7) "Girl on the Bridge" Anyone wondering where the reckless "taking a chance on love" spirit of American romantic comedies has gone couldn't do better than to look at Patrice Leconte's romantic daydream of a movie. Daniel Auteuil is the down-on-his-luck knife thrower who saves a beautiful young girl (the charming Vanessa Paradis) from suicide and makes her the assistant in his act. The movie both believes in and kids the idea that there's a soul mate out there for each of us. Flitting from city to city, the movie captures the globe-hopping spirit of '30s movies, as if Leconte had set out to pay homage to the doomed romantic fatalism of '30s French melodramas and veered off into the era's American screwball comedies.

8) "Beau Travail" Claire Denis' riff on "Billy Budd" transplants Melville's sea saga to the French Foreign Legion and the desert of Djibouti. Placing her faith in the ability of observation to reveal, Denis and her brilliant cinematographer, Anges Godard, allow the film's meanings to reveal themselves in the deliberate, hypnotic pace of the Legionnaires yielding to the rigid discipline and unvarying routine of life under the African sun. As Galoup, the film's version of Melville's master sergeant, Denis Lavant lets loose all of the film's repression in the astonishing final scene, summing up the movie and blasting it to pieces at the same time. I've seen this film four times in the course of the past year, and Lavant's final moments still leave me unable to believe what I'm seeing.

9) "X-Men" Brian Singer's film of the Marvel comic doesn't reach the Wagnerian heights of Tim Burton's "Batman," but it's a great comic-book movie with a grandeur of its own. Depicting the adolescent outsider's desire for acceptance and revenge in the story of a battle between good mutants and evil mutants, the movie is less resonant in the plot involving a bigoted politician than when we get to see the good mutants putting their special powers to work. The best scenes feature the terrifically charismatic Hugh Jackman as Wolverine and Anna Paquin as Rogue, a girl who is so empathetic that merely touching another human being causes her to drain their life force. Paquin gives the freakiest and most convincing portrayal of the heightened sensitivity of adolescence since Sissy Spacek in "Carrie" and Amy Irving in "The Fury."

10) "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" Treating the Depression as if it were a tall tale handed down through the generations, the Coen brothers have made their first movie with heart and beauty. Images drawn from the photography of Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange are side by side with images drawn from American kitsch and movies. Tommy-gun-wielding bank robbers taunt, "Come and get me, coppers!" Klansmen whirl around a prospective victim as if choreographed by Busby Berkeley. As the three chain-gang fugitives who are the rube heroes, George Clooney (in a slick parody of Clark Gable), John Turturro and hilarious, long-faced Tim Blake Nelson are perfectly in tune with the Coens' Rube Goldberg universe. If you can imagine an American comic strip with something like the perseverance and fatalism of bluegrass and spirituals, this is it.

Honorable mentions: If it had been released, Paul Schrader's lush noir romance "Forever Mine" would be near the top of my list. And no list of the movies that have given me the most pleasure this year would be complete without "Erin Brockovich," "Set Me Free," "Cast Away," "Two Family House," "East-West," "Gun Shy," "Jesus' Son," "Judy Berlin," "The Original Kings of Comedy" and Gillian Anderson's staggering performance in "The House of Mirth," the best any actor has given this year.

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