2) "Mission to Mars" Recipient of the year's most disgraceful reviews, Brian De Palma's tender, poetic and intimate science-fiction adventure refines and extends themes that have obsessed him for years and poses a question crucial to any commercial filmmaker in the age when computer-graphics technology threatens to reduce movies to spectacle: How do we avail ourselves of technology without sacrificing our humanity? The humanity here was in the flawless performances by Gary Sinise, Tim Robbins, Don Cheadle and Connie Nielsen (equally terrific in "Gladiator"), and in the spacewalk that makes up the movie's excruciating centerpiece. The scene reverses De Palma's great theme of thwarted chivalry to come up with one of the most moving demonstrations of the bonds of marriage ever put on film. Can American film critics still see what's in front of their nose? The reviews for "Mission to Mars" suggest they're paying more attention to the studios' publicity departments.

3) "Hamlet" Michael Almereyda's free adaptation of Shakespeare is not just equal to its source but confirms the director as contemporary cinema's great poet of urban loneliness, alive to the beauty and coldness of modern cities. In a year of spectacular special effects ("Mission to Mars" and "X-Men") none may provoke as much wonder as the sight of the dead king's ghost disappearing into a Pepsi machine, or as much longing as Hamlet (Ethan Hawke) gazing at the pixel vision images of his Ophelia (Julia Stiles).

4) "Quills" Giving comfort to neither the people who'd ban art nor the defenders who insist, "Art can't hurt you" (as some of Robert Mapplethorpe's supporters did a few years back), Philip Kaufman's nuanced and damnably smart Grand Guignol entertainment about the last days of the Marquis de Sade (Geoffrey Rush) is an argument for the danger that's always inherent in art: the possibility of giving rise to madness. Brazen and witty, Kaufman invites us to flatter ourselves as sophisticates able to chuckle at Sade's tales of depravity. And then he opens up the abyss, leaving us beyond laughter, deep in a world of horror. Great performances from Rush, Michael Caine, Joaquin Phoenix and Kate Winslet.

5) "Yi Yi" When you're thirsty nothing tastes as good as cool, clear water. Edward Yang's three-hour film about several months in the lives of a Taiwanese family is that pure and refreshing. Encompassing life's primal passages, the movie never feels ponderous. Yang fully acknowledges the compromises life entails, but in the end, the movie is a gift that allows us to savor the texture and weight of the moments that slide by us hour after hour, day after day.

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