This meme has been growing in intensity (and tiresomeness) for four or five years, ever since it became clear that new forms of media were eating away the business model of print journalism and that the elite cadre of professional cultural critics was being swamped by the blogulous hordes of InterTwitterMcGoogleyness. Do I really have to keep writing this paragraph of background explanation? I didn’t think so. Thanks! (Salt Lake Tribune blogger Sean P. Means maintains an online list of downsized film critics that now includes 65 names.)

But the last month or so has seen an outburst of self-love and self-loathing to rival the Lost Generation of Paris in the ’20s, except without all the midnight parties, bisexual love triangles and terrific writing. In a gasbaggy, glass-half-full March 31 essay about the demise of the syndicated TV show he co-hosted, A.O. Scott of the New York Times quotes Coleridge and T.S. Eliot and describes this theme as “the larger threnody lamenting the death of criticism.” Toward the end of the piece, he really gets his threnody thrumming: “Criticism is a habit of mind, a discipline of writing, a way of life — a commitment to the independent, open-ended exploration of works of art in relation to one another and the world around them.” I often enjoy Scott’s writing, and can only hope he means this stuff as droll self-deflation. It ain’t droll enough.

Scott’s article, especially coupled with last month’s announcement that showbiz bible Variety was canning its estimable film critic, Todd McCarthy, after 31 years, has occasioned more thoughtful thumbsucking than you’d find in a Montessori kindergarten. Brandeis University scholar Thomas Doherty crafted a weighty think-piece for the Chronicle of Higher Education, and Ronald Bergan offered an articulate defense of the profession (or avocation, or line of bullshit, if you prefer) in the U.K. Guardian. A few days ago Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz got into the act, a few days late and many dollars short, rehearsing the tired old-media dinosaurs vs. blogger upstarts arguments with all the cluelessness that has made him a favored target of Salon’s Glenn Greenwald.

In a particularly unfortunate generational collision, indieWIRE critic and blogger Eric Kohn wrote a half-baked, ruminative essay on the topic for Moving Pictures magazine, which was then picked apart with jesuitical fervor on the National Arts Journalism Program blog by former Premiere critic Glenn Kenny. Subsequent exchanges on Kenny’s blog and elsewhere degenerated into name-calling and accusations of ethical malfeasance: Critics over 40 are grumpy, outmoded graybeards, running late for the 4:30 dinner special at Denny’s! Critics under 40 are balls-sucking festival shmooze-whores with no morals and no education, who think Pasolini designs sunglasses! (Disclosure: I’m on cordial terms with both Kohn and Kenny, or at least I was until now.)

I guess the apogee of all this self-regard arrives in “For the Love of Movies,” a film about film critics by critic-turned-director Gerald Peary, in which scribes from the Bronze Age to the Internet Age ponder the whithers and wherefores of their crippled profession. (It’s just out on DVD.) I won’t deny watching Peary’s movie at a festival last year with a certain queasy fascination, but then I suppose I am the target demographic. I’m pretty sure a movie about philately or corneal-transplant surgery would possess more appeal for a general audience.

As Vadim Rizov recently quipped on the IFC.com blog, the only thing missing is one of those YouTube videos where Hitler hears that film criticism is dying. I can’t provide that, but I will offer some unsolicited advice to my fellow critics all around the world: Shut up. Shut up now. Shut the fuck up and get back to work. If you’re worried that people don’t want to read your movie reviews, what in the name of Jesus Christ crucified makes you think they want to read your bitching and moaning? All this stuff is doing, at least at this point, is creating opportunities for feel-bad encounters with other anguished critics and drive-by trolls, and making you look like a bunch of ginormous great babies.

I’ve worked as a film critic, on and off, often between and around other jobs, since the late 1980s. For the last few years, I’ve been writing and blogging in a role that was closer to independent-film advocate than straightforward critic. With the departure of my dear friend Stephanie Zacharek for her new gig at Movieline (where she will be awesome), I will once again take on a larger role in reviewing movies for Salon. It’s a great gig, and I’m delighted to have it.

But film criticism, at least meaning the elite cultural institution pioneered by Manny Farber, James Agee and Pauline Kael, had a nice 50- or 60-year run, and is now a thing of the past. My opinion about whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing isn’t interesting to anyone, least of all me. Writing about movies requires no particular expertise or training, and as we’ve learned over the past decade, any idiot with an Internet connection can and will do it. Will there continue to be a market for those who can do it better than others? Probably, ultimately, over the long haul. I don’t know. It depends what you mean by “better.”

At the very beginning of my writing career, I learned one thing: Film criticism is a kind of performance, an adjunct form of entertainment. If it isn’t funny and lively and engaging, it isn’t anything at all. My first gig was writing brief reviews for a community newspaper in San Francisco, spending my own money to attend matinees and then writing them up. The rules were simple: If the publisher of the paper — a gay businessman in his 50s whom I never met in person — thought my reviews were funny, they’d get published. (And I’d get paid: $25 per movie.)

Let me make clear that I would agree with virtually any theoretical argument that a defender of old-school film criticism could make. Critics should be educated about the wider world, should know a lot of film history and a little film theory, should be more concerned with the “whys” and “hows” of a movie than with the “whats,” should seek to spark debates and disputes and challenge the audience’s preconceptions. Check, check and check. Sign me up. But reviewing movies is a lot more like performing stand-up comedy than like delivering a philosophy lecture. None of those grand ideas even begin to matter if you’re boring and you can’t write.

If I had a model, it wasn’t Kael or Agee (whom I’d barely heard of) but the late John L. Wasserman, a college dropout who became the San Francisco Chronicle’s lead critic in the ’70s. He passionately defended movies he loved, and launched wicked, hilarious, legendarily unhinged rants against those he found insulting garbage. Wasserman died on the freeway in 1979, with a blood-alcohol level of 0.26 (taking two other people with him), so he was a negative example as well. But if I went into this job with ideas about how to be a critic, it was he who put them there.

I’m convinced that writing reviews for that middle-aged businessman in that little back office on Octavia Street was valuable training. Fortunately, he thought my review of “The Secret of My Success” (with Michael J. Fox and Helen Slater) was funny, or at least funny enough for 25 bucks. A few days later I got to see two women sitting together on a Muni Metro train, reading my review and cracking each other up. It was the first real compliment I ever got, and in many ways it still means the most. Would I have been better off going to law school? That’s possible. But as long as the world lets me do this, you won’t catch me complaining.

No character made me laugh harder than Edna Mode, the dictatorial fashion designer in “The Incredibles” — as actors, cartoon characters get no respect. And a picture like Catherine Breillat’s “Anatomy of Hell,” flawed and difficult, has lingered with me longer than other movies I’ve seen that I love and admire more. How do you explain that? You don’t. You simply make a list, which is, at best, a valiant attempt to fold the greatest number of intangibles into a measly handful of discrete, numbered items.

1) “Before Sunset” — Director Richard Linklater and actors Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke reconnect nine years later to show us what kind of lives Celine and Jesse went on to lead after their one-night love affair in “Before Sunrise.” “Before Sunset” is so beautifully written, and so simply constructed, that it could easily fool you into thinking it’s inconsequential. But this evocative, haunting romance (in addition to being very funny) is adult enough to recognize that disappointment is not only a fact of adult life but also, sometimes, a component of love. There have been bigger movies made about smaller things. This one is modest, fine-grained and close to perfect.

2) “House of Flying Daggers” — Zhang Yimou’s lush adventure-romance is a martial-arts movie that owes more to Bizet or Puccini than to Bruce Lee: It’s operatic and blissfully enveloping. And the lead actors — Zhang Ziyi, Takeshi Kaneshiro and Andy Lau — all have the charisma of old-fashioned movie stars. “House of Flying Daggers” seduces with color, sound and movement. No movie this year made such effective and wide-ranging use of the sensual vocabulary of moviemaking.

3) “Hotel Rwanda” — There are certain movies that, with equal parts skill and, yes, manipulation, get you thinking about what kind of a person you are, and ways in which you might have failed people around you. Based on the true story of Paul Rusesabagina, a hotel manager who sheltered more than 1,200 Hutus and Tutsis during the 1994 Rwandan massacre, Terry George’s “Hotel Rwanda” — beautifully constructed and directed, with a career-defining performance by Don Cheadle — is one of those pictures. “The Passion of the Christ” was the movie most alleged Christians were hyped up about this year, probably because it allowed them to feel self-congratulatory about their willingness to wallow in their savior’s suffering. But “Hotel Rwanda” is the picture that really captures the essence of Judeo-Christian values: It takes the measure of our compassion for our fellow human beings, and demands that we hold ourselves accountable for the things we might have done and didn’t.

4) “Last Life in the Universe” — Thai director Pen-ek Ratanaruang’s spun-sideways love story has the element of surprise working for it. A handsome librarian (Asano Tadanobu) falls for a young mystery woman, but it’s that woman’s sister (Sinitta Boonyasak) who ultimately holds the most mystery of all. “Last Life in the Universe” is stunning to look at, evocative and passionate in its abstract beauty. And it reminds us that gangsters are people too.

5) “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead” — Mike Hodges’ movies — “Get Carter,” “Croupier” and this chilly, superbly constructed little noir — are among the coldest ever made. But no other director can make you feel so much for characters who are essentially unlikable.

6) “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban” — The first true Harry Potter movie — in other words, the first to capture not only the books’ sense of longing but their understanding of the way magic underlies the mundane, instead of just prancing fancifully at a far remove from it. Alfonso Cuarón has made one of the most masterfully conceived and shot fantasy films of all time, precisely because it looks so un-fantastical. Cuarón — who was born in Mexico City — is highly attuned to that quintessentially English characteristic: understatement. The colors of “The Prisoner of Azkaban” are muted and intense: smoky grays, misty browns and brilliant greens. These are the types of colors that don’t reach out to us — we need to come to them. And that’s how “The Prisoner of Azkaban” works its most powerful magic.

7) “The Incredibles” and “The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie” — Of course, it’s cheating to squeeze two movies into one category. But SpongeBob, the undersea hedonist who wants to soak up every pleasure life has to offer, wouldn’t force himself to choose, so why should I? Weirdly, some critics have taken “The Incredibles” to task, calling it an Ayn Rand-y fable that extols the superiority of the megatalented over the merely ordinary. Oddly enough — or not, given how cracked I think the Ayn Rand reading is — I saw “The Incredibles” as a rallying cry for the cultivation and preservation of individuality in an overhomogenized society. (And not just so you can lord your superpowers over the hoi polloi, either. How do the anti-”Incredibles” types explain the way Dash throws the race at the end of the movie? Also: Director Brad Bird knew he’d found the voice for the character of Violet when he heard Sarah Vowell on that bastion of objectivist propaganda, NPR’s “This American Life.”) And then there’s SpongeBob: Are we supposed to see him as an aggressive capitalist who wants it all — the great job, the walk-in closet full of cardboard pants, the precariously tall ice-cream sundaes? The real lesson he imparts, if there has to be one (and there doesn’t, unless you’re a killjoy), is that it takes more than a seaweed mustache to make you a man.

“Hellboy” — Like most stories based on comic books, “Hellboy,” in which Ron Perlman plays a hulking, beer-guzzling, butt-kicking, red-skinned demon with the tenderest of hearts, has a deeply moral underpinning. But director Guillermo del Toro is less interested in your standard-issue battle between good and evil than he is in exploring the nooks and crannies of human vulnerability. Having superpowers doesn’t mean you can escape pain — in fact, it may mean you’re destined to suffer some things more acutely. “Hellboy” is a superhero movie with soul.

9) “The Aviator” — Like Eeyore with his empty hunny pot and his busted birthday balloon, I kept taking this off the list, then putting it back on, then taking it off. But ultimately, it felt wrong to put it anywhere else. Martin Scorsese’s Paul Bunyan-style tall tale about the shadowy mythological beast known as Howard Hughes — those mere mortals who glimpsed him describe him as a fearless flying creature with the talons of an eagle — is superior Hollywood entertainment. It’s also a three-hour movie that doesn’t even pretend to be an epic, and how rare is that these days?

10) “Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle” — Ecstatically silly entertainment, made by a director (Danny Leiner) who recognizes the durability of the road movie (as well as the inherent charm of observant Jewish stoners). And from now on, whenever you see a teen comedy, you’ll have a new game to play: “Spot the Nonwhite Sidekick Tucked In to Show How Progressive a Filmmaker Is.” Leiner has changed the rules, so deftly that people almost didn’t notice.

Honorable mentions: And now, with the toughest part of list making behind us, the fun begins. Here are the also-rans, many of which might easily have found their way onto the list above. These are pictures that, taken together, reflect the sheer damned variety that the movies still give us, year in and year out, even when we start to wonder if maybe we’ve seen it all: Tsai Ming-Liang’s “Goodbye, Dragon Inn,” Alejandro Amenábar’s “The Sea Inside,” Catherine Breillat’s “Anatomy of Hell,” Jim Fields and Michael Gramaglia’s “End of the Century: The Story of the Ramones,” George Hickenlooper’s “Mayor of the Sunset Strip,” Taylor Hackford’s “Ray,” John Waters’ “A Dirty Shame,” Vincent Gallo’s “The Brown Bunny,” Quentin Tarantino’s “Kill Bill, Vol. 2,” Jean-Paul Rappeneau’s “Bon Voyage,” Charles Stone III’s “Mr. 3000,” Richard Loncraine’s “Wimbledon,” Ondi Timoner’s “DiG!” Andrew Lau and Alan Mak’s “Infernal Affairs,” Byambasuren Davaa and Luigi Falorni’s “The Story of the Weeping Camel,” Nickolas Perry and Harry Thomason’s “The Hunting of the President,” Richard Eyre’s “Stage Beauty,” István Szabó’s “Being Julia,” Joshua Marston’s “Maria Full of Grace.”

Charles Taylor’s 10 Best Films

1) “House of Flying Daggers” and “Hero” — The delayed release of Zhang Yimou’s 2002 “Hero” meant we got two martial-arts dreamscapes from him in the same year and watched in astonishment as “House of Flying Daggers” made the earlier “Hero” seem like a warm-up. Thrilling adventures, mournful and rapturous, ravishing to look at, they are also, taken together, a testament to the power of movie stars to bewitch us. The greatest movie stars in the world right now come from Asia, and at times these films play as an ode to the charisma of Tony Leung, Andy Lau, Jet Li, Takeshi Kaneshiro, Maggie Cheung (whose close-ups contain as much mystery as any screen presence since Garbo) and especially Zhang Ziyi. A sprite who commands the camera (and the director’s real-life love) Ziyi is regarded by Yimou here with the tenderness and awe and yearning directors reserve for their most cherished muses. Not only is Yimou the filmmaker putting wonders on the screen in these films, he’s a spectator watching in rapt amazement with us.

2) “The Dreamers” — In 2004, one movie spoke to the true believers in the audience, reaffirming their passionate devotion to the Holy Trinity. Of course I mean Bernardo Bertolucci’s voluptuous celebration of sex, movies and politics. Working from Gilbert Adair’s novel, which updated Jean Cocteau’s “Les enfants terribles” to May 1968 Paris, Bertolucci, in his most playful film, captured both the expansive freedom and the insulation of a moment that proclaimed “All power to the imagination.” Bertolucci isn’t out to mourn a generation’s lost revolutionary fervor but, rather, to proffer a valentine to his comrades on the barricades. And he is graceful and generous enough to disdain the “you had to have been there” elitism with which subsequent generations have been belittled by ’60s veterans. He sees the beauty and reckless daring of his long-ago colleagues in his trio of young leads (Michael Pitt, Louis Garrel and the fabulous Eva Green). You have to wonder if the critics from that era who dismissed the film recognized in it the cinephilia they once possessed but have since decided will no longer get them anywhere. As one friend of mine put it, if you don’t love “The Dreamers,” you don’t deserve movies.

3) “Before Sunset” — Richard Linklater and stars Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy risk a sequel to the 1995 “Before Sunrise,” one of the most exquisite romantic films ever made. What they get is a note-perfect 80-minute conversation from the two once-and-future lovers that acknowledges adult disappointment without giving in to cynicism or bitterness. If movie acting is measured by how open actors are to each other and how they exist in the moment, then what Hawke and Delpy achieve here is perfection.

4) “Last Life in the Universe”– Working in various countries, Asian directors are delivering something approaching the excitement and sense of discovery that the nouvelle vague filmmakers gave French film in the ’60s. One of two contemporary Thai directors on this list, Pen-ek Ratanaruang made what is perhaps the year’s most dreamlike picture. Shot by master cinematographer Christopher Doyle, who also shot “Hero,” “Last Life” is a sort of deadpan screwball comedy in which a lost man (Asano Tadanobu) is brought back to life by a kooky young girl (Sinitta Boonyasak). Only he’s not really lost and she’s not really a kook. Pen-ek doesn’t use the conventions of screwball comedy here as much as he evokes its melancholy ghost. The tone is one of retreat from the messiness of life and finally acceptance of that messiness as the very essence of life. Seemingly light as air, the film achieves real emotional weight, and leaves an aura that stays with you.

5) “Goodbye, Dragon Inn” — A rainy night in Taipei, Taiwan, a closing movie house showing its final feature, a few scattered customers watching (or not watching) King Hu’s 1966 martial-arts classic “Dragon Gate Inn.” Those are the elements of Tsai Ming-Liang’s aching, lovely elegy to moviegoing itself. Tsai sees movie theaters as haunted houses, where the ghosts of all who have graced the screen are more real than the transitory audience, the clubfooted ticket taker, the projectionist she is silently in love with, the unlucky young man cruising the theater’s Byzantine byways. The images may even be more real than the two aged stars of the King Hu film who sit among the sparse patrons, watching their younger selves on the screen. Their presence is a poetic and painful demonstration of the glory and tyranny of the movies: their ability to outlive us all.

6) “Ray” — Taylor Hackford’s beautifully directed biopic didn’t make the conventions of the genre seem fresh, but he showed the conviction and emotional punch that they can still have in the right hands. Like the art of the man it pays tribute to, Hackford’s movie aims for the biggest audience it can. That’s where it finds its voice, its expansiveness, its faith in popular art as democracy in action. Hackford does superb work with the actors. Jamie Foxx’s incarnation of Ray gets the familiar gestures so right you can miss that Foxx works from the inside out. And since black actresses still continue to be underrepresented in Hollywood, there’s a special joy in the great quartet this movie gives us — Kerry Washington, Aunjanue Ellis, Regina King and, as Ray’s mother, fierce, heartbreaking newcomer Sharon Warren. In a year when many of us felt alienated from our own country, “Ray” let us feel the omnivorous inclusiveness that is America at its best. No mainstream movie was as emotionally satisfying.

7) “A Very Long Engagement” — Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s insanely, wonderfully complicated World War I tale (superior to Sebastien Japrisot’s novel) has the intricacy and homemade charm of a mechanical toy from the turn of the 20th century. The film is a mystery of what happened to a group of French soldiers tried for treason, a love story about a woman’s refusal to believe that her fiancé is dead, an antiwar melodrama and, more than anything, a demonstration of a narrative’s power to wrap us in its clutches. The fine cast includes Audrey Tautou (leaving the adorable shtick behind), Ticky Holgado, Tchéky Karyo, Denis Lavant, Elina Lowensohn and Jodie Foster. The film is like a tunnel back to a fully realized world, and Jeunet is the magician who takes us there.

“Hotel Rwanda” — Terry George’s shattering film of the 1994 genocide, the West’s cowardly indifference and the hotel manager who saved more than 1,200 of his countrymen from execution is an example of what can be accomplished by a principled filmmaker using real events as raw material. The movie has a blunt, outraged immediacy that harks back to the muckraking Warner Bros. melodramas of the ’30s. In his first starring role, Don Cheadle is superb as a man who holds onto this sense of decency amid the derangement of everyday life.

9) “Blissfully Yours” — Thirty-four-year-old Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul is one of the truest sensualists to emerge in movies in recent years. This 2002 film, released theatrically in the United States this year, makes you feel as if life itself is unfolding on the screen, each moment indefinably precious. As its two lovers escape into the forest setting, prosaic, dreary everyday life is transformed by the promise of freedom. All through the film the happiness of those moments when the world is held at bay coalesces, dissolves and is found again. As an expression of the fragility of perfect moments, this is the closest movies may ever get to Manet’s painting “Le déjeuner sur l’herbe.”

10) “13 Going on 30″ — As an awkward teenage girl whose birthday wish turns her into the sophisticated career woman she longs to be (at least on the outside) Jennifer Garner gives the kind of performance that made earlier movie audiences fall in love with Carole Lombard, Margaret Sullavan and, before that, Marion Davies. The script’s conventional ending eventually lets Garner down, but director Gary Winick does everything he can to provide some luster. And it’s Garner’s show, anyway. Executing one deft bit of physical comedy after another, she manages to embody the movie’s sweet-spiritedness, poke gentle fun at her heroine’s teenage enthusiasms and evoke some real pathos for the moment when we suspect we’re leaving those enthusiasms behind. Garner’s performance is a charmer, a long-sustained expression of wide-eyed aplomb.

Honorable mentions: Jean-Claude Brisseau’s “Secret Things,” Mike Hodges’ “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead,” George Hickenlooper’s “Mayor of the Sunset Strip,” Andrew Lau and Alan Mak’s “Infernal Affairs,” Alfonso Cuarón’s “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban,” Vincent Gallo’s “The Brown Bunny,” Catherine Breillat’s “Sex Is Comedy” and “Anatomy of Hell,” Charles Stone III’s “Mr. 3000,” Guillermo del Toro’s “Hellboy,” Jean-Paul Rappeneau’s “Bon Voyage,” Byambasuren Davaa and Luigi Falorni’s “The Story of the Weeping Camel,” Alejandro Amenábar’s “The Sea Inside,” Nickolas Perry and Harry Thomason’s “The Hunting of the President,” Jim Fields and Michael Gramaglia’s “End of the Century: The Story of the Ramones,” Danny Leiner’s “Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle,” Richard Eyre’s “Stage Beauty,” Ondi Timoner’s “DiG!”

“In America” (directed by Jim Sheridan). A man moves his young family from Ireland to Hell’s Kitchen, NYC, and figures out the difference between surviving and living. There’s something emotionally rough-hewed about Sheridan’s movie (which is based loosely on his own experience and that of his two daughters, who co-wrote the movie with him). Its edges aren’t polished and smoothed under, which may be why the picture cuts so deep.

“A Mighty Wind” (directed by Christopher Guest). Satire made by a staunch humanist. Guest’s mockumentary about ’60s folk singers is improvisational comedy that feels immediate and spontaneous and jazzy, yet it has so much emotional heft — particularly in the performances of Catherine O’Hara and Eugene Levy — that it leaves an echo of melancholy in its wake.

“Spellbound” (directed by Jeffrey Blitz). This documentary about the National Spelling Bee is more suspenseful than most modern thrillers, and better made, too. But what really sets it apart is the way it makes a kind of straightforward poetry out of the loneliness, the diligence and, yes, the excitement of being a smart kid.

“American Splendor” (directed by Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini). Paul Giamatti is crotchety and wonderful as comic-book writer Harvey Pekar, an unrepentant crank who wouldn’t know a good mood if it peed on his leg. But Pekar’s dirty little not-quite-a-secret is that he’s actually a closet idealist, and both Giamatti and the filmmakers understand that. Pekar is so open to the world around him, it’s no wonder he’s in a bad mood most of the time. Then again, the only way to take the measure of humanity in all its perplexed glory is to keep our receptors on at all times. How do you put that in a movie? I don’t quite know, but Berman, Pulcini and their actors sure pulled it off.

“Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King” (directed by Peter Jackson). I wonder if the massive popularity of the honor-sogged “The Last Samurai” in the first few weeks of its release wasn’t at least partly because moviegoers were treating it as a stopover on the way to “The Return of the King.” Of the two, “Return” is the movie that really scrutinizes the meaning of honor in battle, cutting straight to the spiritual underpinnings of warriorhood. (I’ll take Aragorn’s nightmares over Algren’s, any day.) Or, at the very least, “Return” is a magnificent and purely satisfying — and, yes, devastating — cap-off to one of the greatest epic movie adventures of all time. Accept no substitutes, no matter how pseudo-spiritual or neo-historical they pretend to be.

“Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World” (directed by Peter Weir). Yet another movie about bravery, honor and duty. But as with “Return of the King,” you don’t walk away from it praising the worthiness of its themes — instead, you’re left with a true and deep sense of the rueful compromises that rousing victories often demand. Russell Crowe gives a performance that’s heroic not just in the most obvious sense of the word, but also in the most subtle: His Jack Aubrey understands that every decision has a potentially devastating downside, and he carries that knowledge both in his heart and on his nobly squared shoulders. “Master and Commander” is a magnificent historical adventure with a throbbing heart. And there’s mournful grandeur in cinematographer Russell Boyd’s every shot.

“To Be and to Have” (directed by Nicolas Philibert). A delicately calibrated documentary about a one-room schoolhouse in the French countryside and the teacher who guides the students in attendance there, from tots to young teenagers. “To Be and To Have” illuminates both the vocation of teaching and the work of being a student, without sentimentalizing, or underestimating, either. It’s a small-scale picture that does the same thing a great teacher does: It keeps you thinking long after you’ve left your seat.

“School of Rock” (directed by Richard Linklater). Forget makeover shows: The real transformative power lies in rock ‘n’ roll. Jack Black plays an unshaven lout who takes a bunch of square schoolkids and shows them how to channel their inner cool. This picture moves, driven by intelligence and craftsmanship and goofiness. Hollywood comedies have a bad reputation these days, for some very good reasons. But Linklater leads the way in showing that you can surf the mainstream without being dragged under by it.

“Masked and Anonymous” (directed by Larry Charles). The most picked-on movie of the year was also one of the weirdest and most provocative. In this parallel-universe parable, a troubadour masquerading as Bob Dylan (or is it the other way around?) reflects on American idealism, fame and the commodification of music. No, it’s not linear — but then, neither is Dylan.

Honorable Mentions: Robert Altman’s “The Company,” Lisa Cholodenko’s “Laurel Canyon,” Terry Zwigoff’s “Bad Santa,” Jacques Perrin’s “Winged Migration,” Claire Denis’ “Friday Night,” Tom McCarthy’s “The Station Agent,” Patty Jenkins’ “Monster,” Seijun Suzuki’s “Pistol Opera” and John Malkovich’s “The Dancer Upstairs.” And last but not least, Mark Waters’ highly entertaining “Freaky Friday,” particularly because Jamie Lee Curtis is so damn good.

Charles Taylor’s 10 Best Films

“Lost in Translation” (directed by Sofia Coppola). Coppola is so adept at catching the reverberations of evanescent moods that she can make the most intimate moment in this romance across time zones the one where Bill Murray clasps the foot of the sleeping Scarlett Johansson. “Lost in Translation” uses contemporary borderlessness as a metaphor for the emotional state of the movie’s two chaste lovers, Murray and Johansson, as they wander the corridors of a Tokyo hotel. In outline, it sounds like one of the anomie fests that made people swoon over Antonioni and Resnais. It’s more like a dreamy version of a classic romantic comedy about the modern predicament of feeling like you’re everywhere and nowhere. The faces of Johansson and Murray (in the performance of his life) are so eloquent that they demonstrate how, for actors, words are a last resort.

“In America” (directed by Jim Sheridan). Set in a Hell’s Kitchen tenement, Sheridan’s autobiographical story of an Irish family reeling from the loss of a child is both tender and robust. In the face of the fierce emotion that powers the movie, sentimentality doesn’t stand a chance. Instead of exhausting your capacity to feel, Sheridan keeps deepening it. The performances by the astonishing Samantha Morton, Paddy Considine, the wonderful newcomers Sarah and Emma Bolger, and Djimon Hounsou all radiate with an emotional commitment that matches Sheridan’s. “In America” sweeps you into its rough, loving embrace and then puts you back in the world, safe and sound, telling you the life waiting outside the theater is a gift.

“Spellbound” (directed by Jeffrey Blitz). This splendid documentary about the National Spelling Bee is not only moving and funny but also about as suspenseful as a movie can get. Blitz gives us acute mini-portraits of eight contestants, some of whom — like Ashely, the African-American girl from Washington, D.C., who gets done up in her finest to compete — you can’t help but fall in love with. Perhaps the moment that sums up the movie’s essential decency is when a born-again preacher prays for the success of one kid, a member of his congregation, but asks the Lord to remind him that being a good person is more important. That’s how Blitz is able to make the Bee almost unbearably exciting while making the losers seem anything but.

“The Good Thief” Neil Jordan’s best movie, this sensuous, elegant remake of Jean-Pierre Melville’s “Bob le Flambeur” is looser, freer, hipper than the original. Jordan replaces Melville’s hardboiled romantic fatalism with the story of a battered gambler who regains his harmony with a lifetime of taking risks. The movie is warm and mellow but with a kick. There’s a playful springiness that keeps any hint of hardboiled sogginess at bay. As Bob, Nick Nolte is a magnificent wreck, an image of battered masculinity that is far more beautiful than any preserved and mellowed good looks could ever be. As the young prostitute who becomes Bob’s good-luck charm, the charming Russian actress Nutsa Kukhianidze makes her way through the movie like a languid breeze.

“Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King” (directed by Peter Jackson). The conclusion to the Tolkien cycle reveals that the film is not a trilogy but one gigantic movie. This, the last third, plays upon all the emotions we’ve developed for the characters, echoing moments from the first two installments and enriching their emotional depth. The entire cast rises to the occasion, particularly Sean Astin, Andy Serkis, Viggo Mortensen, and the weirdly talented Miranda Otto. You watch this picture marveling not just at what’s on-screen but also at Jackson’s ability to sustain it so beautifully. It’s one of the great achievements in fantasy filmmaking. Savor it — because as soon as it’s over you’re hit by the melancholy realization that there won’t be another one to look forward to next year.

“To Be and to Have” (directed by Nicolas Philibert). This documentary about a year in the life of a one-room French schoolhouse is a portrait of the teacher as artist, and about teaching as a form of love. Extraordinarily evocative, the movie brings back emotions you may have forgotten you ever had, the wonder of learning letters and numbers and, later, being able to form sentences. In its finest moments, when George Lopez comforts a student whose father is sick or encourages a painfully shy girl, the movie is a masterpiece of empathy.

“The Company” Robert Altman’s film about the work and lives of a ballet company (Chicago’s Joffrey Ballet) features some of the most beautiful dance numbers ever put on film (including a Lar Lubovitch pas de deux danced by Neve Campbell and Domingo Rubio to “My Funny Valentine”). The flip side of Altman’s tortured “Vincent and Theo,” which was about the agony of making art, “The Company” is about the joy of discovering the amazements you’re capable of. Altman, still making great movies in his ’70s, finds affinity with these young dancers who have only a short time to practice their art. He’s managed to defy time. “The Company” is lighter than air and yet it seems to contain everything Altman has learned about making movies.

“School of Rock” (directed by Richard Linklater). A classic American movie comedy. Jack Black throws everything he has at the role of a substitute teacher turning his class into a rock band and, somehow, manages not to exhaust either himself or the audience. Richard Linklater pulls off the feat of making a completely accessible mainstream comedy while staying true to himself. “School of Rock” is pure pleasure, and the joy on of the faces of the kids as they strut their stuff is the year’s sweetest payoff.

“Masked and Anonymous” (directed by Larry Charles). Directors of jazz movies have long gotten away with shoddy structure by claiming they were aping the improvisatory nature of jazz. Larry Charles’ rambling film starring Bob Dylan as a once-famous singer released from prison to play a benefit for America’s elected dictator works exactly like a Dylan song, which is to say it’s oblique, bleak, funny, prophetic and stirring — and critics reacted as though they’d never heard a Dylan record in their lives. The movie received this year’s most uniformly dunderheaded reviews, which were shocking not only for their inability to see what Charles and Dylan were up to, but for their overt hostility to a filmmaker who tried something unusual — which only made the movie’s vision of art reduced to fodder for the dominant polity all the more pointed. Dylan fulfills exactly the same function he does in his songs: not a participant but an observer, meeting all sorts of characters, listening to their tall tales, rants, threats, jokes and warnings. Among the images of a third-world America coming apart, a moment of unexpected peace: Dylan and his band singing “Dixie,” which becomes a love song to a lost republic that may exist only in the country’s unrealized aspirations.

“demonlover” (directed by Olivier Assayas). This meditation on the seductions of technology is a mixture of folly and brilliance that goes willfully off the rails. Even at its most lucid, the movie’s ideas can seem both shallow and paranoid. And the film is still one of the most vital pieces of moviemaking in recent memory, telling us more about the tenor of this moment than perhaps we’re ready to acknowledge. Assayas takes the measure of a borderless, transient world in which the Internet, globalization, and corporate mergers and takeovers have obliterated any sense of continuity or personal loyalty. The movie is exhilarating and made to rob your sleep. As the corporate spy who is both ahead of and behind the game at every turn, Connie Nielsen gives a performance that is both icy and shockingly raw, composed and on the constant verge of lyrical hysteria.

Honorable Mention (in alphabetical order): Directors Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini’s “American Splendor”; Terry Zwigoff’s “Bad Santa”; John Malkovich’s “The Dancer Upstairs”; F. Gary Gray’s “Italian Job”; Aki Kaurismäki’s “Man Without a Past”; Peter Weir’s “Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World”; Christopher Guest’s “Mighty Wind”; Patty Jenkins’ “Monster”; Carma Hinton, Geremie R. Barmé and Richard Gordon’s “Morning Sun”; Carl Franklin’s “Out of Time”; Seijun Suzuki’s “Pistol Opera”; Tom McCarthy’s “Station Agent”; Jacques Perrin’s “Winged Migration.”

The Miramax Award for the Annual Holiday Prestige Turd: “Cold Mountain”

The Emperor’s New Clothes Award: “Elephant”

Andrew O’Hehir’s 10 Best Films

“House of Fools” (directed by Andrei Konchalovsky). You’ll never see another film about the Chechen conflict that has ’80s pop star Bryan Adams in it. Hell, you’ll never see this one. But you should. A heartbreaking and sensual near-masterpiece from Konchalovsky, an all-but-forgotten avatar of Soviet cinema’s lost golden age. (He directed “Asya’s Happiness,” “Siberiade” and the strangely great Hollywood film “Runaway Train” — as well as “Tango and Cash,” with Kurt Russell and Sylvester Stallone!) This tragic and unforgettable movie would have been his triumphant comeback if, well, if it hadn’t disappeared without a trace. There may or may not be a God, but he’s not watching out for Konchalovsky.

“Ten” (directed by Abbas Kiarostami). Yeah, Kiarostami is the Iranian director best known in the West (which means, apparently, that some Iranians think he has sold out — call it the Kurosawa complex). But that doesn’t mean any Americans actually see his films. Shot on digital video via a fixed “dashboard cam,” while a middle-class Tehran woman drives her impossible son around, bickers with her sister, picks up a religious pilgrim and then a prostitute, “Ten” is experimental even by Kiarostami’s standards. It played hardly anywhere. It’s a revelation.

“The Dancer Upstairs” (directed by John Malkovich). The indie-film hero’s directing debut is a near-perfect marriage of political thriller and existential art film. A decent South American cop (the great Javier Bardem) serving a corrupt regime must try to find the elusive terrorist leader who has an entire nation spooked. It’s partly about Peru in the era of the transcendentally evil Shining Path movement, and partly a story about the untrustworthy nature of love. The gorgeous Laura Morante is the dance teacher he falls for; the unforgettable tune on the soundtrack is Nina Simone singing Sandy Denny’s “Who Knows Where the Time Goes?”

“Carnage” (directed by Delphine Gleize). European art cinema continues not to die, despite all reports to the contrary. This debut feature from Gleize, a 30-year-old French director, is the story of a group of strangers all over Europe linked, in an almost religious sense, by the corpse of an Andalusian bull. It’s probably the most beautiful film I saw all year. Gleize is more than anything else the spiritual heir to Luis Buñuel (“Carnage” even stars Buñuel actress Angela Molina, along with Chiara Mastroianni, daughter of Catherine Deneuve and Marcello Mastroianni), but that’s just fine with me. Despite the title and the concept, this isn’t a brutal or “difficult” film; it casts a cool eye on life and death but treats its large cast with a whimsy very close to tenderness. Another marvelous flick no one saw.

“The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King” (directed by Peter Jackson). Much as I will always love “The Fellowship of the Ring” (which, truth be told, is by far the best of Tolkien’s original volumes), Jackson really did save the best for last. It’s far too early to predict how these movies will age, but Jackson has clearly kicked George Lucas to the curb and created the biggest and best pop epic since Francis Ford Coppola’s “Godfather” series.

“The Matrix Reloaded” (directed by Andy Wachowski and Larry Wachowski). Oh, shut up about the dancing and the dreadlocks (as well as about how great your life was in 1999). Somewhere inside, you know it was terrific — that it opened up new possibilities the original film had never imagined. The fact that the Wachowskis had no way to follow up, and that “Revolutions” was basically a dog, doesn’t change that.

“Lost in Translation” (directed by Sofia Coppola). You’ve read enough about this movie by now, haven’t you? Emotionally and visually, it’s pitch-perfect; with this one film, Sofia Coppola jumps to the head of the indie-god class. (Quentin’s got to get out of the basement and return all those Hong Kong videos.) Bill Murray deserves the Oscar and might even get it; Scarlett Johansson is almost as good but won’t win anything (except the, um, hearts of guys all over the world). Making a movie about Yanks in a bizarro-world foreign culture is kind of cheating, and using karaoke scenes as a shorthand for falling in love is really cheating. But somehow Coppola makes it all work; she takes the fraught topic of older-guy/younger-woman love and cooks it down to irreducible human reality. It’s a miniature, but it’s a wonderful miniature.

“Old School” (directed by Todd Phillips). All right, I sort of put this on the list to horrify you. But, hey, if Hollywood does one thing well it’s moronic dude comedy, and frankly it’s an underappreciated genre. (I’m still steamed about the bad reviews that “Saving Silverman” and “Dude, Where’s My Car?” got.) Here are the facts: a) It’s hysterically funny; b) it’s still Will Ferrell’s most blissful performance, “Elf” or not; c) it does not either glorify older men gamin’ on young girls — in fact, it does quite the opposite; and d) it’s just flat-out funnier than “School of Rock,” which was pretty good but in a cleaned-up, so-you-can-take-the-wife-and-kids kind of way.

“Under the Skin of the City” (directed by Rakhshan Bani Etemad). This working-class family melodrama from a female Iranian director best known for her documentaries is well-made, affecting and humorous, and it will open your mind to the realities of that much-misunderstood country. Bani Etemad fearlessly takes on the subjugation of women, political corruption, and the widely despised rule of the ayatollahs, as well as the pell-mell infusion of Western capital, all while portraying the family’s struggle to hold on to its house and save an abused daughter from a life of prostitution.

“Marooned in Iraq” (directed by Bahman Ghobadi). The story of George W. Bush. I kid, I kid! This isn’t as starkly memorable as Kurdish-Iranian filmmaker Ghobadi’s previous film, “A Time for Drunken Horses,” but it’s a more accomplished and far more eccentric work. Among other things, it’s a comedy about a group of hapless Kurdish musicians, well-known in their limited universe, who undertake a foolhardy mission to find a missing woman across the border in Iraq. They are robbed of almost everything, abducted by a local warlord, and forced to play a wedding; they encounter an empty village, presumably gassed by Saddam Hussein. And it’s all pretty funny, in a grating, Three Stooges kind of way. Also, by the end, it’s a heart-wrenching tale of nobility and survival, set against some of the most dramatic scenery you’ve ever seen.

Doyle will do anything to get his children back, but it’s a tough row to hoe when you’ve got both the Irish courts and the Catholic Church against you. “Evelyn” divides its time between Doyle’s dogged fight for his children and the wretched experiences of brave little Evelyn at the hands of that ghastly nun. (The boys figure so dimly into the plot that you almost forget they exist — they’re like semi-invisible elves in miniature tweeds and brogans.) Evelyn, as she’s played by Vavasseur, is potentially a dreadfully charming little moppet, and Beresford seems to have directed her carefully — she never quite crosses over the line to being too cute. Still, you wish you could cut some of the sugar when she takes the witness stand and, at the request of one of the judges, precociously recites the prayer she says every night, something about blessing all her enemies (who really don’t know any better) and the whole of Ireland as well.

“Evelyn” is something of a political movie — in real life, Doyle’s case changed Irish law in regard to the court’s right to separate children from their parents — but it’s not a particularly fiery one. Beresford isn’t above employing a touch of the “Sophie’s Choice” method of filmmaking now and then: You feel something for Doyle as his children are literally wrenched from his arms by authorities and hastened into a vehicle that speeds away, their muffled cries trailing off in the distance. But Beresford is pushing it further than perhaps he should. And there’s just no forgiving him, or screenwriter Paul Pender, for the beaming corniness of one of the movie’s recurring motifs: Evelyn refers to the shards of sunshine that shoot through trees, clouds and other obstacles as “angel rays,” and just a little bit of them goes a long way.

But say what you want about Beresford: There’s no telling what he’ll cook up next, which is why it’s always dangerous to ignore a Beresford movie. (Sometimes I can hardly believe that the same man made movies as disparate as “Double Jeopardy,” “Black Robe” and “Driving Miss Daisy.”) “Evelyn” may be one of Beresford’s less distinguished pictures, but it does have some nice touches, particularly the pub scenes, which feel brushed with a breezy warmth. Quinn, as the American lawyer whom Desmond befriends (and who’s also his main rival for the movie’s female love interest, played improbably but serviceably by Julianna Margulies), doesn’t have much to do, but is charmingly raffish, as usual. Bates, as a retired barrister who’s enlisted to help Desmond in his fight, gets the best lines in the movie, particularly when he’s providing a disparaging running commentary about the bewigged old goats serving on the Irish supreme court.

And Brosnan, whom most of us think of only as James Bond, really attempts to give the character of Doyle some warmth and humor; he’s a bit stiff at times, but it’s easy enough to buy him as a man who genuinely loves his children and would do anything for them. “Evelyn” may be a weightless picture, but it’s hardly torture to sit through. Just watch out for those angel rays.

The books listed here (with the notable exception of the first) place the emphasis on images rather than words, but all of them feed the mind as well as the eye.

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The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th edition)
Houghton Mifflin, 2,074 pages

For word buffs in a lexical slump, this jazzy new edition of a classic dictionary will provide a pleasing jolt. The American Heritage Dictionary has been long and justly acclaimed for its marginalia — drawings and photographs illustrating entries ranging from a drogue parachute (it slows down race cars) to Spike Lee. Although true AH aficionados surveying this, the fourth, edition will miss some old classics like the illustration for “cleavage” (a drawing of Marilyn Monroe), there are still over 1,000 droll choices and illuminating images, all in full color, including a series of three photos that shows a building being imploded.

The decision to incorporate the names of famous people and places in the main index (instead of providing separate biographical and geographical indexes at the back) will no doubt vex traditionalist readers, but everyone — or at least everyone with a computer that runs Windows — should appreciate the accompanying CD-ROM, mostly for the audio files of 70,000 spoken pronunciations. Alas, being a Mac user I was unable to savor the notoriously diverse number of pronunciations of the word “almond” or settle my nagging concerns about how to say “debauchery,” but I diverted myself with a survey of the print version’s many asides, including a usage note regarding “bring” (its meanings vary regionally), a history of the word “fiction” and an item about the word “geek” under the rubric “Our Living Language.”

–Laura Miller

William Blake: The Complete Illuminated Books
Edited by David Bindman
Thames and Hudson, 464 pages

The fierce and fantastical 18th century poet William Blake invented his own method of printing words and images together on a page. Unfortunately, he was only able to produce one book at a time in this way, so few of them exist. This captivating book gathers plates of the pages of all of his illuminated books in one volume.

Once you see Blake’s poetry this way, with his swooping, stylized handwriting creeping around his shimmering, expressive human figures and strangely surreal landscapes, you understand his famous line: “I must create my own system or be enslaved by another man’s.” Blake’s art and poetry are perfectly wed — as you page through this book, there’s a sense of entering into a rich and complete imaginative world. All of Blake’s 17 illuminated volumes are included, from “Songs of Innocence and of Experience” to “The Book of Los,” and there’s an introduction by Blake expert David Bindman.

–Maria Russo

Sacred Legacy: Edward S. Curtis and the North American Indian
By Edward S. Curtis; Christopher Cardozo, editor
Simon & Schuster, 192 pages

This breathtaking collection of almost 200 of Edward Sheriff Curtis’ photographs has something for anyone who cherishes their tiny part in humanity or who grieves at an unspeakable American tragedy — the plight of Native Americans. These turn-of-the-century, sepia-toned portraits of dignified Indian chiefs, graceful loom-spinners and bound papooses are so candid and mournful, your visceral response to their brave sadness might startle you. The text features sagacious verse from about the same era, written by a people altogether cognizant of their culture’s imminent destruction. Curtis lost almost everything he had in his 30-year endeavor to capture and preserve these hypnotic, even sacred images, but in this book his compassion remains. It’s the legacy of a man who could capture in a downward glance or an upheld chin or a leathery, sun-soaked brow, the soul, memory and suffering of a nation.

– Suzy Hansen

The New Yorker Book of Technology Cartoons
Edited and with an introduction by Robert Mankoff
Bloomberg Press, 144 pages

Some people love computers; some people hate ‘em. But nobody — at least nobody I know — doesn’t like New Yorker cartoons. And in “The New Yorker Book of Technology Cartoons,” cartoon editor Robert Mankoff has assembled 110 of the magazine’s wriest takes on technology, targeted to technophiles and technophobes alike. The cartoons, which readers of the magazine may recall seeing the first time around, tackle topics ranging from the high tech to the low tech.

In one by Leo Cullum, a buffalo on a cellphone comments, “I love the convenience, but the roaming charges are killing me.” In another, Roz Chast conjures a new, improved washing machine with “the complete cycle”: “fill tub, wash, rinse, lose sock, spin.” Others address issues raised by our new online culture. From Peter Steiner comes a now-legendary classic: Two dogs in front of a computer; one says to the other, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”

Difficult to resist devouring in one bite (it’s like skipping dinner and getting to eat everyone else’s dessert in addition to your own), the book comes with a CD-ROM containing all the cartoons in e-mail-ready GIF format. So e-mail-overloaded buyer beware, if you give this book as a gift, it’s likely to come back to you.

–Amy Reiter

Julia’s Kitchen Wisdom
By Julia Child
Alfred A. Knopf, 127 pages

Cookery is the love child of art and chemistry; it’s both intuitive and based on a set of perfectly rational, if homely theories. Once you’ve grasped a handful of these precepts, recipes seem less like mysterious sacred texts to be followed to the letter and more like riffs on a few classic themes. This manageable volume by Julia Child (derived from a best-of TV special that compiled “snippets” from her early shows) makes a delightful refresher course for the practiced cook and a good next step for those who’ve had some luck with recipes but don’t really understand how they work. Child offers “master recipes” for soups and sauces as the starting point for myriad variations, and she explains the nuts and bolts of roasting meats, rescuing a curdled Hollandaise, baking bread and making sure your soufflés don’t fall.

This is less a cookbook than a manual of repertory skills, but it’s not for novices — if you don’t know how to degrease a stock, you’ll be lost right out of the gate. Every practiced cook will already know some of this, but few will know all of it, and all will appreciate that it comes amply garnished with Child’s legendary, down-to-earth enthusiasm and charm and some vintage photos of the grande dame herself.

– Laura Miller

Rolling Stone: The Seventies
Edited by Ashley Kahn, Holly George-Warren and Shawn Dahl
Little, Brown, 288 pages

Most of the people who’d be interested in “Rolling Stone: The ’70s” probably lived through the decade themselves, so there’s not much more they can learn from this book. Largely a collection of essays by old-time ’70s stalwarts (Glenn O’Brien, Bob Greene) reflecting on the days way back when, this is a great gift book for anyone whose idea of holiday fun is to light up a joint after the turkey has been consumed.

Still, it does contain essays from some writers we don’t hear from often enough (Donna Gaines on Led Zeppelin, Billy Altman on the early days of punk). The pictures are groovy, and the timeline is relatively useful. Did you happen to remember that on Sept. 14, 1976, 14 Czech rockers, including members of Plastic People of the Universe, faced trial for charges including antisocial behavior and anarchism? Useful information, particularly good for hurling at teenage ingrates who just don’t know how good they have it.

– Stephanie Zacharek

Photolanguage: How Photos Reveal the Fascinating Stories of Our Lives and Relationships
By Robert U. Akeret
W.W. Norton, 238 pages

If a picture is worth a thousand words, the average photo-stuffed American home is screaming for attention. Robert Akeret, the author of “Photolanguage,” is a practicing psychoanalyst, so who better to explain how you can mine your photo albums for the real story behind your family’s facade? “Photolanguage” features dozens of posed and candid photographs, pointing out the kinds of things that speak volumes — are the people in the photo looking at one another? Are they touching? Do their expressions seem comfortable or forced? The book also calls attention to the patterns in photo albums that families put together. Did your parents save several pictures of you over the years strumming an air guitar? It could mean you were born to rock, but it could also mean that your parents just want to see you that way, and that’s why they chose to save those photos.

Akeret mixes photos of celebrities — a clearly alienated Princess Diana with a bored-looking Prince Charles and their kids; a tearful, vulnerable Monica Lewinsky and her father — and ordinary people. Some of his interpretations seem a little off the mark, but that’s part of the fun — after all, there’s more than one story behind any picture.

–Maria Russo

Hats in the Ring: An Illustrated History of American Presidential Campaigns
By Evan Cornog and Richard Whelan
Random House, 318 pages

The 36-day hangover of the presidential election of 2000 has finally ended, but the writing and rewriting of history has hardly begun. Though many will cry fatigue at the thought of stomaching more political rancor, it’s also likely that scores of citizens have felt stirrings of interest in America’s curious process for picking a president.

“Hats in the Ring” comprises all 51 elections, these “remarkable amalgams of serious purpose and carnival spirits,” in a lucid and often humorous look at what happens when America’s finest dash toward the Oval Office. Its pages are sprinkled with Thomas Nast cartoons, magazine covers, campaign posters, propaganda cards and commercial freeze-frames. The book is informative, yes, and also fun: Chapter titles range from “The Nation Turns a Crooked Corner” (Hayes vs. Tilden, 1876) to “‘In Your Guts You Know He’s Nuts’” (Johnson vs. Goldwater, 1964). One can only guess what the Bush vs. Gore, 2000 chapter would be nicknamed. As for Bush the Elder’s, it’s “Meet Willie Horton.”

– Suzy Hansen

King: The Photobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr.
By Charles Johnson and Bob Adelman
Viking Studio, 288 pages

It may not sound quite right to describe a collection of photographs chronicling the civil rights movement and the life of Martin Luther King as “elegant.” But if visual elegance can ever convey a quality as elusive as dignity, then this book, with text by “Middle Passage” author Charles Johnson, covers the territory beautifully. Some of the images, like those from 1963 Birmingham, Ala., are still horrifying even if you’ve seen them dozens of times: attack dogs savaging clearly peaceful black protesters; an injured child lying in her hospital bed after the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church Sunday School.

Yet by its end the book feels more luminous than weighty or troubling. The lush, muted black-and-white of one of the final pictures, the funeral procession in which King’s coffin was pulled along by a mule on a simple wooden cart, radiates peace and calm. If a picture can have that kind of effect, imagine what it must have been like to be there.

–Stephanie Zacharek

Tulsa
By Larry Clark
Grove Press, 64 pages

Your sullen niece. Your younger brother in the black lipstick. Your boss who wore leather pants before you could buy them at the Gap. These loved ones won’t be happy with a nice illustrated volume of “A Visit From St. Nicholas.” You need to give them something darker, something more extreme. You need the anti-coffee-table coffee-table book. You need “Tulsa.”

Originally published in 1971, Larry Clark’s thin book of photographs is a grim affair, a portrait of Clark’s drug-addled friends and comrades, shot in Tulsa, Okla., in 1963, 1968 and 1971. The depressing, uncompromising black-and-whites depict a pregnant woman injecting speed, a dead baby resting in a coffin and a man screaming as a result of his self-inflicted gunshot wound. You see a few recurring characters, with clipped hair and goofy smiles at the start, long hair and blank stares at the end. Short captions run under several portraits: “dead.”

This is depressing stuff, to be sure, but like the most harrowing murder ballads or the most debased loser lit, you often come out of the experience of listening, reading or looking with a better perspective on your own life. Your little sullen niece might realize the Christmas season isn’t so awful after all.

– Jeff Stark

Valley of the Golden Mummies
By Zahi Hawass
Abrams, 224 pages

Egyptology enthusiasts thrilled in 1996 to learn of the discovery of an enormous complex of undisturbed tombs at the Bahariya Oasis 230 miles southwest of Cairo. The hundreds of mummies found there are the remains of wealthy Egyptians (rather than royalty) and their servants, dating to the first and second centuries A.D., when Egypt was under Roman rule. This handsome volume of photographs from the ongoing excavation features lavish color photos of the gilded masks and cartonnages of the more affluent occupants of the tombs and, perhaps just as exciting to armchair archeologists, lots of shots of the dig in process.

Zahi Hawass, director of the Giza Pyramids and the field director of the Bahariya project, provides a text that rambles a bit, but winningly so, informing us that Bahariya is the fourth major site in Egypt to have been initially discovered by an animal (a donkey whose foot poked through the roof of one of the tombs — there’s a picture of him) and confiding that “there is nothing comparable to the smell one encounters upon approaching a mummified body that has been buried for two thousand years.” The end of the book is somewhat padded with disquisitions on Egyptian religious beliefs and other sites in the area (including an ancient winery), but the accompanying pictures are so fascinating that it would be ungracious to complain.

–Laura Miller

A Thousand Hounds
by Raymond Merritt and Miles Barth
Taschen, 600 pages

The only problem with “A Thousand Hounds,” which covers the history of dogs in photographs from 1839 to the present, is that 1,000 is too few. I want even more of these canine photos, from blurry daguerreotypes of Rovers who just couldn’t contain their excitement long enough to endure the interminable shutter speed, to a 1998 portrait of a slender-snouted, silky white wolfhound who looks as if he knows all the secrets of both the universe and hair grooming. Every mood and mode of doghood is represented here. There are famous pictures you may have seen before (heiress and patron of the arts Peggy Guggenheim sporting a fetching pair of batwing sunglasses and clutching an armful of pampered pooches) and less-well-known ones that are winning nonetheless (Jörg Brockmann’s wistful stray, his fur matted, but the playful glimmer in his eyes hardly diminished).

There are essays here, too, by photography experts Raymond Merritt and Miles Barth, as well as notable dog quotes from lots of famous people, but in the midst of so many eager faces and alert ears, I just couldn’t sit still long enough to actually read them. Frisbee, anyone?

–Stephanie Zacharek

The Book Lover’s Repair Kit
By Estelle Ellis, Wilton Wiggins and Douglas Lee
Alfred A. Knopf, 160 pages

Here’s an idea whose time has come: A cosmetic surgery kit for beloved books that have seen better days. After all, sunlight, gravity and everyday wear and tear affect books as well people. Packaged in a handsome box that opens like a book and fitted with compartments for all the specialized tools of the trade — brushes, glue, pH-neutral adhesive and so on — this repair kit is a bibliophile’s dream. A hardcover instruction manual is included, with step-by-step instructions for dealing with every kind of damage to books, from page tears to broken spines.

–Maria Russo

Quack! Tales of Medical Fraud from the Museum of Questionable Medical Devices
By Bob McCoy
Santa Monica Press, 235 pages

Just about 200 years ago, doctors called “phrenologists” promoted the theory that the shape of a person’s head determined his “moral constitution.” In other words, if you’ve got a couple of bumps in the back of your noggin, one of these “experts” might see them as an indication of “secretiveness” or an “interest in wealth.” This type of wacky science is just one example in this lively history of quackery; others feature preposterous medical devices and theories thought up to solve the most troublesome physical and mental problems of the day.

Author Bob McCoy uses the Museum of Questionable Medical Devices in Minneapolis as his source and includes pictures of artifacts, newspaper clippings and advertisements for some of the craziest cures ever. Along with more familiar procedures like bloodletting, you’ll learn about the belief that one can diagnose patients based on their “vibrations,” the Trility Nose Straightener (an ancestor of today’s surgical “nose job”) and the Vibratory Chair, marketed to hospitals and steamship companies as a palliative for people “weary of waiting.” This is a bizarre and enthusiastic book, perfect for anyone who savors the intersection of human folly and weird science.

–Suzy Hansen