James Quandt.

1 THE DEATH OF MR. LAZARESCU (CRISTI PUIU) Olfactory cinema--one can verily smell the film's sodden protagonist--and a miracle of observational empathy. In our diminished culture, the title probably qualifies as a spoiler, but the inevitability of Mr. Lazarescu's demise does nothing to lessen the surprise of his squalid Dantean odyssey toward death.

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2 THREE TIMES (HOU HSIAO-HSIEN) Conscious summa or inadvertent sampler of Hou's career, his triptych of love stories opens rapturously and ends attenuated; no one in contemporary cinema comes closer to Vermeer's interiors with his pellucid lighting and composed domestic space.

3 THE SUN (ALEXANDER SOKUROV) The Russian director's "Men of Power" trilogy concludes with a hushed, troubling portrait of Hirohito--a Gotterdammerung made literal by spectral lighting and fungal color. Issei Ogata's scarily endearing rendition of the emperor, his lips restively testing the air with carplike twitches, is beyond uncanny.

4 GARLANDS (T. J. WILCOX; METRO PICTURES) and 5 PALAST (TACITA DEAN; 51ST VENICE BIENNALE) In contrast to Matthew Barney's Drawing Restraint 9--a bloated voyage into japonisme, whale fat, and cockle-shell backpacks--these two works are touchingly modest, truly romantic in their rendering of the end of things. The imminent obsolescence of their small-gauge formats adds melancholic force to their respective portraits of futile acts, foreshortened lives, and imperiled sites.

6 INSTRUCTIONS FOR A LIGHT AND SOUND MACHINE (PETER TSCHERKASSKY) Eli Wallach seems condemned to run forever through a graveyard in Tscherkassky's nightmarishly looping, self-consuming attempt (in the filmmaker's words) to "turn a Roman western [The Good, The Bad and the Ugly] into a Greek tragedy."

7 MOMENTS CHOISIS (JEAN-LUC GODARD) Selecting favorite moments from his monumental Histoire(s) du cinema, Godard leaves out all the joy and juice--the soaring tribute to Italian Neorealism, especially--but what remains is morosely affecting.

8 LA TRAHISON (PHILIPPE FAUCON) A terse, ambiguous, immensely intelligent portrait of harkis during the Algerian war.

9 LAST DAYS (GUS VAN SANT) and 10 GRIZZLY MAN (WERNER HERZOG) Odd, if not peas-in-a-pod, twins: In each a blond, druggy fuck-up first finds Eden and then finds death--man-child innocents destroyed by their own ingenuousness. The first is all mumble and meander, the second irritatingly voluble, but the flashes of early Errol Morris Americana-grotesque in both films seal their strange confraternity.

SENIOR PROGRAMMER AT THE CINEMATHEQUE ONTARIO IN TORONTO, JAMES QUANDT ORGANIZED THE CURRENT TRAVELING RETROSPECTIVE OF THE FILMS OF MIKIO NARUSE.