The Top 11 of 2004

1) Los Angeles Plays Itself Utilizing clips from sources high and low, from Mildred Pierce to Die Hard to gay-porn classic L.A. Plays Itself, Thom Andersen's meditation on the City of Angels' starring role in the dream machine is part history lesson, part illustrated lecture and entirely exhilarating.

2) The Return A jarring allegory of communism and parental authority, told by first-timer Andrey Zvyagintsev with a visual facility and economy reminiscent of the Russian masters.

3) The Time of the Wolf In these apocalyptic, politically charged times, Michael Haneke settles in comfortably, the surroundings already long familiar. With The Time of the Wolf, he makes a Bush-era allegory worthy of Tarkovsky.

4) Before Sunset Or, Celine and Jesse Go Sightseeing. Richard Linklater provides the two things most often missing from contemporary American filmmaking: really good talk and an acknowledgement of time's ravaging powers.

5) I Heart Huckabees This sprawling look at American life circa now is the cinematic equivalent of The Corrections, a masterwork about the wounds of white-collar America. It tackles the question that haunts us: What is all the sound and fury really about?

6) Sideways Yes, it's every bit as good as advertised. It's already inspired far too many conversations on the merits of pinot noir, though.

7) Collateral Michael Mann's vision of the nocturnal city was the most alluring urban landscape seen on film this year. The downtown skyscraper district and its surrounding working-class neighborhoods made up the backdrop to Collateral's white-hot parable of a good man adrift in the amoral Los Angeles night.

8) In the Battlefields The surprise of this year's New York Film Festival-a shot of adrenaline to the moribund dysfunctional-family drama. Set in Lebanon in the 1980s during civil war, Danielle Arbid's film puts the fighting in the streets as a mere backdrop to the equally ugly fighting at home. The closing montage, set to a chiming guitar solo, is Arbid's passionate declaration of love for her dirty, graffiti-strewn city. No distributor (for shame!).

9) Moolaade Nothing much, really-just another insightful, carefully hewn tale of community, religion and womanhood from a master.

10 & 11) Code 46 & The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou

Yet more proof that sometimes critical consensus is just another word for groupthink. Michael Winterbottom and Wes Anderson each released top-notch works that were greeted with a collective yawn of indifference. Winterbottom's romantic sci-fi flick and Anderson's boy's tale of deep-sea adventure were each tinged with a deeply adult knowledge of loss and death that belied their shared reputations as frothy dilettantes.