1. THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS
At a time when Hollywood movies seem to be nothing but self-conscious recyclings of ancient comic- book clichés, Wes Anderson walks in with a bursting bagful of ideas, presented as the story of an eccentric New York family of geniuses. With reference points from Thurber to Faulkner, it represents the American idiom at its finest and most distinctive.

2. THE TAILOR OF PANAMA
John le Carré's novel of dimmed and damaging idealism, setting a cynical British agent  (Pierce Brosnan) against a vulnerable ex-con (Geoffrey Rush) he has drafted as an operative, was filmed with classical restraint and attention to detail by the great John Boorman.

3. AMÉLIE
It takes a depressive to make a great, glowingly optimistic film, and coming from Jean-Pierre Jeunet, you know that every ounce of charm and feeling in this stylized tale of a helpful Parisian waif  (Audrey Tautou) has survived the most rigorous personal testing. Resistance is futile.

4. WAKING LIFE
The revolution in animation made possible by computer-generated graphics has led to some ravishing new entertainments, but this experimental feature by Richard Linklater puts the new techniques to personal, highly expressive ends. A dream film, it lives in some previously uncharted territory between Disney and Strindberg.

5. THE CIRCLE
Jafar Panahi's film — a circular narrative that links the stories of a number of women of different classes and different experiences in contemporary Tehran — establishes a new direction in Iranian cinema, away from the self-referential formal experiments and veiled allegories of the 90's and into pointed and potentially dangerous social and political commentary.

6. FAT GIRL
The French title — "Ma soeur!" or "My Sister!" — suggests the intensely personal nature of Catherine Breillat's scorching coming-of-age film about a pudgy French teen who must live in the shadow of her slim, sexy older sister. Ms. Breillat's take on female sexuality may not always please the gender theorists, but it remains a pulsingly vital vision fed by blood, sweat and other bodily fluids.

7. SHREK
Hollywood may have lost its way with adult subjects, but this country continues to make beautiful films for children and their grown-upcompanions. Directed by Andrew Adamson and Vicky Jenson, "Shrek" dissected the classic Disney canon even as it extended its underlying emotional appeal into the 21st century.

8. LORD OF THE RINGS: THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING
The first of three installments in Peter Jackson's epic adaptation of the J. R. R. Tolkien fantasy, it could have been another rigidly overdesigned digital nightmare, but is instead a film of amazing vitality and visual invention.

9. A CHRONICLE OF CORPSES
From outside the boundaries of the established independent film world — Philadelphia, to be exact — Andrew Repasky McElhinney's unclassifiably odd horror film marks the debut of a genuinely original sensibility.

10. EUREKA
Though filmed in Japan two years ago, Shinji Aoyama's movie couldn't seem more contemporary: its subject is the emotional void left by a devastating act of irrational violence. Lengthy, leisurely and beautifully composed in widescreen black and white, it is the story of four survivors on a journey through a vast, empty landscape, looking for the lives they have lost.