Frames of reference: originality and daring

At the end of the year, as at the end of the day, all that counts for the reviewer in making a 10-best list is figuring out which movies affected him most and why, with highest marks going for originality, daring and level of accomplishment. The entire process is inescapably subjective and is carried out with the awareness that any number of other films are arguably just as worthy -- or even worthier -- of in- clusion in so arbitrarily short a list.

1. “Tarnation”: Not only did the movie camera Jonathan Caouette received as a gift as a little boy save his sanity throughout an extravagantly dysfunctional childhood and youth in Houston, but also provided the means to record a unique memoir in which Caouette discovered a way to bring meaning and even beauty to chaos.

2. “Notre Musique”: As Jean-Luc Godard approaches 75 he remains the major film iconoclast of his time -- always fresh, confounding, sometimes maddening and endlessly provocative. This time he is even a bit optimistic as he participates in an actual European Literary Encounters conference in Sarajevo, where he interweaves renowned literary figures with fictional characters. Godard is fascinated with eternally opposing forces -- e.g., dark/light, life/death -- which he says yields “the two faces of truth.” Yet the thrust of “Notre Musique” suggests that while language divides people,and nations, images have the power to unite them.

3. “Million Dollar Baby”: To “Unforgiven” and “Mystic River,” Clint Eastwood has added “Million Dollar Baby” -- beautifully adapted by Paul Haggis from an F.X. Toole short story -- to create the great trilogy of the modern American cinema. Experience, maturity and accomplishment have only deepened and enriched Eastwood’s appreciation of the eternal longing for justice, success, love and redemption. The irony of Eastwood is that as he grows as an artist, proceeding from strength to strength, his awareness of the potential for the tragic in life only deepens. As Hilary Swank herself has said, “Million Dollar Baby” is a great love story, between a hardscrabble young woman (Swank) craving salvation in the boxing ring and Eastwood, as a crusty old pro, amusingly resistant to training her. The film is unpredictable and devastating, with superlative portrayals by Swank, Eastwood and Morgan Freeman as Eastwood’s wise sidekick. This film is much more than the usual boxing movie, yet it isolates and illuminates what drives boxers with unique clarity and force.

4. “A Home at the End of the World”: There really are people who can charm the birds out of trees, and Bobby Morrow of “A Home at the End of the World” is one of them. Bobby is already enchanting as a suburban Cleveland 9-year-old in 1967, and even more so by 1982 at age 24, by which time he is played by Colin Farrell in a performance, which like those of his costars Robin Wright Penn, Dallas Roberts (in an enviably striking film debut) and Sissy Spacek, is among the year’s best. Directed by theater notable Michael Mayer in his screen debut, “A Home at the End of the World,” written by Michael Cunningham, is an emotional wipeout, the effect of which is much like the films of James Dean.

5. “Bad Education”: An unexpected visit from a friend from adolescence (Gael Garcia Bernal) to a film director (Fele Martinez) not only provides him inspiration for his next film but also triggers a collision of past and present, memory and fantasy, that reveals the evil that can flourish in a rigid parochial school atmosphere. In his most recent work Pedro Almodovar’s wildly imaginative plots have become veritable cascades, each development more daring and revealing than the last. The effect here is nothing less than prodigious in its virtuosity, in its understanding of the potency of popular culture and in the inextricable intermingling of pathos and darkly humorous absurdity in the workings of fate. A masterpiece.

6. “Maria, Full of Grace”: A strong indictment of international drug trafficking and its myriad causes, Joshua Marston’s harrowing first film is no tract but a perceptive evocation of an appealing young woman (Catalina Sandino Moreno), an impoverished Colombian who signs on to be a drug “mule,” undergoing self-discovery under the most dangerous circumstances. The contrast between Maria’s picturesque hometown and Jackson Heights, Queens, couldn’t be more jolting, yet they are connected by a universal, eternal struggle for survival.

7. “Kinsey”: Writer-director Bill Condon’s bold yet rigorously nonexploitative screen biography of Alfred C. Kinsey, pioneer researcher in sexual behavior, attests to the enduring strengths of the classic film narrative in exploring complex and controversial individuals and issues. Liam Neeson, as Kinsey, and Laura Linney, as Kinsey’s supportive wife, head a superb cast. Condon makes clear how and why Kinsey, a biologist who had discovered that no two gull wasps are alike, ventured into virtually uncharted territory to find a wide range of sexual diversity in men and women, a discovery timelier than ever in its implications.

8. “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”: In writer Charlie Kaufman and director Michel Gondry’s shimmering, quicksilver love story, a workaholic Jim Carrey falls for free-spirited Kate Winslet only to discover that as their lovestarts to lose its bloom she literally has erased him from her memory -- which is the very moment this convoluted, tantalizing and venturesome movie kicks into high gear.

9. “The Phantom of the Opera”: Director Joel Schumacher has joined forces with Andrew Lloyd Webber to bring Sir Andrew’s stage musical version on the oft-told 1911 Gaston Leroux novel to vivid life in this sumptuous, sweepingly romantic period piece. Gerard Butler is surely the most dashing Phantom ever, captivating Emmy Rossum’s exquisite Christine as he lurks in the shadows of the vast and opulent opera house yet becoming dangerously jealous of the theater’s aristocratic and handsome patron (Patrick Wilson), who has started to court her. Deftly setting off an increasingly spooky emotional tumult is Minnie Driver as the opera company’s comically temperamental diva. This “Phantom” has a resonance that would seem to come from an appreciation of what was strongest about the key previous film versions, especially the still-potent 1925 silent original with Lon Chaney and the lush 1943 Technicolor version in which Claude Rains was a heartbreaking Phantom.

10. “Moolaade”: Ousmane Sembene, the father of the sub-Saharan cinema, has made an eloquent protest against the archaic, dangerous tradition of female “circumcision” still practiced in 38 of the 54 African nations recognized by the United Nations. Sembene is a poet of the cinema who warmly embraces life in its joys as well as its sorrows, and the world of “Moolaade” has a sunny, pastoral beauty. In evoking the leisurely, ancient way of life in a rural village, Sembene makes the horrors of genital mutilation, called, ironically, “purification” and carried out in the most primitive manner, seem all the more hideous. His film concerns a vivacious woman (Fatoumata Coulibaly), who has suffered the effects of her genital excision, deciding to give refuge to four little girls trying to flee the unspeakably painful ritual.