Best of 1991

1 BUGSY

American Dreaming by the gangster Bugsy Siegel, who, besides inventing himself as a Hollywood celebrity, invented Las Vegas as the playground for our more primitive fantasies. Warren Beatty and Annette Bening are terrific in director Barry Levinson's smart-ironic, romantic-perverse, funny-poignant take on modern life in a fast, deadly lane.

2. MY FATHER'S GLORY/MY MOTHER'S CASTLE

In a radiant two-part adaptation of Marcel Pagnol's autobiography, French writer-director Yves Robert imagines family life in Provence as a storybook dream: loving parents, adventurous but obedient children, an idyllic refuge every summer. This old-men's view of youth tells us that memories are precious because life is short.

3. EUROPA, EUROPA

In World War II Germany, a Jewish adolescent survives by becoming a member of the Hitler Youth. Writer-director Agnieszka Holland based her miraculously jaunty, profoundly moving portrayal of the will to live on the true story of one Solomon Perel. And Marco Hofschneider plays him with a stunned guile that goes beyond acting.

4. JFK

If the political savants who have been denouncing this zippy melodrama hadn't already existed, Oliver Stone might have invented them, because they fulfill his one-size-fits-all conspiracy theory. Hyper down, pundits! Don't deny Stone the right due any artist: to interpret history through his own prism. And give moviegoers the chance to make up their own minds about who shot President Kennedy. The only thing that Stone's dazzling assemblage of political-science fiction attempts to assassinate is complacency.

5. BLACK ROBE

A Jesuit priest goes into the 17th century Canadian wilderness to convert the savages and is himself converted, after terrifying adventures, to cultural relativism. Bruce Beresford's dark dance with the wolves of the spirit is an intelligent, perfectly controlled epic.

6. PARIS IS BURNING

At the Harlem drag balls, gents parade in costumes and personalities of their own baroque creation. Jennie Livingston's thrilling documentary is not just about what it means to be a member of the triple minority of gay black transvestites. It is a testament to the desire -- pathetic, heroic, overwhelming -- that all dreamers have for transcendence.

7. THELMA & LOUISE

Road picture, feminist parable and populist comedy, this tale of two ladies looking for adventure and getting more than they bargained for outraged the humor-handicapped, but dug into the ribs of the ribald. In the title roles, Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon were gloriously wiggy.

8. BEAUTY AND THE BEAST

There's plenty of animation dazzle in Disney's latest tuneful fable; the Be Our Guest number manages to evoke both Busby Berkeley and the Folies-Bergere. But Beauty swaps the buoyancy of Disney's last great cartoon feature, The | Little Mermaid, for poignancy and emotional depth. That's fine too since, at heart, this story is about a man's need to evoke fear when he is really afraid, and a woman's need to pity a man before she can love him.

9. RAMBLING ROSE

Laura Dern's innocent horniness as the servant girl who gets a middle-class Southern family all hot and bothered was one of the year's comic and erotic delights. Calder Willingham's script and Martha Coolidge's direction flavored a warm, steamy brew with just the right amounts of lemon and honey.

10. THE COMMITMENTS

If you can still sing along to a movie four months after it opens, it probably deserves to be here. The music in Alan Parker's let's-put-the-show- on-right- here-in-Dublin entertainment is classic '60s rhythm and blues performed by white folks with a brogue, but the spirit is reverent and genial, not culturally imperialistic. The soul is part Wilson Pickett, part early Beatles; the guts are supplied by 16-year-old lead singer Andrew Strong. See this roadhouse lark again and feel better about 1991.

THE LONGEST YAWN

What is longer than the fully erect ego of a movie director determined to make a "statement"? The patience, obviously, of movie executives determined to indulge his or her imperious auteurship. And the inordinate length of the movies now trying our patience. The good (JFK) would be better, the so-so (The Prince of Tides) greatly improved, and the bad (Hook) less tiresome if everyone would learn to get on and off in under two hours. Give us a break, guys.