Best of 2000: Film.

John Waters

1. Dancer in the Dark (Lars von Trier) The most hilariously moving, "feel-insane" movie of the year.

2. O Brother, Where Art Thou? (Joel Coen) The jaw-dropping all-singing, all-dancing Ku Klux Klan-Busby Berkeley number is a real beaut.

3. L'Humanite (Bruno Dumont) The endless saga of a simpleton cop so desperate to feel emotion that he spies on the sex life of his lusty neighbors and smells and kisses his crime suspects during interrogations.

4. American Psycho (Mary Harron) A chain-saw movie for the elite; the funniest American comedy of the year.

5. The Idiots (Lars von Trier) A Dogma 95 comedy about a bunch of Danish yuppies who join a Manson-like cult of assholes and liberate themselves by acting like retards in public ("spazzing").

6. Water Drops on Burning Rocks (Francois Ozon) A fake Fassbinder movie directed by my new favorite French auteur. Screenplay necrophilia never seemed so cinematically correct.

7. The Virgin Suicides (Sofia Coppola) Who would have predicted Sofia Coppola could bring to mind Cocteau's Les Parents terribles?

8. Criminal Lovers (Francois Ozon) Ozon again. A Leopold-and-Loeb-meet-Hansel-and-Gretel fairy tale about a bitchy teen ingenue and her naive boyfriend who are imprisoned by a horny, gay, cannibalistic ogre.

9. Pink Narcissus (James Bidgood, 1971/99) Actor-model Bobby Kendall's ass; as beautiful and timeless as The Wizard of Oz.

10. Eva (Joseph Losey, 1962) The best rereleased failed art film of the decade. Jeanne Moreau chain-smokes and listens to Billie Holiday records while humiliating her lover in glorious black and white.

Susan Sontag

1. Yi Yi (A One and a Two) (Edward Yang) Is Yang as great as Hou Hsiao-hsien? Well, he's different. See this.

2. Faithless (Liv Ullmann) Ullmann's best work by far, with one of the greatest film performances ever, by Lena Endre.

3. L'Humanite (Bruno Dumont) A very ambitious film about looking and about guilt.

4. Beau Travail (Claire Denis) A dazzling riff on Melville's Billy Budd. You'll never forget the final scene, when the amazing Denis Lavant starts to dance.

5. The Wind Will Carry Us (Abbas Kiarostami) The best-known Iranian director has made another incomparable film.

6. Hamlet (Michael Almereyda) Hamlet lost in Manhattan. Witty, intelligent, and most convincing when it's altogether over the top.

7. The Circle (Jafar Panahi) Another marvel from Iran. A relentless, anguishing film by a director hitherto unknown to me, about the persecution of women.

8. La Captive (Chantal Akerman) Supposedly inspired by Proust. Atypically movieish (i.e., Hitchcockian) for Ackerman but still adamant, unpredictable.

9. Travelers (Bahram Beizai, 1992) OK, it came out eight years ago, but I just saw it (and I didn't see ten films made this year that I really admired). Trust me, this masterpiece from Iran is unlike anything you've seen yet.

10. Smoking/No Smoking (Alain Resnais, 1993) I saw Resnais's brilliant, ingenious, hilarious film for the first time this summer--it never got a theatrical release in this country. How come?

Ian Birnie

1. You Can Count on Me (Kenneth Lonergan) The most accomplished of this year's American indie debuts.

2. Chunhyang (Im Kwon-taek) From Korea, a completely original, magisterial work that combines sung narration with ravishing images.

3. Chicken Run (Peter Lord and Nick Park) The Ealing comedy is alive and well and living in claymation.

4. In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-wai) A concerto for two ill-starred couples and pure pleasure for the senses. Elegant, restrained, stylized, brilliantly sure of itself from its first frame to its astonishing epiphany at Angkor Wat.

5. Long Night's Journey Into Day (Deborah Hoffmann and Frances Reid) The documentary of the year explores the pain and trauma of South Africa's villains and victims by examining four cases before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

6. The Circle (Jafar Panahi) A compelling and compassionate look at women's lives in Iran. Perhaps the year's most courageous political film.

7. Djomeh (Hassan Yektapanah) A perfect balance of the verbal and the visual: Think blue rectangle against brown field. A jewel in the crown of new Iranian cinema.

8. Dancer in the Dark (Lars von Trier) A mass of indulgent contradictions, it is nonetheless the most exciting and challenging film of the year.

9. Before Night Falls (Julian Schnabel) Adapted from the memoirs of Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas, Schnabel's second biopic passionately affirms the artist as heroic individualist.

10. Yi Yi (A One and a Two) (Edward Yang) A superior soap opera with important things to say about human frailty and everyday life.

Kent Jones

1. The House of Mirth (Terence Davies) Davies's mesmerizing Wharton adaptation is as physically and emotionally precise a film as I've seen in years.

2. Werckmeister Harmonies (Bela Tarr) Passionate, mournful, gorgeous, and genuinely visionary.

3. Les Destinees sentimentales (Olivier Assayas) Another literary adaptation (from Jacques Chardonne), and one of the director's most personal films: a devastating meditation on time and identity, made with the lightest touch.

4. L'origine du XXIeme siecle (Jean-Luc Godard) Godard's first completed work of the new century wonders where the old one could have gone. A heartbreaker.

5. Arbor Vitae (Nathaniel Dorsky) and Time and Tide (Peter Hutton) New films from "two of the greatest silent filmmakers of the sound era," as independent curator Mark McElhatten put it.

6. In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-wai) A work of consummate artistry.

7. Fah Talai Jone (Wisit Sasanatieng) A thrillingly unclassifiable, highly entertaining re-creation of various lost Thai genres--more fun than Guy Maddin.

8. Not Forgotten (Makoto Shinozaki) Beautifully written, structured, and acted, a sharp, moving portrait of contemporary Japan through the eyes of its lost youth and forgotten elders.

9. Taboo (Nagisa Oshima) Wry but electrifying, a movie only an old master could make.

10. Almost Famous (Cameron Crowe) Why all the complaints? Movies this fun don't grow on trees.

Runners-up: Yi Yi (Edward Yang), Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Ang Lee), and Space Cowboys (Clint Eastwood).

DAVID BORDWELL, film historian: The Mission marks a new high for the enterprising Hong Kong director Johnnie To, who once again pumps fresh life into the noir thriller. Running Kitano and Melville through a Hong Kong blender, The Mission is a triumph of abstract style, dark humor, and daringly fractured plotting.

J. HOBERMAN, critic: The year's best unreleased film (and the strongest Chinese movie in a decade), Jia Zhang Je's concrete but elliptical, superbly detached three-hour epic meditates on the mutation of the propaganda-performing Fenyang Peasant Culture Group into the equally cheesy All Star Rock and Breakdance Electronic Band: Platform is Pop art as history.

BARBARA KRUGER, artist: Bamboozled is Spike Lee's latest reckoning with the impossibilities of race in America. Despite an ungood performance by Damon Wayans, this powerful satire is loaded with gorgeously potent musical numbers. Lee again proves himself a compelling artist, bravely grappling with the stuff that counts. Let's hope his dedication to Budd Schulberg is kind of ironic.

RICHARD FLOOD, curator: Pola X by Leos Carax. Beautiful blond boy with beautiful blond mother and beautiful blond fiancee meets beautiful brunette who turns out to be a metaphor for Eastern Europe and, just maybe, his sister. A totally insane, brilliant, stupid film by an unquestionable auteur.

SHARON LOCKHART, artist: What could be better than watching members of the French Foreign Legion hang laundry, iron uniforms, and do calisthenics in unison? Agnes Godard's lush cinematography and the mixture of music, silence, and abstract narrative make Claire Denis's Beau Travail a film you could watch over and over.

PAUL PFEIFFER, artist: Tarsem Singh's The Cell. Cinematically unremarkable, visually mind-blowing--an indication that film aesthetics and storytelling have finally given way to pure visual intensity. It's not the movies anymore, but a cross between MTV, a thrill ride, and computer-simulated warfare.

HOWARD HAMPTON, critic: The pleasures of Almost Famous aren't narrative but lie in Cameron Crowe's devotion to the look and feel of the past, how people moved and performed self-creation, with "Every Picture Tells a Story" as the era's Rosetta stone.

PIPILOTTI RIST, artist: My favorite American film so far this year is Sofia Coppola's The Virgin Suicides. A glorious, illogical, and emotional fairy tale with good cinematography and wonderful music by Air.

JEM COHEN, filmmaker: Three superb short documentaries: Best in Beef (Rob Smits and Britta Hosman), about a modern slaughterhouse; my brother's Fire of Time (Adam Cohen), on the demise of a Barcelona neighborhood; and The March (Abraham Ravett), about his mother's experience leaving Auschwitz.

PETER BOWEN, critic: In this election year, David Gordon Green's George Washington, a quirky drama of growing up in North Carolina, gives me hope for this country--or, at least, for American independent film.