EXAMINING THE YEAR OF UNREALITY.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

Before salvaging 10 worthwhile films out of this overpriced, overhyped and artistically underachieving movie year, a few other things worth mentioning:

Performer of the Year: Billy Bob Thornton, for the mesmerizing contradictions of his character-rich underplaying in ``The Man Who Wasn't There,'' the inventive comic neurosis of ``Bandits'' and the reticent raw nerves he exposed in ``Monster's Ball.''

Theme of the Year: What is reality? At a time when all of our assumptions about the world were violently and forevermore upended, many of the most interesting movies (``Mulholland Drive,'' ``Memento,'' ``Waking Life,'' ``A Beautiful Mind,'' ``Donnie Darko,'' ``Iris'') and a few of the lamest (``Vanilla Sky,'' ``K-PAX,'' ``The Majestic'') addressed the difficulties of navigating through a life distorted by dreams, dementia or assaultive surrealism in one form or another.

New Class of '01: The following folks, either appearing or coming to wider attention for the first time, offered hope that the future of cinema might not necessarily be just wizards, effects sequels and parodies that aren't as funny as the bad films they lampoon.

Directors: Christopher Nolan (``Memento''), Marc Forster (``Monster's Ball,'' ``Everything Put Together''), Todd Field (``In the Bedroom''), Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (``Amores Perros''), Jim McKay (``Our Song''), Pawel Pawlikowski (``Last Resort''), Jonathan Glazer (``Sexy Beast''), Richard Kelly (``Donnie Darko''), John Cameron Mitchell (``Hedwig and the Angry Inch''), Michael Cuesta (``L.I.E.'').

Actors: Naomi Watts (``Mulholland Drive''), Eric Bana (``Chopper,'' ``Black Hawk Down''), Kerry Washington (``Our Song,'' ``Save the Last Dance,'' ``Lift''), Audrey Tautou (``Amelie,'' ``Happenstance''), Kerry Armstrong (``Lantana''), Tyrese (``Baby Boy''), Anais Reboux and Roxane Mesquida (``Fat Girl''), Michael Pitt (``Bully,'' ``Hedwig and the Angry Inch'').

And now, the 10 movies that made it bearable:

1. ``Mulholland Drive'': David Lynch's funniest, saddest, most erotic and psychologically coherent dream movie ever; the culmination of a career spent trying to achieve the cinematic equivalent of subconscious logic. And it's a scathingly perceptive, tragicomic satire of that national dream industry, our very own Hollywood movie factory.

2. ``Memento'': The most audaciously told story of the past several years, in which a man with no memory tries to solve his wife's murder - and we view the whole process backward. Christopher Nolan's brain-tickling puzzle piece is ultimately about the mystery of what we choose to remember, and then use to justify how we treat others.

3. ``In the Mood for Love'': More shattered memories, these of the most wistfully romantic kind. In a year marked by explicit foreign films, Wong Kar-wai's gorgeously appointed study of the platonic passion between two displaced people in 1960s Hong Kong was hands-down the hottest, and deepest, love story of the year.

4. ``Black Hawk Down'': Director Ridley Scott strips away most war movie cliches to immerse us in the operational hell of urban combat. Based on the 1993 fiasco in Mogadishu, Somalia, it's uncompromising, wall-to-wall fighting with no time to linger on philosophy, personalities or melodrama - like it would be if you were there, and more persuasively so than any other war film I can think of.

5. ``The Circle'': Iran's institutionalized misogyny has never been more artfully or enragingly depicted than in this group study of women furloughed from prison, but still trapped in a social rat's wheel of unyielding sexism.

6. ``The Royal Tenenbaums'': Family dysfunction has rarely been more fun - or poignantly moving - than as it's depicted in Wes Anderson's meticulously controlled comedy about a clan of busted prodigies. Also features the crowning comedy performance of Gene Hackman's career.

7. ``Startup.com'': Incredibly prescient, fly-on-the-wall documentary about building an Internet business, filmed just as the bottom dropped out of the whole, illusory gold rush. A perfectly timed testament to the end of an era.

8. ``Ghost World'': The smartest teen movie in a generation. Thora Birch's performance as a high school iconoclast trying to keep up the good fight against the conformity and compromises of looming adulthood is a complete original, kooky yet always persuasively, unpredictably human. Steve Buscemi makes a celebration out of crankiness.

9. ``Waking Life'': Finally, a movie that uses computer animation for something other than joke-cracking donkeys and big-screen video games. Richard Linklater's cyber-rotoscoped blabfest may risk aimless pretension, but a careful look reveals a film brimming with insight, playfulness and inspiration, and whose core concern is nothing less than the very meaning of existence. For those who want more from a technological breakthrough than convincing blue monster fur.

10. ``A Beautiful Mind'': Usually, ``true life stories'' as demonstrably fake as this one turn me off. But Ron Howard, Russell Crowe and company have made such a compelling parable out of the life of schizophrenic math genius John Forbes Nash Jr. that anyone with an interest in how the mind works - and, often simultaneously, glitches out - must be impressed by this immensely clever movie's imaginative obfuscations.

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3 photos

Photo:

(1) ``Ghost World''

(2) ''The Circle''

(3) ``Memento''