Premiere's Top 10 Films of Tribeca 2008:

1. The Secret of the Grain — Memorize this name: Hafsia Herzi. The up-and-coming Algerian-Tunisian-French beauty has already won a César Award, Venice's Marcello Mastroianni Award and more for her performance here, but it's her gloriously sexy surprise I hinted at before that makes the film's final 10 minutes as rewarding as all 141 that come before it. I know that's a tease, as is what to expect: sweat-glistening sensuality and unblinking suspense.

My Winnipeg Courtesy of Tribeca

2. My Winnipeg — Guy Maddin's finest, funniest film thus far. It's not hyperbole, I've seen them all.

3. Somers Town — The only section in color is its brief ending, which I guarantee will be widely misunderstood as an epilogue if and when someone finally distributes this absolute delight. Crowd-pleasing wish fulfillment, some say? Listen again to the dialogue just prior to know what's real: it's kind of a fake-happy downer, but you still sense Shane Meadows loves these characters.

4. Profit motive and the whispering wind — Who says that avant-garde cinema can't be political, poetic, radical, austere, and still just a pleasure to watch? John Gianvito's bravest move is in allowing his film the awkward freedom of running just under an hour — too long to be a short, too tiny to be distributed as a feature, yet cutting or padding would've been an artistic mistake, bravo.

5. Guest of Cindy Sherman — Single giddiest moment: Julian Schnabel, circa the macho '80s, sitting and admiring his own paintings, then boasting ridiculous plans to hang his canvases in a Roman coliseum.

6. Man on Wire — James Marsh's filmmaking and Philippe Petit's storytelling are so vivid and vital that when Petit finally dances across the sky between the Twin Towers, the still photographs were enough to both drop my jaw and put a big acrophobic knot in my stomach.

7. Redbelt — Call me a "brain-dead liberal," but as hugely entertaining as I find David Mamet's jujitsu hoodwinker — the first directorial effort of his I've liked in a decade, if not two — the plot doesn't make a lick of sense. Where does the con begin, and is it plausible without some fluky twists de machina? Rather than elaborately and expensively conning this poor sap, couldn't all these dangerous villains have just Googled "two white marbles + one black marble + bowl," or would that have forced Mamet to write an action-thriller about copyright infringement?

Sita Sings the Blues Courtesy of Tribeca

8. Mister Lonely – Werner Herzog is one of the funniest screen comedians living today.

9. Charly – The repetitive process of Charly's obsessive-compulsiveness is what stays with me most. How do you recommend a film to someone when your fondest memories of it are cleaning pots and remembering to slam a trailer door?

10. Sita Sings the Blues — Taking notes while I was watching, I was frequently reminded of Jessica Yu's doc Protagonist, as its ambitious juggle of ideas (or in Nina Paley's case, animation styles and storytelling techniques) is so experiential that describing it comes off too academic to do it enough justice.