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Ten-best lists are for appointed film critics. The rest of us do what we can to like as many films as possible, and I find I can muster 10 for 2001, without too much cheating. In no particular order, they are Hannibal, Faithless, Ghost World, Moulin Rouge, Conspiracy, The Deep End, Mulholland Drive, Last Orders, In the Mood For Love and The Lord of the Rings.

Yes, Conspiracy was shown on the HBO channel in the States, so you could say it was television (it will be shown on BBC2 on 25 January), but it looked and felt like a big movie. And yes, I excluded Apocalypse Now Redux because I guessed that sticklers would say that was cheating.

But in comparing 2001 and 1971, I have to cheat in bigger things. You see, part of the excitement of 1971 was digesting Bertolucci's Conformist (1970) while waiting for his Last Tango in Paris (1972), or retracing Buñuel's Tristana (1970) while trying to imagine what his The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972) might be like. I could throw in Bob Rafelson, drawing breath between Five Easy Pieces (1970) and The King of Marvin Gardens (1972).

But for strict constructionists, here are the films I liked best in 1971 (and still watch): Klute, McCabe and Mrs Miller, The Last Picture Show, The Hospital, Two-Lane Blacktop, WR: Mysteries of the Organism, A Clockwork Orange, Blanche (by Walerian Borowczyk), Truffaut's Anne and Muriel and Nagisa Oshima's Ceremony.

At which point, I should not need to spell out the concept of this article. You ought to have it by now. Even if you flinch from some of my preferred films for 2001, even if you'd sooner have In the Bedroom, Black Hawk Down, The Others, Oceans 11, Pearl Harbor, Harry Potter, Planet of the Apes, Ali, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider or Vanilla Sky, why, I can come back with these runners-up from 1971: Carnal Knowledge, The French Connection, Dirty Harry, Harold and Maude, Sunday Bloody Sunday, Le Souffle au Coeur, The Salamander and Claude Chabrol's Just Before Nightfall.

Very well, I will be plain: I think there was more reason for optimism then than now. You don't have to remind me how often the fallacy about the old days being richer and happier has been exposed. Nor is there any need to stress how boring it is for the young and thoroughly up-to-date to be told what they missed. Moreover, I do see how every 'now' must assume that things have never been better, more dramatic or more important than this now. And 2001 has ended up being a noisily 'now' year.

Still, 1971 had its moments and I fear even those of us who were alive and adult then may forget them. I had to go to an almanac to relearn that on 31 October, 1971, a cyclone hit the eastern coast of India, in the province of Orissa. More than 15,000 people were killed. In the same year, the first British soldier was killed in Northern Ireland and a major war broke out between India and Pakistan. There was a riot at Attica prison; the Pentagon papers were published; and the best picture, according to the following spring's Academy Awards, was The French Connection .

It was also the year I started teaching film to American students in England; a few, already, were Vietnam veterans, and most of the rest were scared of having to go, and alarmed by the society that was making that war so far away. Emotionally, we were all still in the Sixties, thrilled at but shocked by the rapidity and violence of change, troubled at the way old wisdoms about the nature of America were being tested.

But that ferment was vital to the excitement I'm talking about. For in 1971, and the years around then, the students I met were convinced that the movies were about their world and experience. Pictures like Makavejev's WR, Don Siegel's Dirty Harry and Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange produced intense classroom arguments over violence, law and order, sexuality. The students were happy to assess the quality of the movies, and there was a new willingness to see them as the work of directors (or even artists).

There was also a confident assumption that the movies were of the world, and that foreign film movements (like the French New Wave, drawing to a close, and the German new wave, about to begin) were instructive. Buñuel's satire on the bourgeoisie in 1972, and Kubrick's in 1971, seemed part of the same thrust or unease. The near- contempt for old-fashioned policing in Dirty Harry was part of the same mood swing that included the immense respect for organised crime in the next year's Godfather. It was a time in our lives when Michael Corleone's chilling control could seem comforting.

When Pauline Kael died this past September, one of the most piquant realisations was that she had been lucky to be close to her peak in 1971, when it seemed natural for lively film criticism to be a part of the ongoing debate on our larger experience. That integration of film and the world doesn't seem to exist any more. So Black Hawk Down, say, may be a piercing evocation of combat, based upon an oppressive sense of universal heroism and a near-complete reluctance to assess the political background (and the local meaning) of the problem in Somalia. If Black Hawk Down wins best picture (and it could), it will be because it fortuitously coincides (for it was effectively done before 11 September) with the national wish to celebrate our military and neglect our motivation.

There isn't really a direct comparison with 1971, except that so many of the best films of that year and time, even the American ones, were based on a more rueful and troubled notion of who we are. I happened to see Klute again recently. I don't mean to overrate it: it's just a very good psychological thriller. But its two central characters, Bree Daniels (Jane Fonda) and John Klute (Donald Sutherland), are so much more grown-up and complicated than the people we see now coming out of Hollywood.

It's taken for granted in Klute that Bree and Klute are both flawed humans, trying to make their way, trying to communicate and be happy, yet riddled with their own unease. You can find the same approach to character and the same disdain for tidy or cheerful endings in McCabe and Mrs Miller or The Last Picture Show, portraits of human or social context, the interaction of lives and behaviour, and the absurdity of such notions as villainy or heroism. It's even there in The French Connection and Dirty Harry - that feeling that we can't quite trust ourselves. But in today's films, there is a hysterical urge for heroes to be perfect and likeable - just think of those young zealots in the shameful Pearl Harbor .

In The Hospital, a film more dependent creatively on its writer, Paddy Chayefsky, than on its director, Arthur Hiller, there was an overall admission that, despite every benevolent intention, the institution called a hospital had become a place of chaos and inadvertent damage. And clearly in 1971, the film was a metaphor for the society as a whole. We still suffer the same kind of hospital, more or less, or the same fuddle of bureaucracy, but in Pearl Harbor and in Black Hawk Down, we are told to trust our institutions and the guys who run them. In other words, we have gone back to the kind of blithe fantasising that once prompted all movies.

So did we have such a good time in 1971 by seeing how wretched we were and what a failure our world was? Well, yes, I think so, and, yes, I miss the angry critical intelligence in young people, no matter that it was often too extreme in 1971. It is a marvel, now that a crisis has persuaded so many of us to think that we are at war and to give up the critical scrutiny of decisions about our freedoms and our economy that are far more damaging in the long run than the attack on the World Trade Centre.

I am talking about more than the movies, but why shouldn't a film writer have that duty? Why shouldn't films be about our world? The film this year that seemed to me the best, as art - Mulholland Drive - was also one of the most enclosed: in truth, it was more about the world of movies than the world at large.

Which is one reason I liked Hannibal, in which a movie tradition of horror was turned so unexpectedly into romantic comedy. If only Ridley Scott had been so daring with Black Hawk Down . If only we had characters like Bree Daniels and John McCabe. If only we had doubts in the dark.

© New York Times

David Thomson's most recent book, In Nevada, is published by Abacus, £10.99

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