Best of 2000: Film

John Waters

1. Dancer in the Dark (Lars von Trier) The most hilariously moving, "feel-insane" movie of the year.

2. O Brother, Where Art Thou? (Joel Coen) The jaw-dropping all-singing, all-dancing Ku Klux Klan-Busby Berkeley number is a real beaut.

3. L'Humanite (Bruno Dumont) The endless saga of a simpleton cop so desperate to feel emotion that he spies on the sex life of his lusty neighbors and smells and kisses his crime suspects during interrogations.

4. American Psycho (Mary Harron) A chain-saw movie for the elite; the funniest American comedy of the year.

5. The Idiots (Lars von Trier) A Dogma 95 comedy about a bunch of Danish yuppies who join a Manson-like cult of assholes and liberate themselves by acting like retards in public ("spazzing").

6. Water Drops on Burning Rocks (Francois Ozon) A fake Fassbinder movie directed by my new favorite French auteur. Screenplay necrophilia never seemed so cinematically correct.

7. The Virgin Suicides (Sofia Coppola) Who would have predicted Sofia Coppola could bring to mind Cocteau's Les Parents terribles?

8. Criminal Lovers (Francois Ozon) Ozon again. A Leopold-and-Loeb-meet-Hansel-and-Gretel fairy tale about a bitchy teen ingenue and her naive boyfriend who are imprisoned by a horny, gay, cannibalistic ogre.

9. Pink Narcissus (James Bidgood, 1971/99) Actor-model Bobby Kendall's ass; as beautiful and timeless as The Wizard of Oz.

10. Eva (Joseph Losey, 1962) The best rereleased failed art film of the decade. Jeanne Moreau chain-smokes and listens to Billie Holiday records while humiliating her lover in glorious black and white.

Susan Sontag

1. Yi Yi (A One and a Two) (Edward Yang) Is Yang as great as Hou Hsiao-hsien? Well, he's different. See this.

2. Faithless (Liv Ullmann) Ullmann's best work by far, with one of the greatest film performances ever, by Lena Endre.

3. L'Humanite (Bruno Dumont) A very ambitious film about looking and about guilt.

4. Beau Travail (Claire Denis) A dazzling riff on Melville's Billy Budd. You'll never forget the final scene, when the amazing Denis Lavant starts to dance.

5. The Wind Will Carry Us (Abbas Kiarostami) The best-known Iranian director has made another incomparable film.

6. Hamlet (Michael Almereyda) Hamlet lost in Manhattan. Witty, intelligent, and most convincing when it's altogether over the top.

7. The Circle (Jafar Panahi) Another marvel from Iran. A relentless, anguishing film by a director hitherto unknown to me, about the persecution of women.

8. La Captive (Chantal Akerman) Supposedly inspired by Proust. Atypically movieish (i.e., Hitchcockian) for Ackerman but still adamant, unpredictable.

9. Travelers (Bahram Beizai, 1992) OK, it came out eight years ago, but I just saw it (and I didn't see ten films made this year that I really admired). Trust me, this masterpiece from Iran is unlike anything you've seen yet.

10. Smoking/No Smoking (Alain Resnais, 1993) I saw Resnais's brilliant, ingenious, hilarious film for the first time this summer--it never got a theatrical release in this country. How come?

Ian Birnie

1. You Can Count on Me (Kenneth Lonergan) The most accomplished of this year's American indie debuts.

2. Chunhyang (Im Kwon-taek) From Korea, a completely original, magisterial work that combines sung narration with ravishing images.

3. Chicken Run (Peter Lord and Nick Park) The Ealing comedy is alive and well and living in claymation.

4. In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-wai) A concerto for two ill-starred couples and pure pleasure for the senses. Elegant, restrained, stylized, brilliantly sure of itself from its first frame to its astonishing epiphany at Angkor Wat.

5. Long Night's Journey Into Day (Deborah Hoffmann and Frances Reid) The documentary of the year explores the pain and trauma of South Africa's villains and victims by examining four cases before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

6. The Circle (Jafar Panahi) A compelling and compassionate look at women's lives in Iran. Perhaps the year's most courageous political film.

7. Djomeh (Hassan Yektapanah) A perfect balance of the verbal and the visual: Think blue rectangle against brown field. A jewel in the crown of new Iranian cinema.

8. Dancer in the Dark (Lars von Trier) A mass of indulgent contradictions, it is nonetheless the most exciting and challenging film of the year.

9. Before Night Falls (Julian Schnabel) Adapted from the memoirs of Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas, Schnabel's second biopic passionately affirms the artist as heroic individualist.

10. Yi Yi (A One and a Two) (Edward Yang) A superior soap opera with important things to say about human frailty and everyday life.

Kent Jones

1. The House of Mirth (Terence Davies) Davies's mesmerizing Wharton adaptation is as physically and emotionally precise a film as I've seen in years.

2. Werckmeister Harmonies (Bela Tarr) Passionate, mournful, gorgeous, and genuinely visionary.

3. Les Destinees sentimentales (Olivier Assayas) Another literary adaptation (from Jacques Chardonne), and one of the director's most personal films: a devastating meditation on time and identity, made with the lightest touch.