1994 is the year, more than any other, that epitomizes the insanity of the Secret History of Cinema project. Let's face it, you, the reader, can pick any random ten films released in 1994, put them in order by the director's birthdays, publish it, and you'd have a more interesting list than most critics' top-ten lists for the year. For the Secret History, we try to be more responsible than that, but we're acutely aware that whatever values and ideals we cling to and whatever we might hope that we are doing, we're still laboring under severe restrictions.

Restriction One is the unavailability of many foreign films in the U.S. A common perception these days is that unlike in the Sixties, the glory days of Bergman, Fellini, and Antonioni, now all foreign films suck and interest nobody except pedants. This false belief results directly from the proven fact that there are only 1.3 theaters per 100,000 square miles of American soil where films in a language other than English are allowed to run through a projector. How can people say that there are no good foreign films any more when you can't see them unless you go to festivals? How many of these people saw Cold Water or Satantango?

The situation with video is little better. Of the ten films we chose as the best of 1994, only five are distributed on video in the U.S. (the Number One film, Through the Olive Trees, is not one of them; thanks a lot, Miramax, for being the U.S. distributor of this film), and of these, we bet that only a couple of them can be readily found in video stores not in major cities.

How do film critics and distributors decide there're no good foreign films out there? When foreign films as diverse and vital as those of Abbas Kiarostami and Wong Kar-Wai are made and not shown here, can the filmmakers themselves be blamed? In researching 1994 cinema, we realized that there were about 40 films that we wanted to see but couldn't and probably never will, and not one of them was from the U.S.

Restriction Two is that before we can even figure out what the 40 or 50 films most worth seeing might be, we have to wade through piles of movies recommended by people whose only criterion seems to be is that if a movie doesn't suck, it's great. And this results directly from the proven fact that in the '90s, 97 to 98 percent of all works in any medium suck. So people are understandably grateful for small favors. Meanwhile, we end up having to sit through 50 Hong Kong action movies to find two good ones. We also saw lots of heavily promoted American independent films, like Spanking the Monkey and Clerks. We even watched a documentary on basketball.

Things That Don't Suck is the new aesthetic category of the '90s, used to describe everything from beer and restaurants to alternative music and TV programming. Although the advertising and publicist types who employ this as a category of worth want you to believe that just because whatever it is they're offering isn't 100 percent offensive or repellent means it's somehow great, we won't go along. Few American films in 1994 rose above the "don't suck" level. The ultimate film that doesn't suck is Pulp Fiction. On the list of the Top Ten Films of 1994 That Don't Suck, it would be Number One.

Let's not get into Restrictions Three through Six. The point is, the history of filmmaking in 1994 confronts us with too much and too little. We did end up with ten exceptional films—not just films that don't suck.

The top ten

1. Through the Olive Trees (Zir-e Derakhtan-e zeytun; Abbas Kiarostami, Iran)

During the shooting of a movie near the site of a recent calamitous earthquake in rural Iran, a young former mason, recruited as an actor, courts a local girl, also acting in the film. Her social position is slightly higher than his, and she refuses to talk to him except in character. This imperturbably graceful film unrolls in shots that combine dry understatement with a plain, confrontational quality. Its absence of any glamour, mysticism, or idealization—and also of any "debunking" intention—about art is probably unique in the films-about-filmmaking genre. One of the main pleasures of the movie is the suspense of whether the young hero's beloved will finally answer him. This suspense is echoed in the seemingly casual quest of the director of the film-within-a-film, who, like Kiarostami himself, is looking for a subtle blend of reality and artifice. It's surprising that a film can be at once so basic in its technique and its view of the world and so sophisticated in what it does—as if one found out that the inventor of the alphabet wrote Plato's dialogues.

2. Ashes of Time (Dung Che Sai Duk; Wong Kar-Wai, Hong Kong)

Told obliquely, in shards of brilliantly colored, off-balance scenes, this dense, packed film explores the trauma of lost love across long time periods and from shifting points of view. Mostly the story is narrated by Ouyang Feng (Leslie Cheung), a professional killer in medieval China. Tangentially and almost irrelevantly, Ashes of Time is a martial-arts film, but its action scenes are shot and cut as flurries of movement in which the outcomes of the heroes' showdowns with fate turn on invisible, incomprehensible chance. The rest of the film is a kaleidoscopic exploration of moods, dominated by numb vengefulness and a savage desolateness. Extraordinary performances, especially by Leslie Cheung and Brigitte Lin, make this the best acted film of 1994.

3. Red (Trois Couleurs Rouge; Krzysztof Kieslowski, France)

Kieslowski's last film, and the last of his Three Colors, concerns the chance meeting of sweet-faced model Irène Jacob and retired judge Jean-Louis Trintignant, a bitter crank who spends his time electronically eavesdropping on his neighbors' phone calls. For all their acclaim, Kieslowski's late films remain mysterious and somewhat impenetrable; they're ghost stories where the living haunt themselves. Red doesn't give in to its impetus towards a pat ending, even as it neatly ties itself up and weaves in loose threads from Blue (1993) and White (see below). The film becomes a deep crimson catalogue of in-frame lighting that tries to illuminate the impossibilities of knowing whether one has done right or can correct the errors of the past or even understand other people. As a director who learned to cover his tracks, Kieslowski makes it difficult to figure out why he does what he does. Intentions are unclear, the difference between causality and coincidence is erased, questions are raised that can't be answered, like what is it about bowling that's always so good in movies?

4. Heavenly Creatures (Peter Jackson, New Zealand)

Using every device known to modern filmmaking—from integrating black-and-white with color to computer-generating butterflies—Jackson proves that a director with talent and vision can get over the stumbling block of high technology and make a true movie. Heavenly Creatures is set in early 1950s Christchurch, New Zealand. Two teenage girls (Melanie Lynskey and Kate Winslet), romantic outsiders who live mostly in their imaginations, decide the only way they can be together forever is to murder Lynskey's innocent mother. A gripping study of adolescent naivete and obsession, the film joyously captures The Fourth World, that place the girls call into being, where Orson Welles is a terrifying ogre, Mario Lanza will always be the world's greatest tenor, and all the best people have diseases. Rarely has such a such a tragic story been directed so exuberantly. Lynskey and Winslet, in their debuts, are simultaneously convincing and larger-than-life, and Jackson's dynamic use of widescreen makes even his Steadicam forays seem indispensable. Nine minutes were cut from this film for its American release. Why?

5. Cold Water (L'eau froide; Olivier Assayas, France)

In 1994, French TV commissioned nine filmmakers to make a series of films called "Tous les garçons et les filles de leur age," each set during the period of its director's adolescence, and with teenagers as the main characters. The only entry in the series available on U.S. video is André Téchiné's Wild Reeds, a fine film; the series also includes Chantal Akerman's Portrait of a Young Girl... (see below). Olivier Assayas's Cold Water, set during the early Seventies, is an unsettling film, made in total, unsentimental commitment to the blankness, resentment, and longing of its protagonists. At the beginning of the film, the heroine, Christine (Virginie Ledoyen) is caught shoplifting. We learn that she does badly in school, has a bad attitude about everything, and has been pretty much left to her own devices by her divorced middle-class parents. Her only close friend, Gilles (Cyprien Fouquet), is also from a broken home and shares Christine's aimless rebelliousness, but clearly has more of a safety net than she does. The film follows these two closely, not only denying us any comfortable distance but also refusing us the option of simply idealizing this blandly unformed rebel couple. About two-thirds of the way through, the film unexpectedly settles in for a long exploration of a party at an abandoned building outside of town. Iggy Pop, Nico, and Alice Cooper records are played. This part of the film is astonishing in its fluidity and immediacy, its evocation of possible escape and adventure; and here the hitherto unstated sadness and violence of the film are expressed.

6. The Emigrant (al-Mohager; Youssef Chahine, Egypt)

The story of Joseph (Genesis 37-58), here called Ram and played by Khaled el Nabaoui. Handsome and good-natured and a bit of a know-it-all, young Ram leaves his desert tribe to learn farming. Beaten and abandoned by his envious half-brothers, he is sold into slavery in Egypt but ingratiates himself with his captors, wins the love of both a sexually frustrated high priestess (one-named actress Yousra) and a slave girl, and eventually is put in charge of Egypt's agricultural program. A splendid old-fashioned epic with attractive actors, dancing, court intrigue, and spectacle, not to mention Michel Piccoli in an Anthony Quinn role as Ram's father, all filmed vigorously and stylishly by veteran director Chahine. His graceful camera movements and dynamic compositions evoke a world in which reason and honesty believably triumph over jealousy and strife.

7. Portrait of a Young Girl at the End of the Sixties in Brussels (Portrait d'une jeune fille de la fin des années 60 à Bruxelles; Chantal Akerman, France)