing with his semi-functional family and the usual complement of flaky friends and nemeses. The special effects are unexpectedly elaborate for such a fiercely independent work, and feature such startling images as the engine of a jetliner crashing through the roof of a suburban house and a six-foot rabbit with what looks like a bug’s mask that only our hero can see (it’s Harvey gone amuck). It’s oddball worldview massaged by a superb pop-Goth score and just-right stunt casting (co-producer Drew Barrymore, Patrick Swayze and Noah Wyle pop up in supporting roles), Donnie Darko is among the year’s most audacious, confident movies.

What would a top ten list be without a movie by the Coen brothers? This year’s entry from the duo is the lovingly-constructed and stunningly-photographed tribute to films noir of the 1940s and 1950s, The Man Who Wasn’t There. In the midst of a remarkable string of focused, weighty work, Billy Bob Thornton stars as small-town California barber Ed Crane, who breaks out of his self-imposed rut of silent observation by murdering the big-shot department store owner (James Ganolfini) whose having an affair with employee Doris (Frances McDormand) -- Ed’s flighty wife. Stylish and assured, the film lingers lovingly on the clothes and sets, but never loses sight of the intricate human games that give the genre its attractive urgency. With its deadpan narration and respectful treatment, The Man Who Wasn’t There does for film noir what 2000’s O Brother Where Art Thou? did for the rural south. 

The literal translation of the title of Jacques Rivette’s latest feature is "Who knows?," and the question can be taken many ways in the context of the film. Six characters somehow involved in the production of a Pirandello play become intertwined with one another, led by the gamine-like Jeanne Balibar (currently an immensely popular actress on the French scene) as a thespian returning to the stage after some time off. One of the founding fathers of the French New Wave, Rivette is now seventy-three, but doesn’t seem to have lost one iota of his wit or energy. His films are full of serenely confident men and women torn between duty and impulse, yet ultimately finding immense satisfaction in both. Moviegoers captivated by the deliberate yet rewarding Va Savoir are directed to selected previous works available in the United States, including Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974), La Belle Noiseuse (1991), Joan the Maid (1993) and Up/Down/Fragile (1999); you won’t be disappointed.

The ad campaign for Startup.com features the outline of two very small people rolling an immense black rock, or dot, up a steep incline. As this is the perfect graphic for the so-called "Dot-Com Fever" of the last millennium’s cusp, so too this exquisitely timed documentary is the no-holds-barred story of one such failed virtual business. Childhood friends Kaleil Isaza Tuzman and Tom Herman had a good idea for a utilitarian website, govWorks.com, but when they became overnight internet millionaires the money and fame went to their head and destroyed their business -- and their friendship. So much of documentary filmmaking is being at the right place at the right time, which is what makes Startup.com such a remarkable chronicle of an American era as embarrassingly profligate and irresponsible in hindsight as, say, Studio 54 was in the 1980s.

For pure, what-the-hell genre pleasure, larded over with thick helping of contemporary Hollywood star wattage, it was tough to beat Steven Soderbergh’s glossy and seductively stylish remake of the Rat-Pack heist movie, Ocean’s Eleven. Ostensibly an updating of that not-very-good caper film, this Ocean’s Eleven plays more like a successful blend of Soderbergh’s incredibly nimble directorial style (he’s his own cameraman, which helps) and star and chief instigator George Clooney’s own raffish image (they first collaborated on the equally stylish Out of Sight). With Brad Pitt and Matt Damon in tow, Clooney organizes a group of professional miscreants to knock over a seemingly impregnable casino vault owned by ruthless, fish-eyed owner Andy Garcia, wisecracking all the way. Vets Carl Reiner and Elliott Gould are terrific in support, though Julia Roberts’ part seems a bit underwritten for her character’s importance to what plot there is. After a reportedly low-key chamber drama with Roberts (the title keeps changing), Soderbergh next plans to remake Andrei Tarkovsky’s influential science fiction epic Solaris -- marking yet another chapter in contemporary Hollywood’s most dazzling and ingratiating career turnaround.

Stranded at an abandoned German mine in the middle of a vast and barren African desert, eleven bus passengers subsist on alcohol and tinned carrots while awaiting rescue. When former actor Henry (David Bradley) comes up with the odd notion of performing Shakespeare’s King Lear from texts he scribbles on rolls of paper, the endeavor serves to heighten the already volatile emotional and sexual tensions amongst the group members. Two marriages, those of Ray and Liz (Bruce Davison, Janet McTeer) and Paul and Amanda (Chris Walker, Lia Williams) begin to unravel, while the self-serving liaison of Gina (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and Charles (David Calder) results in tragedy. The fourth official Dogme 95 production following The Celebration, The Idiots and Mifune (and the last by one of the movement’s original founders to see release), The King is Alive is at once the most challenging and rewarding of the cycle to date: director Kristian Levring’s confident, almost thriller-like approach is complemented by a fatalistic elusiveness, best summed up by Henry, who predicts "some fantastic striptease act of basic human needs… is man no more than this?" Next up in the American marketplace for the Dogme franchise is Lone Scherfig’s delightful Italian for Beginners (see "The Best Movies You Haven’t Seen Yet," below), the first Dogme comedy. 

The year was so good that this failed pilot for David Lynch’s follow-up to the small-screen Twin Peaks, revamped and intercut with nearly an hour of newly-shot footage, captured the imagination of critics nationwide, a cadre of moviegoers perhaps so hungry for something determinedly elusive that the praise for this virtually un-followable movie approaches the hysterical. No matter: like Blue Velvet before it, the muddy narrative virtues and character idiosyncracies of Mulholland Drive become, over time, strengths, not weaknesses, woven together with sinister seductiveness by Lynch’s menacing yet almost childlike vision. If it’s a clearly-defined story you want, look elsewhere, but for doom and foreboding in the land where movies are made, Mulholland Drive is the address to find.

Every list needs a guilty pleasure, and this one has Daniel Minahan’s supercharged, immensely funny spoof of reality television, Series 7: The Contenders. In an average-looking Connecticut suburb (actually a blending of two existing towns), a randomly selected group of average citizens gun each other down for cash and prizes -- not to mention the privilege of surviving until the next round (Series 8?). The spark of genius behind the film is Minahan’s determination to play it completely straight, and the casting of TV vets in the supporting roles (save Brooke Smith as the determined, pregnant current champ, just about everyone’s got at least one credit on an episode of "Law and Order"). The results are dazzling, with future generations guaranteed to do a double-take when they rent a DVD and wonder how they could have missed the initial broadcast. Possessed of both sheer storytelling chutzpah and a real understanding of TV’s most basic manipulative instincts, Series 7 is a love-it-or-leave it satire that beats the boob tube at it’s own game. For similar fare set in another genre, try Wet Hot American Summer, but avoid Scary Movie 2 and Not Another Teen Movie -- or at least approach them with extreme caution. 

Films that could just as well have made the list, finished as a strong also-ran or were just plain fun include 

• Amélie

• Amores Perros

• Apocalypse Now Redux

• Baby Boy

• The Believer

• Blow

• Bridget Jones’s Diary

• Bully

• The Business of Strangers

• La Cienaga

• The Circle

• Corky Romano

• The Curse of the Jade Scorpion

• Dark Blue World

• The Deep End

• Down from the Mountain

• The Endurance

• Faithless

• Fat Girl

• 15 Minutes

• Ghost World

• The Gleaners and I

• Gosford Park

• Hannibal

• Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone

• Hedwig and the Angry Inch

• In the Mood for Love

• Intimacy

• Lantana

• Josie and the Pussycats

• Joy Ride

• Legally Blonde

• The Legend of Rita

• Little Otik (aka Otesánek)

• Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

• Monkeybone

• Monster’s Ball

• Monsters, Inc.

• Moulin Rouge

• No Man’s Land

• The Others

• Our Lady of the Assassins

• Our Song

• The Pledge

• Rat Race

• The Road Home

• The Royal Tenenbaums

• The Score

• Sexy Beast

• Shrek

• Snatch

• Spy Kids

• The Tailor of Tenenbaums Panama

• Texas Rangers

• Thirteen Ghosts

• Together

• The Town is Quiet

• Training Day

• Under the Sand

• Waking Life

• With a Friend Like Harry

All are now or will shortly be available on DVD and/or home video, and each is worth a look.

The Worst of 2001 

• A.I. Artificial Intelligence (dir: Steven Spielberg, USA)

• Enemy at the Gates (dir: Jean-Jacques Annaud, Germany/United Kingdom/Ireland)

• From Hell (dir: The Hughes Brothers, USA)

• Glitter (dir: Vondie Curtis-Hall, USA)

• The Majestic (dir: Frank Darabont, USA)

• Pearl Harbor (dir: Michael Bay, USA)

The Most Overrated Film of the Year

•  A Beautiful Mind (dir: Ron Howard, USA)

The Best Movies You Haven’t Seen Yet

Some of these films have American distributors and are in the release pipeline, others are still having their ad campaigns formulated, and at least five haven’t even been bought yet. These titles are worth seeking out at any cost.

• La Commune (Paris 1871) (dir: Peter Watkins, France)

• A Fine Day (dir: Thomas Arslan, Germany)

• Hi Tessa (dir: Robert Glinski, Poland)

• Italian for Beginners (dir: Lone Scherfig, Denmark)

• Millennium Mambo (dir: Hou Hsiao-hsien, Taiwan/France)

• The Safety of Objects (dir: Rose Troche, USA)

• The Son of the Bride (dir: Juan Jose Campanella, Argentina)

• Wild Flowers (dir: F.A. Brabec, Czech Republic)