The 10 Best Films of Their Year--Three Views

1. Thelma & Louise. Under director Ridley Scott’s ebullient guidance, two women on the run invade Peckinpah territory: Beautiful, exhilarating, funny and impassioned, a sure-fire pop movie classic.

2. Barton Fink. A comic nightmare in which Joel and Ethan Coen mix equal parts of Polanski, Kafka and Ben Hecht as a radical N.Y. playwright in Hollywood, circa 1941, learns how to adjust to the system, and to Hell itself.

3. Rhapsody in August. Memories of Nagasaki: A great pacifist film, small and jewel-like, from Akira Kurosawa, who substitutes Ozu-like serenity for his usual violent pyrotechnics.

4. Korczak. Director Andrzej Wajda and writer Agnieszka Holland’s wounding portrait of life during the Holocaust years in the Warsaw Ghetto; its evocations of quiet courage beggar most of what passes for bravery on our screens.

5. The Man in the Moon. No American movie in 1991 was more lyrically directed than Robert Mulligan’s poignant tale of a young girl’s awakening to love and grief in the rural South.

6. La Belle Noiseuse. Jacques Rivette’s fascinating rumination on the artistic process: How a painter paints, how a model poses, how art (not necessarily good art) evolves, despite everything.

7. JFK. A stormy “J’Accuse” from Oliver Stone, America’s modern master of the political melodrama. The “Z”-like deconstruction of the Warren Commission’s Kennedy assassination theory is hellishly exciting, eye-opening, infuriating, never boring.

8. The Double Life of Veronique. Two lives, one in Poland, one in France, mysteriously merge in Krzysztof Kieslowski’s jewel-like fantasia, one of the year’s most haunting romances. 9. Madame Bovary. Not necessarily Flaubert’s “Bovary,” but a well-mounted, superbly acted one; perhaps director Claude Chabrol’s deepest examination of provincial lust, guilt and betrayal.

10. Life Is Sweet. Mike Leigh’s serious comedy about food, feminism and Britain’s forgotten underclass; sprightly and humane, it contained perhaps the year’s best ensemble acting.

(Honorable mention: “Homicide,” “The Fisher King,” “Bugsy,” “City of Hope.”)