Great Performances

Robson Green
With his attractively dented face, hawk's eyes, and bent smile, Green resembles a British Paul Hogan who's so hot, he's got a lot more than shrimp on his barbie. This year, he made legions of PBS-viewing Americans swoon, first as a rogue in the romantic comedy Reckless, then as a tough but sensitive police detective in the miniseries thriller Touching Evil, and finally as a sensitively macho bodyguard in Masterpiece Theatre's The Prince of Hearts. Given Green's stardom in Merrie Olde E., and his burgeoning cult here, they might have titled that last one The Prince of Heartthrobs.

Aretha Franklin
This was the year soulstress Aretha Franklin recaptured our R-E-S-P-E-C-T. At February's Grammy awards, she subbed for tenor Luciano Pavarotti (who canceled 45 minutes into the live telecast), pretty much nailing his signature song, the devilishly tricky Puccini aria ''Nessun Dorma.'' We knew she had chops — but Italian opera? Her encore: At April's VH1 Divas Live, the 56-year-old soul mama effortlessly out-belted Mariah Carey, Gloria Estefan, Shania Twain, and Celine Dion. Now we know what D-I-V-A really stands for: Divine Incomparable Virtuoso Aretha.

Catherine Keener & Jason Patric
The bitter little pills who populate Your Friends & Neighbors would make Dale Carnegie roll over and Mister Rogers lock the dead bolts. But two took the devil's cake: Patric as the satanically buff narcissist of every woman's nightmares, seducing and destroying at whim (his blearily ecstatic steam-room rape confession is sublimely terrifying), and Keener, whose sardonic man-eater was nearly a relief in comparison. No Friends episode, this: When Patric meets and verbally devours Keener in a bookshop, it's like the best episode of When Animals Attack.

Barenaked Ladies
Lots of rock bands would balk at having anything to do with so crass a thing as ''showbiz.'' Not Canada's Barenaked Ladies, who bring an almost vaudevillian sensibility to their live performances. At the July 24 stop of last summer's H.O.R.D.E. tour, the Ladies mesmerized the post-hippie Columbus, Ohio, crowd with their mix of choreographed dance routines, goofy medleys of other people's songs, silly, freestyle rapping, rubber-faced mugging, and — oh, yeah — solid musicianship. Like Marilyn Manson, these guys know good tunes are just the beginning; if you want the kids to love ya, you've gotta give 'em a rilly big shew.

Thomas Vinterberg
The prankish ''Dogma 95'' rules of filmmaking invented by Danish director Lars Von Trier (Breaking the Waves) and his 29-year-old protégé, Vinterberg, are arbitrary and nutty: Use only handheld cameras, shoot only on location, yada yada yada. But Vinterberg turned formal novelty into forceful art in The Celebration, his mesmerizing study of an unraveling family in which the film itself appears to disintegrate as the relationships do. Powerful stuff from a Danish whippersnapper — who, against all the rules, is also so movie-star handsome, he'll never need to hide behind a backwards baseball cap.