Cinema

By RICHARD CORLISS

1 KANDAHAR Before Sept. 11, few knew of Kandahar; few cared about the ravages of civil war and Taliban rule in Afghanistan. Now the world sees the news value in Mohsen Makhmalbaf's tale of a woman crossing the desert incognito to find her sister. Even without the headlines, this Iranian film boasts a visual and emotional magnificence. It has a painter's acute eye for beauty within horror: the gorgeous colors of the burkas that imprison Afghan women; the handsome face of a child in a Taliban school as he expertly assembles a Kalashnikov rifle; the vision of one-legged men scrambling to retrieve prostheses dropped in parachutes from a plane. This is scoop journalism and heartbreaking poetry.

2 MOULIN ROUGE A never-prettier Nicole Kidman entrances hunkily soulful Ewan McGregor in an orgasmic swirl of color, design and pop music from mad Aussie Baz Luhrmann. In the age of Media Cool, this recklessly romantic burst of kinetic excess offended nice sensibilities (see next page) even as it launched other viewers into rapture. I'm with the rapt. The movie asks, Moulin Rouge-ez avec moi ce soir? I say, Sure. All night long.

3 BLACK HAWK DOWN Ridley Scott's harrowing replay of a 1993 Somalian debacle for U.S. troops is pure cinema in action. In nearly two hours of relentless warfare (think of Saving Private Ryan without the slow bits), it shows how a director can marshal images and sounds, biography and geography, to create emotion pictures. With Gladiator, Hannibal and now this ultimate war movie, Ridley's on a roll.

4 IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE So many affairs are like the one endured here by Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung: furtive, guilty, leaving the ache of remorse. Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai keeps the camera close to his actors--so close you can feel their heat and pain. Everyone is gorgeous and grieving in this threnody to erotic loss.

5 MULHOLLAND DR. David Lynch made the first 90 min. of this sexy thriller as a TV movie. When it didn't sell, Lynch added a coda that sends his characters into the weirdest Wonderland, as if Twin Peaks were to morph into Blue Velvet. It's not all intelligible, but it's always fabulous. Like the Coen brothers' excellent The Man Who Wasn't There, Lynch's laugh-scream of a movie dwells lusciously in the Kingdom of Noir. It ransacks old-movie style to create an avant-movie nightmare.

6 MONSTERS, INC. It was a swell year for computer-generated cartoons. Shrek and Monsters, Inc. each had heart, spot-on gags and $200 million-plus domestic grosses. But if my desert island had a giant movie theater (or a DVD player), I'd choose the latest miracle from director Pete Docter and the Pixar crowd. This is a buddy movie and a daddy movie, about two creatures who inadvertently adopt a nosy little girl. It's got pictorial dazzle and an uncommon generosity of spirit, and it ends with the sweetest, rightest shot of the movie year.

7 FAT GIRL Merci, French directors, for reminding audiences that sex, with its negotiations and lies, its beauty and messiness, its graphic, clumsy imagery, is a crucial part of the human drama. The best of a new bunch of dark, sometimes explicit French films about sex is Catherine Breillat's fable of two sisters, 12 and 15, who are rivals and comrades. Breillat juggles coming-of-age comedy with horror-tragedy in a film that lingers in the mind like the memory of a first, fatal affair.

8 THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING It's a fantasy based on a famous series of novels.. a film of eye-popping grandeur and sumptuous production values...and, unlike the recent Harry Potter event, it's a good movie too. In the first of a Tolkien film trilogy, director Peter Jackson lays out the Middle Earth adventure with epic brio. This solid, often stirring version stops just this side of enthrallment. But then, the grand journey has just begun.

9 AMELIE FROM MONTMARTRE A shy girl with a runaway imagination (Audrey Tautou) forces magic on all those in her Paris neighborhood. Jean-Pierre Jeunet's scurrying narrative and cinematic gamesmanship (a style that could be called faux Truffaut) may at times weary viewers used to Hollywood's burlier, spell-it-all-out mode. But give me, any day, a film that offers a groaning banquet table of invention and enchantment--and a showcase for world-class beguiler Tautou.

10 GHOST WORLD An Amelie with attitude, teen Enid (the frighteningly assured Thora Birch) adopts orphan things and people in order to make fun of them. This daringly undarling comedy, from director Terry Zwigoff and comix writer Daniel Clowes, shows just how furtive and morose an ordeal growing up can be. It's a Heathers for the 9/11 Generation.