As I type these words, I'm looking at my hands. In part this is because I never learned to type properly, and so occasionally need to visually reorient them on the keyboard (though I can still do a mean three-finger hunt-and-peck; I was last clocked at 58wpm). More significantly, though, I'm pondering the quirk of evolution that produced a total of ten fingers, inspiring a base-ten system of arithmetic and ensuring that film critics enumerating the year's best cinematic efforts settle on a decimal representation. No matter how barren or bountiful the twelvemonth, we all dutifully cobble together ten titles that represent, for us, the cream of that particular crop. It's pretty much de rigueur, like acknowledging a sneeze with a polite "gesundheit," or, in my circle, applauding the key grip during the closing credits (no real reason apart from the fact that my circle is composed of former smartass adolescents).

Occasionally, however, people do rebel. New York Press critic Godfrey Cheshire, for example, chose to include only eight films in his top ten list for 1998, by way of protest: he felt that only eight first-class movies had been released. Had I done the same, my list would be exactly three titles long. In fact, I seriously considered forgoing the list entirely this year, so singularly unimpressed was I with the barrage of mediocrity that assaulted U.S. screens between January and December last. I did finally dutifully put one together, however...and here it is, stark and unadorned and totally depressing: