THE BEST OF 1996

By CONTRIBUTORS GINIA BELLAFANTE, RICHARD CORLISS, CHRISTOPHER JOHN FARLEY, PAUL GRAY, BELINDA LUSCOMBE, JOSHUA QUITTNER, RICHARD SCHICKEL, MICHAEL WALSH, STEVE WULF, RICHARD ZOGLIN

One's knee-jerk tendency at year's end is to look back and decry the 12 months at hand as the most dismal, most indicative of civilization's downward arc since, well, the 12 months before this. 1996, with enough depressing cultural offerings to warm a pessimist's heart, may not change a Scrooge's mind on this score. Perhaps 1996 will even be remembered as the year of the somewhat desperate exclamation point: That Thing You Do! Suddenly Susan! Lamar!

Yet in 1996 there was a lot to reward a scrappy faith in human persistence. Amid a flotilla of alien invasions, The English Patient brought David Lean-like scope and passion back to the Cineplex. Still laboring under Khomeini's fatwa, Salman Rushdie produced what may be his greatest novel. A rock update of La Boheme brought the Broadway musical resoundingly into the '90s. The Fugees proved you can sell millions of rap records without gangsta's toxicity, while Tiger Woods broadened golf's horizons simply by showing up. And Jerry Seinfeld stayed funny, defying sitcomic entropy. So here's to the men and women who spat in mediocrity's eye and made us believe in forward progress--the best of 1996.