(Excerpted)

Is this it? asked The Strokes. The band may have struck that punctuation squiggle from the title of its debut album, but the post-Velvet Underground, post-Television, poster-boy-foxy rockers were, like the other artists who top our critics' lists, definitely floating a query. Why is it that the year's smartest, most accomplished, most ravishing entertainment tended to be consumed with quests and questions? At the cineplex, Peter Jackson's adaptation of The Lord of the Rings illuminates the mythic searching of Frodo Baggins, while in Memento the hero's noirish struggle to solve the basic mystery of life -- Who am I? -- makes for a thrilling existential interrogation. At home, a first-rate DVD revisits the biggest inquiry in all of cinema -- What's Rosebud? -- while the greatest Internet thrill, a 2001 cyberspace odyssey, turned participants into scavenger hunters guessing where one Jeanine Salla was. The biography Savage Beauty probes the enigma of Edna St. Vincent Millay; The Corrections gives the American family the third degree; our critics wonder if any of it could be more sublime. (Meanwhile, they have a different line of questioning for the year's foulest contributions: Have they no shame?) We know better than ever that life holds few certainties, but are sure of the resonant beauty of great work. This is it.
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SITE OF THE YEAR 1 The Hunt for Jeanine Salla

(familiasalla-es.ro) Steven Spielberg's A.I. Artificial Intelligence may one day be appreciated as a work of Stanley Kubrick-inspired genius. But right now it's considered a box office disappointment that was promoted using an elaborate murder-mystery plot both detached from and more fun than the film itself. The creators of the A.I. scavenger hunt, which spanned 30 websites as diverse as rogueretrieval.com and martinswinton.com and told such a complex tale that it took people from around the globe to decipher some of the clues, are mere months from announcing their next top secret project. And maybe now it won't have to be yoked to a movie at all.