The (Way More Than) Ten Best Movies of the Year

It was unusually hard coming up with a 10-best list this year. Not because there weren't enough good movies but because there were too many, and it hurt to leave so much good work off the list. So I'm appending a second 10 and a host of other highly recommended movies, many of which, depending on the day I made the list, might easily have crept into the first tier. These were the movies that made me feel like Anton Ego, in one of the year's most transcendent cinematic moments, tasting his first bite of glorious ratatouille.

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1. Syndromes and a Century Never heard of it? Sadly, this entrancing Thai movie played in only a few cities. But no film transported me like Apichatpong Weerasethakul's lovely, earthy, funny and mysterious film. A movie about doctors, lovers and Buddhist monks, divided into two parts that mirror each other—one set in the country, one in the city—"Syndromes" is almost impossible to describe. There's not a scene in it quite like any you've ever watched before. It allows you to look at life, and movies, with newborn eyes.

2. There Will Be Blood Another astonishing metamorphosis from Daniel Day-Lewis, who turns himself into a ruthlessly ambitious, misanthropic oil tycoon in early-20th-century California. Paul Thomas Anderson's superbly crafted, uncompromising study of unchecked egotism and greed is an epic character study as dark, and as daring, as they come. Anderson's images imprint themselves indelibly on the mind.

3. This Is England Set in the Midlands of England during the Thatcher years, writer director Shane Meadows's deeply personal coming-of-age story follows a fatherless 13-year-old working-class kid who falls under the malign influence of a racist skinhead (a great performance from Stephen Graham). Every frame of this funny, scary movie is wonderfully alive.

4. The Lives of Others The well-deserved winner of the Best Foreign Film Oscar, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's wrenching study of an East German Stasi officer spying on a playwright and his lover is a thrilling, near-definitive portrait of life in a totalitarian state.

5. No Country for Old Men The Coen Brothers were a perfect fit for Cormac McCarthy's brooding, gripping vision of evil unloosed upon the Western landscape. Josh Brolin, Tommy Lee Jones and the terrifying Javier Bardem are pitch perfect in this unblinkingly tense thriller, a philosophical genre movie without an ounce of fat on its lean, mean body.