The Best Of 1995: CINEMA

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1 PERSUASION and SENSE AND SENSIBILITY The first of these Jane Austen adaptations is reserved, the second more bustling. But both have heroines (played impeccably by Amanda Root and Emma Thompson) who tend to others' emotional needs while submerging their own, yet find a romantic reward. The enchanted viewer is rewarded too: by subtle ensemble acting, writing that understands the void that tactful conversation fills, direction (by Roger Michell and Ang Lee, respectively) that finds the hidden hungers of the cautious soul. Honorable mention to Clueless, the Emma of Beverly Hills High.

2 CRUMB Robert Crumb, the Brueghel of underground comic books, sits uneasily for Terry Zwigoff's blistering documentary portrait. Crumb's images of geeky guys and rampaging women seem almost normal next to this picture of his middle-class family--a mother and three gifted, twisted sons--all devoured by demons. Appalling and enthralling, Crumb is the ultimate situation tragedy.

3 WILD REEDS Young love rarely seemed so tormented or rapturous as it does in Andre Techine's memory film. Political rivalries cloud a bucolic French town and Algerian war drums beat, but the main convulsions are romantic. A great date movie for teens with high sat scores and overheated hearts.

4 LES MISERABLES Writer-director Claude Lelouch's film is less an adaptation of Victor Hugo's epic narrative than a passionate response to it--one overflowing heart heeding the call of another across the years. Resetting the tale mainly in the occupied France of World War II and reimagining many of its incidents, Lelouch remains true to his source's sweep, scale and romantic, entirely unfashionable belief in the conquering power of simple human goodness.

5 APOLLO 13 Director Ron Howard and protean star Tom Hanks celebrate the virtues of community--ingenuity, patience, humor--with such fidelity and drama that the ill-fated 1970 moon shot becomes a triumph for Hollywood on its best behavior.

6 DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS The free-lance private eye's lot was never a happy one--ask Philip Marlowe. But he didn't have to fight racism while trying to fight crime. Easy Rawlins (Denzel Washington), a black man, does. And it grants Carl Franklin's cool, crisp adaptation of Walter Mosley's novel (set in classic noirland, '40s L.A.) the edge, weight and revitalizing relevance long needed by a genre often made limply nostalgic.

7 HEAT Who will be prince of this soulless city--Robert De Niro's fastidious criminal or Al Pacino's emotionally erratic cop? In the end it doesn't much matter. Their job is to lend familiar dramatic tonalities to Michael Mann's brilliant, jarring, amoral expansion of and meditation on the violent themes running through postmodernist life.

8 TOY STORY Two generations of kids' playthings--a cloth cowboy and a rocket man--reach detente in this marvelously inventive buddy film. Yes, the whole thing was animated by computer, but that's not the big news. It's that director John Lasseter is the year's most impressive new comedy visionary.

9 GET SHORTY A movie-mad mobster (dreamy, incisive John Travolta) reinvents himself as a movie mogul. He's a real shark chewing up Hollywood's rubbery simulacrums while helping some bottom feeders rise to the top in Barry Sonnenfeld's jaunty, well-acted comedy of bad manners.