4 Clockers Spike Lee, in his electrifying adaptation of Richard Price's inner-city novel, broke through years of sclerotic gimmickry and yelling-around-the-dinner-table theatrics to attain true maturity as an artist--and hardly anyone gave a damn. Framing a complex murder mystery around Strike (Mekhi Phifer), a nerve-jangled teenage crack dealer, Lee creates a shattering portrait of a community in breakdown. As Rodney, a stone killer with a mask of a smile, Delroy Lindo reveals how survival can breed betrayal, then murder, then madness. The film presents the tragedy of the American inner city on its broadest, most colorful canvas yet. Still, some dismissed Clockers as one "hood movie" too many, as if the dramatic value of certain lives had a statute of limitations.
5 Dead Man Walking Is it possible to make a liberal message movie that isn't a preachy, ennobling tract? The miracle of Tim Robbins' wrenching drama is that it moves us to view capital punishment with new eyes by bringing us perilously close to characters a lesser movie would have signposted. The heroine, a nun (Susan Sarandon), receives a letter from a death-row inmate (Sean Penn), and though she isn't sure whether to believe his claim of innocence, she fights to commute his death sentence anyway. Dead Man Walking forces us to confront the humanity of someone who may be a vicious killer. At the same time, it shows us the grief of the victims' families and dares to suggest that execution may be a route to absolution. Penn, in a stunning performance, mixes blase sociopathic viciousness with something terrifyingly frail, revealing that even a heartless man can bleed.
6 The Bridges of Madison County A great weeper: When Clint Eastwood stands abandoned in the Iowa rain, we're watching stone melt. Like Casablanca, The Bridges of Madison County makes a quick, doomed love affair seem more timeless than a lifelong one. Eastwood, in a beautiful piece of direction, retains the strength of Robert James Waller's novella (don't deny it--the plot worked) but replaces the Whitman-goes-Harlequin treacle with something moodier: a slow dance of wills, as two weary middle-aged souls quietly erase the space between them. And Meryl Streep gives the performance of her career. Now flirting, now brooding, now radiant, her Francesca is every woman who was ever torn between the roles of lover and caretaker.
7 Priest A young clergyman (Linus Roache) who's homosexual, who goes cruising, who listens to a confession of incest and feels bound by his vows not to stop it. In outline, Priest seems all but designed to shock. The real shock, though, is that the movie's subject isn't transgression but faith. It shows us the anguish of a man who, because he's gay, violates Catholic doctrine with every breath. Yet his devotion to God is so powerful that in the very helplessness of his desire, his sin, he seems to be crying out for a new definition of what it means to believe.
8 Crimson Tide It only looks like a Cold War retread. In Tony Scott's riveting submarine thriller, the prospect of the U.S. and Russia tilting nuclear warheads toward each other has nothing on the white-hot conflict between Gene Hackman, as the sub's martinet commander, and Denzel Washington, as the upstart who leads a mutiny rather than risk Armageddon. (Talk about a new power generation.) The two actors keep working to top each other's fury, making this duel feel palpably alive.
