Amy Taubin.

1 A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE (DAVID CRONENBERG) The perfect American family, the perfect American small town--how could they not be a hallucination? In this wide-angle version of Spider, the insanity is institutional, implicating us all.

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2 2046 (WONG KAR-WAI) Dense, sprawling, intoxicatingly erotic in its images, sounds, and rhythms, Wong's magnum opus is a cautionary tale in which obsessive love is inseparable from the aesthetics of its representation.

3 THE HOLY GIRL (LUCRECIA MARTEL) This Argentinean filmmaker remakes film language to reflect the interaction of mind and senses in a coming-of-age narrative about a Catholic schoolgirl's compounding of the sacred and the profane.

4 THE INTRUDER (CLAIRE DENIS) An epic poem by one of cinema's most adventurous poets about an adventurer betrayed, physically and metaphorically, by his own heart.

5 BLUE MOVIE (ANDY WARHOL) Seen for the first time since 1968, it's ethereal hardcore--and very witty. Viva proves that she deserved her "superstar" designation.

6 LAST DAYS (GUS VAN SANT) This Kurt/not Kurt biopic is an act of mourning: it's also the ultimate junkie movie. Looping through time and space, it delivers deja vu every ten minutes.

7 NO DIRECTION HOME (MARTIN SCORSESE) The director and his subject--Bob Dylan--never crossed paths when they lived blocks from each other in the '60s, but their virtual meeting in this exquisitely edited documentary unleashes our collective cultural unconscious.

8 FUNNY HA HA (ANDREW BUJALSKI) Often compared to Cassavetes, this twenty-six-year-old 16-mm fetishist is also the Rohmer of post-college malaise.

9 POLICE BEAT (ROBINSON DEVOR) A character study and a cityscape movie, it merges inside and outside in a stranger-in-a-strange-land narrative about a West African immigrant working as a bicycle cop in Seattle.

10 ROBERT BEAVERS and OWEN LAND RETROSPECTIVES (WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART, NEW YORK) These back-to-back Whitney shows demonstrated the range not only of each of these polar-opposite film-makers but also of the project best known as the "New American Cinema."

AMY TAUBIN IS A CONTRIBUTING EDITOR OF FILM COMMENT AND SIGHT AND SOUND.