Best first feature

ONE PART TRIBE 8, one part Red Dora's, By Hook or by Crook (Silas Howard and Harry Dodge, USA) is a San Francisco film through and through. It's got the feisty nerve of so much of the literature spawned in this town (Kathy Acker by way of Michelle Tea, with 20 used paperbacks thrown in for good measure). On the filmic side, By Hook mixes it up with everything from Pull My Daisy to Midnight Cowboy. But when it comes to the issue of lifestyle, well, this is queer-core to the core. Body and image, music and text, word and muse, they all blend into one bender of a journey as the camera rolls and San Francisco's streets and sensibilities float in and out of view. So genius, it deserves to survive and multiply on the screens and Leather Tongues of this town forever – and if they ever do remake the Mint into an Our Town museum, then By Hook or By Crook oughta be part of the permanent collection.

B. Ruby Rich

B. Ruby Rich's top 10 plus one (in alphabetical order)

1. Adaptation (Spike Jonze, USA)

2. L'emploi du temps (Time Out) (Laurent Cantet, France)

3. Far from Heaven (Todd Haynes, USA/France)

4. Heaven (Tom Tykwer, Germany – plus Italy/France/U.K./USA)

5. Morvern Callar (Lynne Ramsay, U.K.)

6. The Quiet American (Phillip Noyce, USA/U.K.)

7. Russian Ark (Alexander Sokurov, Russia)

8. The Sleepy Time Gal (Christopher Münch, USA)

9. The Son's Room (Nanni Moretti, Italy)

10. The Weight of Water (Kathryn Bigelow, USA)

11. Best documentary: Daughter from Danang (Gail Dolgin and Vicente Franco, USA)