So 2006 will witness the birth of what's called "day-and-date" releasing, in which selected indie-type films will simultaneously appear in art-house theaters, become available on pay-per-view television, and (in some cases) be released on DVD. Magnolia, Bowles' company, will release Steven Soderbergh's "Bubble" on all three platforms on Jan. 27, and the entire industry is watching eagerly.

"That's really going to be an interesting experiment," says Bowles. In theory, he explains, you get the best of both worlds. The idea is that theatrical release "will still pique people's interest and generate good reviews" -- but then anyone, anywhere in the country, can see the film right away without leaving home.

As Werner of IFC adds, "Sixty percent of the New York Times' readership lives outside New York City. Why should they have to wait four months after they read a review to see that film?" Personally, I'm not convinced that "Bubble," a grim little working-class drama that makes Lars von Trier's films seem hilarious, is the best test case for this experiment. But whether that movie clicks or not, day-and-date release seems pretty much inevitable, at least for films at a certain modest market niche; most distributors I talked to have something similar either planned or on the drawing board.

Where does all this fascinating business news leave the art form of cinema, if that hasn't become an embarrassing expression? I have no idea. Can some new distribution model, where you can watch Tarantino's next film at home with a group of friends over gnarly rounds of bong hits, restore the lost sense of "cultural imperative," the aura of aesthetic and cultural definition that independent movies once possessed?

I don't think so, and it's probably not even the right question. New movies, even when they're as good as the 10 or 20 I'm about to list for you, have to compete not only with each other but with a vastly expanded entertainment universe. Are you really going to haul your ass off the couch and go pay 10 bucks to see an uncategorizable French film by an unknown director (like Arnaud Desplechin's "Kings and Queen") when you could stay home and watch anything and everything by Scorsese or Tarkovsky or Hitchcock or Dario Argento? How does one choose between Pirjo Honkasalo's demanding documentary about the Chechen war, "3 Rooms of Melancholia," and the fifth uproarious night in a row of viewing "Bubba Ho-Tep"?

There are no good answers to these questions. Nobody knows anything. What I do know is that this 10-best list self-consciously grades on a curve, and I'm not embarrassed about that. My first, second and third criteria were that I loved the film and thought I saw something significant in it. But after that I considered the cruel vicissitudes of fate and rooted for the underdog. I haven't spent much time summarizing these movies (that's what links are for, people!), but I've tried to shed a little light on what happened to them and why.

If the glass is half-empty, it's also half-full. Eamonn Bowles may sound like a skeptic about adventurous independent cinema, but he really isn't. "Look, everyone's bemoaning the fact that these films don't do well theatrically," he says. "But people can see almost anything they want to see, and that wasn't true 10 or 15 years ago. They just have vastly more choices, and that's not a bad thing."

In the fullness of time, in other words, really good movies like these will find the audience intended for them by the movie gods, even if they can't quite create a cultural moment, or define a collective aesthetic experience, the way "La Dolce Vita" or "Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie" or "Stranger Than Paradise" once did. I believe that, I think. Or anyway, it's what I tell myself.

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