CL critics name top 10 films of 2000

Felicia Feaster
1. Dancer in the Dark A completely original revitalization of the musical, Lars von Trier's story of a martyred mother's unbreakable love for her child reached ecstatic melodramatic heights brought down to earth by Trier's emotionally devastating Brechtian musical numbers.
2. You Can Count on Me This beautifully performed character study of the relationship between a grown brother and sister whose lives have been defined by their parents' deaths offers hope that mature, thoughtful, nuanced dramas are still capable of being made on the indie scene.
3. The Filth and the Fury Intelligent? Tender? Socially committed? This narcotic documentary of the world's most notorious punk band broadened our understanding of the men and the music, offering as trenchant a vision of the U.K.'s economic straits as a Mike Leigh or Ken Loach film.
4. Girlfight Like another one of this year's girl-power entries from a first-time director, Sophia Coppola's splendid The Virgin Suicides, this estrogen-driven story gave a heart and soul to female ambition, power and desire few films ever bother with.
5. American Psycho Though it at times descended into slasher film camp, director Mary Harron did the unthinkable when she transformed snot-nosed literary dabbler Bret Easton Ellis's loathsome, misogynistic "satire" into a genuinely shocking, deliciously stylish portrait of modern soullessness.
6. Ghost Dog An idiosyncratic story and entirely odd combination of art film and gangster schlock, Jim Jarmusch's inner-city samurai film proves there's still a place for quirky stories and unique visions in contemporary cinema.
7. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon Ang Lee's bold film dared to alienate an American audience with Mandarin Chinese dialogue as it envisioned the delicate, gravity-defying martial arts action and tenderness of the Hong Kong cinema in a wholly new light.
8. Traffic A vanguard indie who's managed to retain some of his integrity even as he heads into La-La Land, Steven Soderbergh's Altmanesque story of the intersecting players in the American and Mexican drug trade maintained an engrossing pace even as it juggled multiple storylines.
9. Requiem for a Dream An often ludicrous, hysterical spectacle of drugs and sex (not unlike this year's equally noteworthy, shock-rific sin-pot Quills) featuring over-edited histrionics and voyeuristic thrills masquerading as moral message, this lurid cautionary tale nevertheless stuck with you for its visual pyrotechnics, chutzpa and dumb, blind faith in its own excessive vision.
10. Gladiator Russell Crowe.
Curt Holman
1. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon If Jet Li wed Jane Austen, they'd deliver something akin to the thrilling kinetics and emotional depth of Ang Lee's lavish Hong Kong homage.
2. You Can Count on Me With the year's finest original script, Kenneth Lonerghan and his cast take delight in finding the commonplace miracles in love, family and the workplace.
3. Chicken Run: "Wallace and Grommit" creators make a great escape from a tyrannical hen farm, with so many poultry jokes they could have called it Chicken Pun.
4. High Fidelity Stephen Frears and John Cusack provide a loving, letter-perfect rendition of Nick Hornby's novel of love among the cut-out bins.
5. The Filth and the Fury: A Sex Pistols Film Julien Temple's collage-like essay puts the seminal punk band in their rightful place in both English history and pop music.
6. One Day in September A brilliant blend of chilling interviews, archival broadcasts and evocative recreations puts you at the scene of the terrorist attack on the Munich Olympic Games.
7. Almost Famous Cameron Crowe's autobiographical fable shows how one music critic — and the whole of rock 'n' roll — came of age.
8. American Psycho Die, yuppie scum. This fiendish, hilarious consumerist satire rests on Christian Bale's perfectly tailored shoulders.
9. Jesus' Son: Hallucinatory humor, the hope of redemption and a self-effacing cast mark this willfully episodic look at a junkie's hard-knock life.
10. O Brother, Where Art Thou? Pay less attention to the Coen Brothers' cornpone jokes and Homeric footnotes and enjoy the superbly chosen period music and glorious cinematography.
Eddy Von Mueller
1. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon With dazzling camera-work, complex characters, kick-ass fights and a rich and ambiguous narrative, Ang Lee's martial art-movie towers head and shoulders above anything else this year. Granted, it was probably hoisted up there on wires ...
2. Chicken Run OK, it ain't art, but the first feature from Aardman Animation's Nick Park and Peter Lord, the claymation wizards behind Creature Comforts and "Wallace and Grommit," is funnier, smarter and more satisfying than most of the flesh-and-blood features foisted upon us these days. It is also the most impressive 3-D animation ever produced.
3. Gohatto (aka Taboo) Though it hasn't yet made landfall in Atlanta, Nagisa Oshima's beautifully mounted, wildly controversial gay samurai epic is undoubtedly 2000's most innovative offering. Its straightlaced, straight-faced portrayal of love among Japan's war-elite is also a welcome antidote to the current explosion of huggably effete stereotyped gay men in American films.
4. O Brother, Where Art Thou Gotta love those Coens. Only the demented duo behind Raising Arizona would think that pseudo-musical adaptation of Homer's Odyssey set in the 1930s rural South was the perfect way to ring in a new millennium. Weirder still; they're right.
5. Shadow of the Vampire E. Elias Merhige's deliciously dark film-about-film fantasy about the making of the classic horror silent Nosferatu probably won't win Oscars for production design, original screenplay, costumes or "Best Supporting Actor" for Willem Dafoe. But it should.
6. Dancer in the Dark Just when you think you can relegate Lars Van Trier to the Danish Home for the Irretrievably Obtuse, he goes and cranks out a major work of world cinema. A subtle solution of neo- and sur-realism, Dancer is all the better for the ditching of Dogma aesthetics and the eye-opening debut performance of Bjork.
7. Best in Show Not quite the best in show; but certainly a "Best in Breed," Chris Guest's sharply written and scrupulously shot mockumentary about purebred pooches and their humans is more fun than turning an amorous Rottweiler loose at a meeting of the Greater Atlanta Association of Jack Russell Fanciers.
8. Third World Cop Technically a '99 release, this razor-sharp, no-budget Jamaican noir, shot on consumer-grade DV cameras on the incredibly mean streets of Kingston, only recently made the rounds of domestic venues. Not only is Cop a riveting, reeling good ride, it also points to the great promise of digital technology, which is allowing major movie-making talents to operate in places, like Jamaica, that never had a prayer of sustaining a commercial film industry.
9. Croupier Another victim of the vagaries of international film distribution, Mike Hodges' slowly simmering 1998 pot-boiler about the doings and undoing of a would-be novelist-turned-casino dealer was well worth the two years it took to get it into American theaters. It's also well worth a trip to the video store, when it gets there.
10. Timecode This experimental DV drama, which splits the big screen into four smaller ones showing parallel stories which constantly overlap and interact, may not show us the Shape of Things to Come, but it is an impressive step toward re-thinking cinema in the post-filmic age.
Bert Osborne
1. Requiem for a Dream Director Darren Aronofsky's piercing depiction of addiction hell is dazzling and exhilarating when it could've been merely depressing and enervating (it's that, too). The incomparable Ellen Burstyn heads a uniformly superb ensemble.
2. Chocolat A warm and fanciful romantic fable in which the never-lovelier Juliette Binoche plays a '50s free-spirit who breezes into a small French village and opens a confectionery, arousing in more ways than one the sensations of a star-studded supporting cast.
3. Billy Elliot The unabashedly uplifting story of a young British boy (Jamie Bell soars) who finds a reprieve from his dreary working-class life in the unlikeliest of places: ballet class. Yeah, it's a "feel-good" movie — so what's wrong with that?
4. Dancer in the Dark Another bold experiment from director Lars von Trier, this documentary-styled musical tragedy (!) features as the ill-fated heroine, Bjork, who delivers a surprisingly nuanced, ultimately heartbreaking performance.
5. Chicken Run Watching this highly imaginative and entertaining feature-length debut from animated-short Oscar winners Peter Lord and Nick Park, you will believe that chickens think and feel and talk — and you may never eat another chicken pot pie.
6. You Can Count on Me. A simple, leisurely paced comedy-drama, with Laura Linney and Mark Ruffalo as grown siblings still coming to terms with their past. Matthew Broderick steals the show as her persnickety boss.
7. Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport An undeniably powerful and moving documentary (by Mark Jonathan Harris) about the British effort to evacuate some 10,000 Jewish children from Europe before the outbreak of WWII.
8. Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her Glenn Close, Holly Hunter, Kathy Baker, Cameron Diaz and Calista Flockhart star in this insightful interweaving of stories about five L.A. women — and still it was shelved by its studio, though it screened one time at the High, thanks to the Sundance Institute.
9. Malena From Giuseppe Tornatorne (Cinema Paradiso) comes another alternately whimsical and wistful coming-of-age tale set in Italy during WWII, involving an adolescent boy and the sensuous war widow he worships from afar.
10. Tigerland Set in a U.S. Army training camp during the Vietnam War, this gritty but thoughtful drama is all the more remarkable for having been directed by the ordinarily slick and vacuous Joel Schumacher. A largely unknown cast excels.
Steve Warren*
1. Almost Famous In 1973, "with the band" was the place to be for rock journalists and groupies. Cameron Crowe brought it back, recreating his own coming of age.
2. Chicken Run I'm not the biggest fan of Aardman Animation's short films, but it's amazing how well they've sustained their first feature. Fun for all ages.
3. Chocolat A grand dessert at the end of the year's mediocre movie meal. Lasse Hallstrom whips his international cast into a cohesive, English-speaking ensemble.
4. Erin Brockovich Steven Soderbergh shows a commercial movie can be a good thing and showcases Julia Roberts' best performance in an empowering true story.
5. Fantasia 2000 Sixty years later, Uncle Walt's concept of classical MTV yields the best of Disney's four new animated films. (The Emperor's New Groove is second.)
6. High Fidelity John Cusack is perfect in this hilarious combination of rock minutiae with an exposé of how men's minds are linked to their hearts and dicks.
7. Nurse Betty Renee Zellweger and Morgan Freeman excel in Neil LaBute's change-of-pace dark comedy about a woman losing her mind and finding herself.
8. Shadow of the Vampire The ultimate "making-of" film, a fanciful tale of how F.W. Murnau cast Nosferatu with a real vampire (Willem Dafoe hitting a new career peak).
9. Tigerland Joel Schumacher downscales effectively with a low-budget war/antiwar movie about young men training to go to Vietnam; starring next big thing Colin Farrell.
10. Traffic Steven Soderbergh's interwoven drug tales play more like television than cinema, but there was better entertainment on TV than in the movies this year.

• The films are listed alphabetically because there was no "best picture" this year.