It was touch and go at times, but 2007 shaped up to be a pretty good vintage. Notably, American auteurs of the ’90s resurfaced — with a vengeance: Haynes, Fincher, and Anderson (Paul Thomas, but we still love you, Wes) were joined by their predecessors, the Coen brothers, on the marquee. Equally striking was the little-remarked success of female filmmakers, including Pascale Ferran (“Lady Chatterley”), Tamara Jenkins (“The Savages”), So Yong Kim (“In Between Days”), and the late Adrienne Shelley (“Waitress”). 2007 also boasted innovative popcorn flicks: “Sunshine,” “The Host,” and “The Bourne Ultimatum” all bucked the implications of the fourth straight year to see a sequel as the leading grosser.

10. Killer of Sheep: Thanks to last year’s accolades for Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1969 resistance potboiler “Army of Shadows,” the placement of a 1977 film on a 2007 top-10 list no longer ruffles feathers, but we’ll tuck it in at 10 to acknowledge its unusual out-of-time existence. Charles Burnett’s impressionistic, empathetic look at a Watts neighborhood family packed in the crowds at IFC Center, after its restoration and unveiling by Milestone Films. One can only imagine the alternate history of American independent cinema with “Killer of Sheep” as the keystone, with its musical sense of attenuated human rhythms, its unforced grace, its genuine beauty, and, not incidentally, Mr. Burnett’s feel for the working-class milieu. But you don’t want to overburden the thing, so suffice to say, where have you been all my life?

9. Hot Fuzz: A triumvirate of high-profile, male-panic comedies — “Knocked Up,” “I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry,” and “Superbad” — commandeered multiplexes this summer, but they had nothing on this hilarious labor of love from the Brit team of director Edgar Wright, actor and co-writer Simon Pegg, and actor and co-joker Nick Frost. A parody of the ludicrous likes of “Bad Boys II” and Anglo village-green provincialism, “Hot Fuzz” succeeds thanks to fan-boy savvy and split-second timing in front of and behind the camera: This lot knows when and where you’ll stop laughing, and pulls up just in time. It’s an on-your-toes self-awareness that slowly departed from the amusing but deflating “Simpsons Movie.” (Also, and this is no small point of standards, “Hot Fuzz” looks appropriately slick, while “Superbad” is one cruddily lit film.)

8. I’m Not There: This exploded, multifaceted portrait of Bob Dylan was the logical next evolutionary step after the recent run of biopics, and who better to deconstruct celebrity, genius, artifice, and identity than Todd Haynes. But while connections exist between “I’m Not There” and Mr. Haynes’s earlier work in the theoretical-biographical vein (1998’s “Velvet Goldmine”), the surging emotional impact of the film also evoked his last film, “Far From Heaven.”

Some carped about the literalness of Mr. Haynes’s interpretations, but in a sense he was working in and around a myth, much as he harnessed Sirkian melodrama in “Heaven.” Mr. Dylan may be the original self-made enigma, but that didn’t detract from Mr. Haynes’s exhilarating orchestration of six voices, the great man’s music, and as many or more styles, ideas, and sentiments. Sure, one wishes the “Ballad of a Thin Man” sequence weren’t quite so on-point, or that Cate Blanchett, for all the skilled mimicry, didn’t elongate the “Judas” moment in that faux drone. But the hurtling, moving experience of “I’m Not There” speaks for itself.

7. Zodiac: Filmmaker David Fincher perplexed many with his exactingly detailed period album of the disintegrating trail of the Zodiac Killer, an investigation that went nowhere despite tantalizing near misses. Unlike his 1995 portrait of a serial killer, “Se7en,” there was no diabolically fascinating mastermind or anti-aesthetic of murder as lurid art. Instead, the trick was to ignore whatever the anemic Jake Gyllenhaal (as Robert Graysmith, a cartoonist moonlighting as boy detective) was doing and home in on the rich craft in the service of depicting obsession.

That included the superb supporting cast (from Mark Ruffalo and James LeGros to Brian Cox and John Carroll Lynch), the precisely wrought and balanced filmmaking, and the faded snapshots of a city over time. Though everyone expected a big bang from the director of “Fight Club,” his puzzle disturbed and implied more for being unsolved. “Just because you can’t prove it doesn’t mean it isn’t true,” says Graysmith, and instead of expressing a “Dirty Harry”-style, anything-goes justice, the line could be a desperate motto for the movie’s realist indeterminacy.

6. Away from Her: Twenty-eight-year-old Canadian actress Sarah Polley enlisted past co-star Julie Christie and fellow Canadian Gordon Pinsent and pulled off an unlikely accomplishment for a filmmaker whose peers generally gaze inward. “Away From Her” is an attuned drama about the lifelong romance of marriage and the long goodbye of Alzheimer’s. Adapting the short story “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” by the formidable Alice Munro, Ms. Polley isn’t infallible, but navigates with her actors the tricky distances and ironies that open up in the central couple’s tragic predicament.

5. No Country for Old Men: Adapting Cormac McCarthy’s novel, Joel and Ethan Coen harmonize a murderer’s march with a sheriff’s elegy for his land and his years, and even if they didn’t pull off the masterpiece everyone claimed, it’s hard to turn away for a second. Josh Brolin found a ragged dignity in his character’s increasingly bloody grip on keeping something for nothing, while Javier Bardem made his killer so ghoulish and empty-gazed that you (almost) didn’t laugh at his lost-a-bet hairdo. Tommy Lee Jones sits and takes it all in, down to a final monologue recounting a dream as bereft in its way as the explicit violence that came before. Joel and Ethan: We hereby forgive you “The Ladykillers.”

4. Syndromes and a Century: Like Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s last film, “Tropical Malady,” “Syndromes and a Century” is a beguiling work in two movements, but the Thai director here opens out his magic of memory and desire on a grander scale, across distinct eras in the nation’s effort to modernize. In a Thai hospital, incidents and relationships unfold obliquely and mysteriously. They include a strange job interview between a doctor and her smitten candidate, the bond between a gallant singing dentist and a sweetly shy monk, and two older ladies drinking booze from a bottle secreted away in a mannequin.

Mr. Apichatpong imbues his idiom of long takes and pellucid photography with an irresistibly sunny sense of contemplation. You can feel the love, and the heartache, and for all this, the gentle filmmaker faced blinkered censorship of the film back home.

3. Ratatouille:Conventional wisdom had Pixar long ago eclipsing Disney as the go-to brand for quality animated entertainment (well, except “Cars”), but “Ratatouille” restored some needed heart to the pixilated outfit’s fastidious breeziness. This story of a rat gourmet is genuinely warm, wise, and witty, where other animated features ham-handedly court all ages with mindless pseudocleverness, sappy quests, and pop-culture regurgitation. The colorful animation, which New York Sun critic Bruce Bennett wrote should be “rated T for texture,” is expressively and delicately wrought without resembling an advertisement for a vector compiler. “Ratatouille” might also reflect a zeitgeist of burgeoning generations of young culinary experts raised on cooking shows and democratized foodie interests.

2. There Will Be Blood: Just as much of a work of sustained tension, P.T. Anderson’s best film yet is an extraordinary melding of terrific filmmaking and gangbusters acting. Mr. Anderson’s films have always threatened to float away in perfectly framed, cinephilic-magical realism. But “Blood” is grounded by the dust, dirt, and oil puddles of turn-of-the-century California, and by Daniel Day-Lewis’s technically and soulfully brilliant performance as a predatory, self-consuming oilman.

1. Day Night Day Night: A perfectly constructed time bomb of a movie, Julia Loktev’s debut feature is the exacting verité docudrama of a future nightmare: A soft-spoken teenager is prepped and launched as a suicide bomber in Times Square. Unlike the grueling September 11 memorial “United 93,” this pitilessly empirical film withholds dramatic cues, forcing you to think and feel your way through the terror. As the never-named girl, the strikingly featured Luisa Williams is riveting in her first screen role. Ms. Loktev’s film, which came out this spring before the celluloid battleground had shifted to Iraq, grinds to an ending that, contrary to expectations, offers a kernel of hope.