I couldn't find ten best films from 1998. I found just eight. I'm sure I must have missed a few along the way, but it wasn't for want of searching. Most of 1998 passed by, cinematically, in the wayward fashion of a child dragging a stick along a sidewalk.

Hollywood, having discovered there's gold in them thar hiphuggers, went after the "youth" audience with a vengeance, and seemed determined never to overestimate its intelligence. Movies have deteriorated from plot- and character-driven entertainments into visual concatenations of cartoon violence and shotgun editing driven more by the likeness of a theme-park thrill ride than a coherent structure with purpose or sense. Motivation and consequence have been thrown out the window, so that you never know why somebody is apt to do something, and there are no consequences for that something they do.

One of these days in the not distant future, I may just take one of these sorts of movies apart. Did you, for instance, really believe that the spying technology shown in Enemy of the State can be used in real life the way it is in this much better than average popcorn movie? Well, it can't. Go back and take a look at the far superior big-screen entertainment Patriot Games, also a popcorn movie (though one with more brains in 10 minutes than Armageddon had in its entire length) - the spying technology there is put to realistic use, even to the point of defining its state-of-the-art limitations. And how much of Armageddon did you believe? And did you buy the notion, in Deep Impact, that a teenager, having rescued his princess (and under incredibly unbelievable circumstances), could outrun a 600-foot high tidal wave on a motorbike - starting out, incidentally, on the East Coast making what looks suspiciously like the High Sierra in just over five or six minutes? Do you think it matters?

Even supposedly serious "intelligent" films went over the rainbow into tabloid land. Hilary and Jackie is supposed to be a true story about the life of Jacqueline du Pré, the British cellist, and her relationship with her sister, Hilary. It is based on the book A Genius in the Family (now retitled to match the movie), which tells a far different story about Jackie, a book filled with the love of music, and without the twitching ugly neuroticisms the film attributes to her. The movie rang so untrue to life, so emotionally untrue to me, that I went back and read the book, to discover the moviemakers had taken liberties (evidently with the real Hilary's acquiescence) that turn du Pré's life into a Freudian sideshow.

And am I the only one who felt that the seriously overpraised Affliction was itself an emotionally damaged piece of work? The only scene we see of the central character's abuse at his father's hand is mild compared with what is in the book, and mild compared with what really happens on a continuing, nearly day-by-day basis when a child is subjected to a parent's alcoholic rage. Just because a film is darkly pretentious does not mean it should be taken seriously if it doesn't manage to ring emotionally true. I can live with an emotional downer of a movie if it sounds the bell of emotional truth at the deepest levels, and, yes, I'd forgive poetic license taken in the name of fact and sensibility if it added to my experience of the world, or enriched my artistic understandings.

So, considering that, I find three movies pretty much tied for first place in my affections.

1. (tie x 3) Central Station
There is the sort of performance in this film you may see once in a decade, that of Fernanda Montenegro, a superstar in her native Brazil. She disappears quite completely into her role as an embittered old woman scratching out extra dinero by writing letters for the illiterates who pass through Rio de Janeiro's train station. She has let herself go. And she is definitely not nice. She, most unwillingly and unhappily, becomes the protector of an abandoned 10-year-old (a screen natural, by the way, and a tough little mother) and journeys with him into Brazil's interior to help him find the father who abandoned him. (The genius of Montenegro's performance is that you are never aware that any acting is involved.) It is a road movie, and the destination is the interior of this woman's being. The film steers clear of bathos and Hollywood Spielbergian sentimentality, and this gives it its power to seduce you into believing what you are seeing. Gorgeous use of the 2:35.1 aspect ratio and quite enveloping stereophonic sound. (This movie is shot by someone who looks as if he is exploring the possibilities of the widescreen for the first time.) The woman and the boy are at war throughout most of the picture, and the understanding they finally reach transcends the differences that separate them.

1. (tie x 3) Gods and Monsters
This is another meditation on friendship and its transformative power (forget all the crap you've read about the homosexuality of its main character, that is window dressing). As in Central Station, the two unlikelies who become friends are separated by age, by sex(ual preference in this case), by education, and by experience and each's sense of place in the world. It purports to depict the last days of veteran director James Whale (Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein, and Show Boat), who has suffered a stroke and realizes his condition is deteriorating. He befriends the yard man, an ex-Marine named Clay (to be molded, of course), who bears a subtle resemblance to the Monster, perhaps hoping to provoke Clay into a murderous rage (guess how) so that he can die. Sir Ian McKellan's performance (like that of Judi Dench in Shakespeare in Love) is at the opposite end of the spectrum from the naturalism of Montenegro. You know he's acting and you love seeing him make every line spin off like an expertly thrown frisbee (and he knows just how to get the target he wishes to hit). Brendan Fraser, on the other hand, plays it in the fashion of Montenegro; he is surprisingly successful at disappearing into his character. Wait till you see him in the film's last shot. It takes two viewings to appreciate in some depth the subtle parallelisms that abound here, and it helps to see Bride of Frankenstein again to see just how much this is a serio-comedic (and finally melancholy and sad) variation on an original theme by the real James Whale.

1. (tie x 3) Shakespeare in Love
If you love words, if you love acting, if you love exuberance, you'll walk out of the theater on a cloud after this one. Some have downplayed it for not being a "serious" film. But is Der Rosenkavalier less great because it is an entertainment? (Nor does this soufflé collapse toward the end or on second viewing - indeed, there is more going on than the eye can absorb in one sitting.)

And then:

4. The Thin Red Line
Terence Malick's return, after 20 years in the wilderness. The unconventional structure of this film has turned too many people off - it seems so strange the first time you see it, what with the most dramatically urgent scenes falling dead center in the film. (It builds from near-fragmentary impressions at the beginning to a focused climax, then decays away again.) None of Malick's films (Badlands, Days of Heaven) have been greeted by unanimous critical hosannas when first they appeared, and I predict, as time passes, the strengths of this film will come to be appreciated and its weaknesses overlooked. I do wish Malick had had time to finish a final edit. It is clear he did not. The excision of ten, even 15 minutes would have tightened its oft rambling focus as the soldiers, faced with death, meditate (in voiceovers) upon the metaphysical. Nick Nolte, who did not impress me in Affliction, did so here. So did Sean Penn, whose growth as an actor is well nigh astonishing. Beautiful, if self-conscious, widescreen photography and convincing use of SDDS theatrically.

5. A Simple Plan
A morality tale wrapped in the trappings of a thriller. I don't think the two ever quite converge as they should, but you walk out of the theater with it sticking in your mind. Director Sam Raimi (of Evil Dead fame) keeps the voltage low (no flying cameras), never overwhelming the actors with arty patina. You know the plot probably. Three men, out hunting, find an airplane buried in the snow. There's $4,000,000 aboard, and it's evident the money was ill-gotten. They decide to keep it and if no one shows up to claim it, they will divide it and leave town. You better believe someone is going to show up to claim it, but not till after the clean-cut hero (and his wife, a Lady Macbeth in waiting) sink into a moral slime, to the horror of his slow-witted brother (Billy Bob Thornton) in a performance on a level with McKellan, Fraser, and Robert Duvall in A Civil Action. I was dazzled, and no, it's not a rerun of the much more mentally impaired man he played in Sling Blade. Thornton becomes the conscience of the tale and he pays dearly.

6. Elizabeth
Despite, toward the end, its structural swipings from The Godfather, this wild and woolly film grabs you and holds on for dear life. Gangsters in the court of Elizabeth I. You don't wonder that she turned into a walking iron maiden after seeing what she had to go through. Cate Blanchette, who was such a treat in Oscar and Lucinda (a wrongly forgotten film) is even better here and flawlessly depicts the transition from a youthful frolicker to the "virgin" queen (which she isn't by a long shot here, especially after she falls into the arms of Joseph Fiennes, who is also in the other Elizabethan-era flick, Shakespeare in Love). There's more dirty politics here than there has been in Bill Clinton's Washington, although there they just murder reputations - here it's anything goes. The historical facts don't get in the way of this murderously entertaining bungee-drop into history.

7. Saving Private Ryan
When Steven Spielberg gets "serious," I usually walk away deeply impressed, until I start thinking about the sentimental sugarcoating he feels oblige to tack obligato on the material. The ending of Schindler's List, for example, is a complete falsification of what really happened: Schindler drove off with his car's hubcaps filled with diamonds. I believe many admirers of Ryan were snookered by what I call the "Psycho" effect. In Psycho, the unexpected violence of the shower scene leaves the audience so traumatized that hardly anyone realizes the movie is, structurally and artistically, then over. Same thing in Alien after the thing pops out of John Hurt's chest. In Ryan we have that opening 20 minutes of sheer carnage, which leaves us in such a state of shock that we watch the rest of the movie (a more or less ordinary World War II movie with an unbelievably sexual stabbing scene - whatever was Spielberg trying to say?) at a level of fearful anticipation we wouldn't otherwise have had. The final battle in Ryan actually comes as something of a "closure" - how I hate the word - and lets us off the hook simply because it isn't as bad as we're expecting. I can't deny the skill and artifice in the movie's construction, but again, the very tail-ending shows Spielberg syruping it up, which I see as a sign of his contempt for the audience (à la Schindler).

8. Dark City
A young man awakes lying naked in a bathtub, a rivulet of blood running out of the center of his forehead. There is an ornate-looking hypodermic on the floor. He is in a hotel room he doesn't remember checking into. He finds a slaughtered prostitute in the room (though he stops to save a goldfish whose glass bowl he has accidentally overturned). And he gets a call from someone who tells him to get out of there, his life is in danger. He does, and as he leaves he sees three figures, dressed in black Sergio Leone style raincoats, their faces painted white, Queen Elizabeth style, gliding down the hall toward the room. He escapes into the night. And into the city, where, at the stroke of midnight, the clocks stop and the entire populace falls asleep. Except for him and a race of aliens who are, by collective psycho-kinesis, re-inventing the city physically and altering the memories and personalities of its inhabitants by injecting other memories (with a hypo in the middle of the forehead). Somehow, the process went wrong with him and now he has some psychic powers of his own, in order to fight back. No more will I tell you. If you like thoughtful sci-fi (I do), this will give you plenty to munch on (are we only an assemblage of our memories?), along with the kind of visual imagination you hardly see these days.

The next grouping has, in several cases, some of the more interesting, if not fully realized films. I started with (11) because I couldn't find a worthy candidate for (9) and (10).

11. Rushmore
A laconic, off-kilter comedy that works because of its near-perfect timing and because of Bill Murray's performance, which suits his deadpan, skewed sensibility to the proverbial T. It is rather harder to summarize this film than you might think. A far more polished effort than director Wes Anderson's first, Bottle Rocket.

12. Pleasantville
Until it gets obviously preachy, this film serves as a cogent reminder of the dark side of the "good old days," as some remember them through the situation comedies of the Fifties. It just misses being a great fable. I think its creators lost confidence in the audience toward the end, otherwise why soften it when things turn sour in sit-com land? The central conceit, its transitions from black and white to color, is a symbolic stroke of genius, since black and white represents the stereotypical memories of the past, and the color represents the complexity and diversity of life itself. Read it as Fundamentalists versus Humanists.

13. Ronin

14. The Opposite of Sex
Sort of a messy film whose sheer energy keeps it bursting at the seams with all sorts of human oddities and bizarro relationships, encompassing pretty much all of the sexual possibilities, while the characters are coming to understand what the opposite of sex is and means. Worth seeing for Christina Ricci and Lisa Kudrow, and for its sheer unpredictability. A formula film, this ain't. Fun, too, if you appreciate its often black humor and cynical take on its characters' pretensions.

15. The Truman Show
This is really a combination of science fiction and horror movie. You might look at it as sort of Dark City inside out (and there are striking resemblances between the two). Or maybe as Stepford Town, USA. Certainly as a re-telling of the mythic Hero's life, death, and rebirth. I found the underbelly of this film genuinely unpleasant, never more so than in its scenes of emotional betrayal: note the scene on the dock between Truman and his best friend. Chilling and ugly.

16. The Object of My Affection
For once, an unblinking look at the often painful interface between straights and gays, one that will ring true for anyone who has been impaled on this particular cusp. Cut out the sappy last scene, and you have a movie far better than most reviewers have given it credit for (how wrong can you go with Nicholas Hytner directing and Wendy Wasserstein scripting and a spectacular cameo performance by Nigel Hawthorne?). One of the strengths of this movie is that it plays to no stereotypes, even if the characters are themselves sometimes behaving as stereotypes. They are capable of the surprises real humans are. Like several other of the year's best movies (Gods and Monsters; Central Station), this is really a movie about friendship, and how friendship is able to bridge the gaps between people that our preconceptions create.

17. The Big Lebowski
A very funny, off-the-wall comedy (as deadpan in its shaggy dog way as Rushmore is in its highly controlled one). The central idea here is that innocence is, in the end, the best protection against evil.

18. Love and Death on Long Island
One of a kind. John Hurt's best performance in years and a sneakily affecting one by Jason Priestley. Hurt plays an isolated British academic who wanders into the wrong part of the multiplex (he's going to see Death in Venice) and winds up in a teen movie starring Priestley. He's captured by Priestley's beauty, in much the same way as Aschenbach is with Tadzio's in Death in Venice - I mean as portrayed in Thomas Mann's novella, not in Luchino Visconti's cruisy homoerotic re-telling film. And he finds himself going to Long Island where the young actor lives in an effort to find in himself something that has died long ago. Since Hurt's character is as alien to the world of Long Island (read suburban America) as an anthropologist on Mars, we are always aware of the contrasts between this stranger looking for paradise, and "paradise" itself. His efforts to become the boy's mentor (the only notion he has about how to relate to him) are awkward, and while you're laughing, you're also hurting for him.

What? No Life is Beautiful? No, Virginia, I don't believe in Santa Claus and there's no way I can buy into the second half of that film. I didn't believe it. And in asking us to believe the unbelievable (that he could keep a small boy hidden in a concentration camp for quite some while), I think Roberto Benigni seriously underplays an incomprehensible horror that shames the notion of human goodness and thus trivializes the experience.

No Waking Ned Devine? Never - about as substantial as the head on a beer. No Little Voice? The last third sinks what had been one of those delicious British fairy tales for which I was more than willing to suspend disbelief, until the gears changed, and the movie went into high (and unpleasant) melodrama, with a fade-out far more false than the mythic tale told in the first two-thirds.