Best in Film: Scott Foundas

3 The Fog of War. A movie of this moment, and of the one yet to come, consisting of 11 "lessons" from the life of former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, as told to that intrepid chronicler of our national identity, Errol Morris. Morris responds by conjuring McNamara's expressive words into some of the most potent images of war and remembrance in the modern cinema. The moral of the story being that history has a funny way of repeating itself, and how we have a funny way of forgetting that.

4 Japón. The year's most impressive debut feature, Carlos Reygadas' cryptic fable tells of an unnamed man brought back from the brink of a suicidal abyss by his odd romance with an elderly widow named Ascen (as in Ascension). What follows is a sometimes impenetrable, often overreaching, but always beguiling succession of abstract, nearly wordless scenes — including a disturbingly beautiful bit of lovemaking — about the search for meaning and spirituality in a world of disappointments.

5 Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. A great naturalist epic masquerading as a seafaring adventure, courtesy of Peter Weir, who has spent his career delving into landscapes both savage and domestic to explore the rifts between classes, cultures and differing systems of belief. Here, detailing with unparalleled verisimilitude the daily life on a British man-of-war during the Napoleonic Wars, the camaraderie of brothers-in-arms and the rituals by which apprentices become masters, Weir produces that rarest of films: a humanist Hollywood spectacle, worth every penny of the three studios' investments it took to make it.

6 The Man on the Train (L'homme du Train). Director Patrice Leconte makes movies that possess a clockmaker's precision and a pickpocket's efficiency. This one marks the crowning achievement in his careerlong fascination with voyeuristic obsession, yearning for the road not taken and the films of Alfred Hitchcock — all filtered through two sublime performances: Jean Rochefort's as the retired schoolteacher who dreams of being a bank robber, and pop star Johnny Hallyday's as the bank robber who dreams of being a retired schoolteacher.

7 American Splendor. The life and work of Harvey Pekar — poet laureate of the depressed, unfulfilled existence — rendered, well, splendidly by the husband-and-wife filmmaking team of Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, and by the chameleonic actors Paul Giamatti and Hope Davis.