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

6. Knocked Up You don't need to think that Seth Rogen's grungy slacker and Katherine Heigl's pregnant career girl belong together—who does?—to find this the smartest, funniest romantic comedy of the year. Nobody understands the eternal adolescent American male quite like Judd Apatow, who reinvents the battle of the sexes for the 21st century.

7. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly The hero of Julian Schnabel's movie may be paralyzed, and able to communicate only by blinking his left eye, but this dazzlingly inventive film soars as far as protagonist Jean-Dominique Bauby's liberating imagination can take us.

8. Away From Her In Sarah Polley's piercing adaptation of Alice Munro's unsentimental love story, a husband loses his wife to Alzheimer's and watches her fall in love with another man. A great cast led by the heartbreaking Julie Christie made this the most emotionally devastating movie of the year.

9. The Hoax Strangely overlooked, Lasse Hallström's spirited, smart, enormously entertaining account of master scammer Clifford Irving's fake Howard Hughes autobiography gave Richard Gere his best role in decades. Mixing fact and fantasy with some sleight of hand of its own, it portrays Irving as a pawn in an even bigger drama that reached all the way to the Nixon White House.

10. Sweeney Todd In Tim Burton's darkly inspired reimagining of Stephen Sondheim's classic show, Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter slice, dice and sing their way through Victorian London, pumping fresh (and copious) blood into the Hollywood musical.

The Runners Up
"Persepolis"
"No End in Sight"
"Eastern Promises"
"After the Wedding"
"The Savages"
"Rescue Dawn"
"Zodiac"
"Paprika"
"The Orphanage"
"The Wind That Shakes the Barley"