(In order of preference)

In this unconvential Dalai Lama biopic, Martin Scorsese at last captures the radiant gravity that eluded his The Last Temptation of Christ 10 years ago. Less a costume drama than a cinematic tone poem, Kundun eschews the standard history lessons. Instead, it evokes a deep-seated beauty through its images, sounds, and rhythms -- all resonating in an utterly symphonic conclusion. In terms of pure cinema, this is truly exciting stuff.

The Sweet Hereafter
(Fine Line Features)

Atom Egoyan does Russell Banks, superimposing the essentials of Banks' novel about the aftermath of a school bus accident on his own concerns about the needs of the individual and the nature of family and community. A la Exotica, the narrative flits forward and backward in time, revealing different perspectives on the tragedy in their own good time. At its most affecting moments, it's otherwordly. One of the best ensemble casts of the year (see also L.A. Confidential, below) is topped out by the astonishing Ian Holm, with Sarah Polley and Bruce Greenwood making big impressions.

L.A. Confidential
(Fox Searchlight)

Perhaps the single best time that could be had in a movie theater this year. L.A. Confidential is an absolute pleasure to watch, no less so for the acuity with which Brian Helgeland's screenplay boils down James Ellroy's sprawling hard-boiled novel. Much credit is due to solid performances all around, as well as what must have been preternaturally focused direction by Curtis Hanson, who showed some stuff unseen in his previous features. Not at all flashy, but gripping and thematically solid in a way few contemporary features ever manage.

Another one of the stranger films of 1997 was this newest macabre gem from master Czech animator Jan Svankmajer, depicting a bunch of hardcore sexual fetishists with rather odd fixations whose quests for fulfillment lead them down intersecting paths. It's hard to tell what, if anything, this film really "means." But it bears the fingerprints of a visionary, and it's a surrealist's delight.

Errol Morris's documentary about a circus trainer, a topiary gardener, a robot scientist, and a mole rat expert was one of 1997's simplest pleasures. With what seems like effortless aplomb, Morris edits interview footage together with his trademark hyperreal staged scenes to create a connect-the-dots portrait of the human race at the end of the 20th century. He also manages to pay tribute to the satisfaction of a job well done.

Director Iain Softley's breakthrough is an expertly engaging distillation of Henry James that turns on Helena Bonham Carter's performance as a turn-of-the-century woman whose turn-of-the-century unhappiness may or may not excuse her deviousness. Photographed in rhyming tones of purples and blues, she is the cunning but rueful apex of the year's most disquieting lovers' triangle.

This is the year's guiltiest pleasure -- a Woody Allen film that hangs Woody Allen out to dry and then has the gall to stump for our sympathy in the last reel. The director claims that there's nothing particularly autobiographical about this picture, but it has the ring of truth. And that's why it's so bitterly, pungently funny. Did I laugh? I laughed long and loud. It's recommended only to Woody's legion of devoted fans, but I'd be disingenuous if I tried to deny that this, his most self-indulgent comedy in years (and that's saying a lot), won me over completely.

Anchored by knockout performances, Donnie Brasco manages to retool the gangster movie, with a narrowed focus and only a couple of nods to Scorsese. What feels just right is the menace, the sense of dread that accompanies a small-timer's life in the mob -- not to mention an undercover cop's. Based on a true story, natch, but Paul Attanasio's screenplay finds the proper place for every character and each sticky situation.

Most Underrated

Philip Glass's hypnotic score must have lulled the big city critics to sleep like so many lullabies. How else to explain their relative apathy toward Kundun, the most adventurous and experimental American film of the year?

Most Overrated

James Cameron's Titanic proved mainly that the director was capable of making a three-and-a-quarter-hour movie that was engaging, if not compelling. In a sudden rush to embrace what's purportedly a return to good old-fashioned Hollywood studio filmmaking, critics and viewers alike have enthroned this one at the top of 1997's movie heap. I respectfully disagree.

The similarly beloved Boogie Nights, meanwhile, struck me as a stone-cold GoodFellas knockoff, from the pushy/fancy camerawork to the descent-into-a-nightmare structure and virtuoso staging.

And I just don't understand the cult appeal of Kevin Smith's latest, Chasing Amy. Sure it's funny, just like Clerks was funny. If Kevin Smith was working as a sketch writer for Saturday Night Live, I might even argue that he's some kind of genius. But his slacker-hip stories turn grating at feature length, especially with the indulgent monologues that he gives his characters to mouth.

Best Reissue (Theatrical)

Who would have thought that the pre-release version of The Big Sleep, finally shown in theaters this year, could possibly be better than the film noir classic that movie buffs everywhere have grown to love? And I do think this version is better. The cherished "racehorse" dialogue between Bogey and Bacall is gone, but the overall mood of the film is darker and more consistent. And when the question is finally posed of whether these two characters -- who've kept their distance during this version of the film -- can trust each other, the charge in the air is palpable.

Best Video Release

New Yorker Films snuck Jacques Rivette's Celine and Julie Go Boating onto videotape in 1997, and it's a hard sell -- with the market for foreign and independent films on video shrinking, you can hardly blame them for festooning the jacket with a shot of Julie in the shower. Do them a favor and rent it from your nearest video dealer, assuming he had foresight enough to buy copies of largely forgotten gems like this one.

If Celine and Julie Go Boating isn't a revolutionary film, it's a uniquely captivating one. The opening scenes, in which Celine, sitting on a park bench, sees Julie rush by, dropping her scarf, and then chases after her with it, give you no clue by themselves what the film's subject is likely to be. It's only later on, when things start to become a little bit baffling, that you realize that Celine is Julie's White Rabbit, and that both of them have no gone through the looking glass -- or the viewfinder, as it were.

Celine and Julie become spectators, and eventually participants, in a delightful sort of dream-theater version of cinema. As an audience, they have the opportunity to make a moral choice regarding what happens on-screen and their culpability in those events. At first, the situation is simply baffling. Before the film is over, it will become wholly satisfying, and then baffling again.

But it's a fascinating game given elegant form through Rivette's leisurely, elliptical style (at 193 minutes, it's even more expansive, in its own way, than Titanic). More, it's a compelling exercise in spectatorship, paying tribute to the way that we watch movies. It may also seem like a bit of a relic, since they don't make art movies like this anymore. All the more reason to set aside a Sunday afternoon and enjoy.

Runners-Up:

Trainspotting (uncut, undubbed widescreen laserdisc w/commentary track and deleted scenes, Criterion)

The Singing Detective (six-cassette boxed set, CBS-Fox)

Vertigo (widescreen laserdisc w/commentary track and documentary, Universal Signature Collection)

Best Reason to Pay For Cable

I could pretend that Comedy Central's South Park didn't make me laugh harder than anything else in 1997, but I'd be lying. This unremittingly profane animated series by the folks (fellow University of Colorado alums Trey Parker and Matt Stone) who brought you Cannibal: The Musical finally discovers the cadence and attitude of schoolyard conversation among little kids -- it's as innocent as it is vulgar. Takes me back, it does.

Best Book on Film

Eye on the World: Conversations with International Filmmakers (Silman-James Press) is almost daunting in its breadth. This 826-page collection of San Francisco Chronicle journalist Judy Stone's interviews with more than 200 directors constitutes a smorgasbord of little bites of film history. I'll humbly admit that names like Ferid Boughedir (Tunisia), Kashiko Kawakita (Japan), and Glauber Rocha (Brazil) meant nothing to me when I picked up this book. To be honest, I still have no idea what their films are like, but I will now have an impetus for checking them out, and a point of reference for viewing. Conversely, who can resist the time-capsule appeal of an interview with a wisecracking Woody Allen, circa 1968, during the shooting of Take the Money and Run, his first film as director? Or an appreciative conversation with Walter Murch, the largely unsung film editor and sound designer who helped Coppola craft Apocalypse Now? Most of the interviews are only two or three pages long, but their clarity is tribute to Stone's skills as a reporter, eschewing self-promotion in favor of a style that reveals her own talent for clarity.

Best Reason to Log On Every Day

The Hollywood Stock Exchange is a real-time market simulation that hinges entirely on the grosses of real cinematic product. In exchange for your registration (it's free), you get $2 million "Hollywood dollars" to invest as you will -- "movie stocks" are valued at however many millions of dollars they make in the first four weeks of release while "star bonds" move up and down according to the grosses of the films the personalities appear in. The various fan sites and "columnists" know all the angles and do a bang-up job of predicting just about exactly how much a movie will make in the days before it opens. What's even more sobering is that on Saturday afternoon, when the estimated Friday grosses come in, the HSX can pretty much peg the movie's eventual performance. There are wild cards, of course, which keep the game fun and intriguing (often, they're "smaller" movies that go against the grain of the HSX demographic -- My Best Friend's Wedding was a windfall for a few lucky players, as was Soul Food). If you play to win, you'll learn more than you ever wanted to know about how much money the movies make, and how quickly.

The "Miramarketing" Award for Most Egregious Misrepresentation of a Film

The dotty Australian import Love Serenade, a sweet but sly tale of a smooth-talking DJ and the rather dowdy young sisters who fall for his low-rent seduction tactics, was promoted stateside with this lovely newspaper ad featuring co-star Miranda Otto looking drop-dead gorgeous in what looks to be a bit of silk lingerie. Of course, that photo bears no relationship whatsoever to anything in the movie itself, least of all Otto's rather awkward girl-child character. Miramax apparently thinks that ravishing babes are essential to selling a non-Hollywood picture, but it's truly sad if this kind of misrepresentation is necessary simply to plant butts in theater seats. Good flick, despite the ad.

The "My Brain Is My Second Favorite Organ" Award

Scottish actor Ewan McGregor spent more time this year talking about his penis than his pictures, as delighted journalists quizzed him about appearing conspicuously nude in art-house hits Trainspotting and The Pillow Book. Nothing if not charming, McGregor took all the questions in stride, chivalrously complaining that women are asked to shed raiment for the screen far more often than men, and even going so far as to make a joke about his upcoming part as young Obi-Wan Kenobi in the sacred Star Wars series: "I think there's got to be a scene where Obi-Wan's in the buff. Yeah, when he drops his robes or something and shows everyone his light saber."

The "Everyone's A Critic" Award for Best Off-the-Cuff Slam

Later in the same interview (with E! Online), McGregor had this to say about last year's biggest hit, Independence Day: "I would shoot myself in the head before I was in a film like that. I really would. I think it's disgraceful."

Best Dumb Fun

I've now seen The Fifth Element twice, and while the hokey climax still makes me wince, Luc Besson's live-action comic book exhibits goofy imagination in spades. Plus, it features Ian Holm (who gave the performance of his career in The Sweet Hereafter) in a fine supporting turn as a daffy old priest. Gary Oldman, meanwhile, synthesizes a bad guy out of equal parts Ross Perot and Adolf Hitler. Don't confuse it with a great film, but do give it a look on video if you took a pass in theaters and have a soft spot for sentimental sci-fi fluff.