The Year’s Best

What made many of the year’s best films so notable was the sheer vigor of craft: can’t-miss ensembles firing up a deftly turned story, often to nuanced comic effect. They made movies such as “The Queen” and “Little Miss Sunshine” easy to love. It was also a good year for movies that weren’t so easy to love, wiggy excursions like “Inland Empire,” in which David Lynch abandoned film entirely for purposefully garish video, and “A Scanner Darkly,” which pushed the envelope with psychotropic animation. Either way, there was an abundance to engage.

10. THE DEVIL AND DANIEL JOHNSTON
Directed by Jeff Feuerzeig

At once comic and tragic, the often-catastrophic life of cult-hero songwriter Daniel Johnston begged for a documentary like this one. Mr. Feuerzeig’s problem, though, was that his manic-depressive subject proved an iffy interview because he must be heavily medicated. Luckily, Mr. Johnston had not only a lot of talkative (and semi-famous) friends, but he grew up as an obsessive archivist of his own crazy-quilt artistry and insanity. Whether you like Mr. Johnston’s music or not (it’s an acquired taste), the film’s intricate scrapbook collage is a moving portrait of an artist unlike any you’ve ever met.

9. DANCE PARTY, USA
Directed by Aaron Katz

Novice director Aaron Katz displays a richly intuitive command of a young, unknown cast in this no-budget indie, which follows a pair of high school kids through the groggy mornings and beer-sodden late nights of a Fourth of July weekend, where scruffy teenagers negotiate painfully tentative connections — and quick, decisive sexual hookups. If this sounds like Gus Van Sant territory, it is: The movie was even made in Portland, Ore., the director’s hometown. But Mr. Katz has a feel for language and an intimate way with the camera that gives his scenes an almost documentary realism uniquely his own.

8. VENUS
Directed by Roger Michell

Peter O’Toole, taking a grand valedictory lap as a fading actor indulging in one last romantic folly, isn’t the only reason to see this candid and charming comedy. But his performance, a marvel of elegance amid the erosion of old age, is more than ample incentive. The writer-director team of Hanif Kureisihi and Roger Michell offer a kind of male version of “The Mother,” as an elderly ladies man (Mr. O’Toole, who has lived such a role) woos a most unlikely goddess of love — the delinquent grandniece of his best friend. Newcomer Jodie Whitaker holds her own in epic company, a chavvy Eliza Doolittle to Mr. O’Toole’s genially lascivious Henry Higgins.

7. THE PROPOSITION
Directed by John Hillcoat

This brutal, minimalist Western revisited the Ned Kelly legend as a band of outlaw brothers wage war in the Australian outback to avenge one of their own, even as one of them (Guy Pearce) weighs an inevitable betrayal. Gloomy genius songwriter Nick Cave penned the screenplay, lean yet laden with rough poetic flourishes. John Hillcoat (“Ghosts of the Civil Dead”) directed, reveling in Peckinpah-like eruptions of bloodshed and the fevered, fly-ridden rawness of the desolate location.

6. BORAT: CULTURAL LEARNINGS OF AMERICA FOR MAKE BENEFIT GLORIOUS NATION OF KAZAKHSTAN
Directed by Larry Charles

There’s a lot more going on in Sacha Baron Cohen’s transgressive romp than poop gags, although such vulgar indulgences are the funniest moments in this not-quite-mockumentary. Borat (Mr. Cohen) is a horny, hirsute news correspondent from a primitive former Soviet Republic set loose in America to interview politicians and common folk, using his guilelessness to disarm them while he pulls their leg.

The high-risk pranksterism sets up a lot of easy jokes at the expense of dumb rednecks — who obviously never caught Mr. Cohen’s “Da Ali G Show” on cable — and disquieting ones about anti-Semitism, blurring the line between what’s staged and what’s not. If you don’t want to think about all that, there’s also nude male wrestling. And Pamela Anderson.

5 VOLVER
Directed by Pedro Almodóvar

Once the bad boy of Spanish cinema, Pedro Almodóvar has mellowed into mastery. He still loves nothing better than the outrageous convolutions of the soap opera, but now the rhythms of his films are modulated with a fine, precise touch. There is mayhem aplenty in this comic melodrama — in which Penelope Cruz is haunted by the supposed spirit of her dead mother (Carmen Maura) — including murder, attempted rape, transposed identities, and so on. Yet, amid the slapstick domestic horror, an elegiac tone emerges that suffuses this high-end chick flick with a redemptive sweetness.

4. INLAND EMPIRE
Directed by David Lynch

Life-sized humanoid bunnies, a chorus line of streetwalkers doing “The Locomotion,” distraught mystery women in dark hotel rooms … and a monkey? David Lynch came back with a vengeance with this three-hour journey into limbo, which he all but made by hand, shooting with a consumer-grade video camera over a three-year span. It’s his freest, and most freely associated, work since “Eraserhead” 30 years ago, as much an exploration of visual texture and psychic ambiguity as a ghost story about mythic Hollywood. Laura Dern occupies almost every frame as an ill-fated actress whose multiple personalities loop like a needle in a spinning record, and gives a performance that is nearly operatic.

3. LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE
Directed by Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton

If husband-and-wife directors Ms. Faris and Mr. Dayton succeed at nothing else, they have secured a spot in the pop culture pantheon for inventing a surprising new excuse to use the Rick James party anthem, “Superfreak.” It’s the funky punchline to this unexpectedly touching and vibrantly rude dysfunctional family comedy, in which a VW van full of losers go on the road trip from hell — and learn how to love each other.

2. A SCANNER DARKLY
Directed by Richard Linklater

Richard Linklater’s prolific run of films jumps from genre to genre, but his work is consistent in its love of effusive speech – from the postgrad philosophizing of “Slacker” to the doped-up crosstalk of this nervy, nervous Philip K. Dick adaptation. The movie was shot with an eclectic cast (Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr., Winona Ryder, Woody Harrelson) and then rendered as animation using a technique called Rotoscoping — also featured in Mr. Linklater’s “Waking Life.”The vivid colors and jittery, morphing forms are an ideal analog for Dick’s hallucinatory dystopia, a bedraggled near-future where paranoia is a drug and no one can escape the voices in their head. As visionary as its source.

1. THE QUEEN
Directed by Steven Frears

Her majesty Helen Mirren gave the performance of the year as Queen Elizabeth II, humanizing the stony matriarch — in fluffy pink slippers, no less — as she grudgingly gives in to the mass public outpouring of grief after the sudden death of Princess Diana. A sterling ensemble cast hits a perfect pitch in this comedy of the overly mannered, guided by the adroit touch of director Stephen Frears.