THE BEST CINEMA 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

1 THE ENGLISH PATIENT For so many European wanderlusters who found an Eden in the Sahara, the desert was a woman--dazzling, enveloping, with a vastness that held all their dreams. In such a place, just before World War II, the Hungarian aristocrat Count Laszlo de Almasy finds his ideal desert woman and follows her to hell. He then lives, just barely, to tell the tale to a ministering angel (Juliette Binoche) who can give him what he needs: not absolution but understanding. The lovers are Ralph Fiennes--all coiled sexiness, threat shrouded in hauteur--and Kristin Scott Thomas, who has the gift of making intelligence erotic; they come together in a dance of doom that is abrasive, mysterious, powerful, inevitable. Anthony Minghella's beautiful film, based on the Michael Ondaatje novel, gets the rapture right, with a scope and intimacy rarely seen on film since the David Lean days.

2 Big Night Neither the time (the 1950s) nor the place (the Jersey Shore) is propitious for a gourmet Italian restaurant. But the struggles of the immigrant Pilaggi brothers to impose their delicate risottos on a red-sauce culture are perhaps the year's most unlikely success. Primo, the chef (Tony Shalhoub), has the soul of an artist--watchful, uncompromising, mildly depressive. Secondo, the maitre d' (Stanley Tucci, who, with Campbell Scott, wrote and directed), is trying vainly to be an American entrepreneur. Stumbling toward bankruptcy, they also sail toward wisdom in this beautifully acted and utterly delicious comedy of--shall we say?--table manners.

3 Trainspotting A Hard Day's Night on heroin, this gleefully amoral comedy turned a quartet of Scottish drug addicts into transatlantic icons. The denizens of the Edinburgh lower depths--blithe abusers of heroin, alcohol, nicotine and their best friends--are witty, cunning, brimming with the kind of sociopathic bravado that spells sexiness in the mid-'90s. Well, tsk-tsk and all that. But good movies make their own morals. And this one, based on Irvine Welsh's trend-spotting novel, is also and mainly a display of savvy camerabatics. Though grim death hangs like crepe over our antihero (star-in-the-making Ewan McGregor) and his mates, the John Hodge script and Danny Boyle's direction couldn't be more vital. Aesthetically, at least, Trainspotting chooses life.

4 Lone Star A skeleton, unearthed after a 30-year rest, leads sheriff Sam Deeds (Chris Cooper) on a deeply disturbing dig into his own past and that of a Texas border town that turns out to be a lot less somnolent than it looks. Sam manages to recover a lost love (shiningly portrayed by Elizabeth Pena) but the countywide network of corruption eventually snags them both. Writer-director John Sayles is a subtle, patient craftsman; he knows that in good fiction, history has to be more than a throwaway line. Sayles also has a gift for showing, without bloodily melodramatizing it, the strangeness lurking beneath the bland surfaces of American life.

5 Chungking Express By the time Americans finally catch up with Hong Kong cinema--since the mid-'80s the world's most turbulent and entertaining--it may have been suffocated by the censorious new lords from the mainland. So Wong Kar-wai's kicky art movie about two cops on the night shift not only is as mod as tomorrow's couture, it also serves as a nostalgia trip through what has been Asia's freest colony. Here are a cool killer-drug queen (veteran stunner Brigitte Lin) and an indefatigable ingenue (pop pixie Faye Wang) exercising their wiles on lovelorn guys--all caught in Wong's murky, slo-mo camera eye. The twilight, late-night and hangover dawn of a civilization has rarely looked so ravishing.

6 Secrets & Lies A white working-class London woman and her long-lost black daughter, unaware of each other's existence for almost 30 years, are reunited in this unexpectedly sunny drama from Britain's Mike Leigh, the improv impresario known for corrosive studies of family breakdowns. An epic in miniature, S&L is nearly 2 1/2 hours of bruising tenderness and bravura acting, yet it sails along with the expectation that some families can end up with the happiness they have worked so hard to avoid. Expect Brenda Blethyn, a teary tornado as the mother, to be in an aisle seat on Oscar night.

7 Flirting with Disaster Plunging into it, more like. Mel Coplin (Ben Stiller) assumes that his birth parents are alive, well and no nutsier than his adoptive ones. The conventional wisdom of mental health dictates that he seek them out. The unconventional sensibility of writer-director David O. Russell dictates that nothing and no one Mel encounters on his odyssey shall turn out to be what they at first seem to be. Mel's social worker is terminally randy; his real mother and father are major drug traffickers; a pair of stern federal agents are revealed to be gently gay. Russell observes these and other folkways with an understated objectivity that renders his comic subversions all the more deadly.

8 Everyone Says I Love You All singing, all dancing, all talking, as they used to say. In Woody Allen's lovely flight of fancy, the singing is often kind of croaky, the dancing sort of klutzy and the dialogue pure Woody--the noises that psychologically aware, politically correct people make when they are at desperate sexual cross-purposes. But such folks are entitled to their romantic yearnings. This film's good-humored poignance--and high originality--lies in the contrast drawn between the characters' passionate desire to put a little music in their lives and their inability to carry a tune.

9 Evita It might have been an Oliver Stone political screed or a Ken Russell hallucinogen; the lead actress might have been Meryl Streep or Michelle Pfeiffer. But here it is--20 years after Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber first produced their gorgeously cynical opera about Eva Peron--reimagined through the eye of director Alan Parker and the flesh of Madonna. The take is dense and studious, an aptly conservative adaptation of a pop classic; it lets the score seduce and the star shine. Madonna, who is up to the vocal demands of the role, makes Eva--sexual predator, social climber, queen of the Argentine, would-be saint--an appealing character in a cautionary fable. The moral: celebrity needs suffering and early death as its price and consummation.

10 Jerry Maguire In corporate America the assertion of principle is often the prelude to self-immolation. Case in point: Jerry Maguire (a superb Tom Cruise). Soon after he calls on his colleagues in a sports agency to consider human values as well as the bottom line, he gets fired. Spinning his wheels wildly, he seeks moral traction in an icy-slick world, aided by his one remaining client (a testy Cuba Gooding Jr.) and his sole employee (Renee Zellweger, fierce and mousy). Blending romance and realism, writer-director Cameron Crowe achieves the kind of confident, endearing comedy you would've sworn Hollywood had lost the knack of making.