Wesley Morris: The year in movies

As befits an election year, the movies were rife with politics made personal or the personal made political. At least one promise of 2005 is that with John Kerry back in the Senate and George W. Bush reinstalled as POTUS, the tidal wave of sloppy, slanted anti-whomever diatribes might recede.

Fortunately, this year also saw graceful treatments of such difficult subjects as abortion (''Vera Drake"), the right to die (''The Sea Inside"), sex (''Kinsey"), rigged elections (''The Manchurian Candidate"), and abusive Catholic priests (''Bad Education"). Biographies abounded and personal statements came from little-known directors such as Jonathan Caouette (''Tarnation") and Ross McElwee (''Bright Leaves") as well as icons such as Oliver Stone, who saw more than a little of himself in Alexander the Great, and Clint Eastwood, who looks inward in ''Million Dollar Baby."

Two directors who had previously made good politically topical films went in the opposite direction. David O. Russell (''Three Kings") gave us ''I [Heart] Huckabees," an existential comedy about living outside the moment. And Alexander Payne (''Election") made a movie about two middle-age men on vacation in ''Sideways." Good as they are, neither made my top 10, but here's hoping Russell and Payne return to their tough, cynical selves. Given the shape the world's in, we'll need them over the next few years.

BEST

BAD EDUCATION

In Pedro Almodovar's Technicolor noir, two Catholic-school boys fall in love, only to be torn apart by a jealous priest. One becomes an actor and aspiring transvestite, the other a filmmaker, and in a move that might drive Brian De Palma to quit making movies forever, the would-be tranny takes the director a screenplay based on their erotic puppy love. What transpires is an ingenious hall of mirrors and a den of lies, making it impossible to determine where memory ends and cinema begins. Innocent boys grow into cynical adults in a world where no one is above deceit or exploitation, not even, the movie says, the director himself. This is another landmark for Almodovar, who for my money, is Europe's greatest active director.

MILLION DOLLAR BABY

If Almodovar is Europe's current master, Clint Eastwood may be ours. Martin Scorsese suddenly seems insecure. Steven Spielberg is now half as mushy but twice as erratic as he once was. And Robert Altman is too proud to reach for greatness. Eastwood is the one director who, with each film, returns to the same themes (his masculinity and encroaching mortality) to see where he stands. This boxing film is his apotheosis, the kind of movie only a 75-year-old can make: It wants to prove nothing, so its ancient story takes on new life as a late chapter in Eastwood's deepening study of his own screen persona. Hypnotically photographed and soulfully acted by Hilary Swank, Morgan Freeman, and, in the performance of his career, Eastwood himself, this is a wise work of political and moral individualism.

TARNATION

Rarely has the self been dismantled, reassembled, and remixed with as much incriminating candor or kaleidoscopic vigor as by Jonathan Caouette. He began living for his own video camera when he was 11, and as an adult he wondered how much his mother's mental instability informed his own. The film, though, is upholstered with the detritus of pop culture, which Caouette offers as pieces of his soul: Kenneth Anger by way of William Faulkner in the age of iMovie.

VERA DRAKE

Mike Leigh is so good so often that he often has to be exceptional to get anybody's attention anymore. This tale, set in the 1950s, about the eponymous London charwoman who performs abortions in her spare time, is his most powerful since ''Naked." It's a deftly constructed tour de force of social reconstruction: You can feel the morality of the period breathing down every character's neck. It's only a matter of time until Vera is caught and her family devastated, but Leigh cultivates a heart-stopping amount of suspense. This is the year's best-harmonized ensemble, and as Vera, Imelda Staunton movingly embodies the propriety of her era: The reach of her own radicalism is lost on her, but never on Leigh.

MOOLAAD

Senegal's Ousmane Sembene is the granddaddy of African cinema, and sure, he's an outspoken citizen of the world. But like few directors making movies, Sembene can make a work of didacticism that enthralls like nobody's business. This, his second late-period masterpiece (the first was his 2000 comedy ''Faat Kin"), is a melodrama about an outlawed sorceress (the formidable Fatoumata Coulibaly) fighting her village's leaders, their cultural mandates, and her own annoyed daughter, who wants to play by the rules. There's an argument for modernity and with it newfound personal liberties. But ever the progressive, Sembene lays this struggle at the feet of his heroine. He's always sensed that fathers and husbands will only disappoint. So with peerless grace, his movie proclaims that woman is the future of man.

GOODBYE DRAGON INN

The decaying Taipei movie palace at the center of Tsai Ming-liang's filmgoing ballad is a haunted house, spooked by the millions of images that have floated from its projection booth and enlivened by the peculiar viewing habits of its patrons. The whole picture unfolds in a single night, the theater's last, and Tsai devises some breathtaking shots, mostly around his itinerant, limping ticket-taker and the projectionist who, until the end, isn't there. The marriage of reverence and wackiness has rarely produced a more erotic and ultimately romantic depiction of loneliness at the movies.

CRIMSON GOLD

Jafar Panahi's perfect circle of a movie takes distress to a sad, brutal place. A pizza deliveryman (Hussein Emadeddin) heads into the upscale Tehran jewelry shop that previously condescended to him and holds it up. Panahi doesn't use conventional film vocabulary to win our empathy. This spare yet intelligently constructed social commentary is about the unbearable weight of being.

ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND

Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet meet, fall for each other, break up, and hire a company to erase their memories of each other, only to discover it was a brilliant mistake. Or something like that. Charlie Kaufman and Michel Gondry give time and space a beguiling workout without making light of the loneliness that lurks in every frame of the movie. What's touching is how Kaufman's Mobius strip of a script finds its mate in Gondry, a genius with the visual mastery to personify the fight to keep love from slipping away.

HARRY POTTER AND THE PRISONER OF AZKABAN and I'M NOT SCARED

Now that Spielberg has stopped doing Spielberg, it's up to two directors, an Italian and a Mexican, to carry on in his name. Their two films, both fearsome boyhood tales, make up an astounding double feature of parentally challenged kids in jeopardy. Gabriele Salvatores's summery ''I'm Not Scared" is not afraid to put the life of its boy who knows too much on the line. Meanwhile, Alfonso Cuaron encouraged ''Harry Potter" to mature, intrepidly allowing hormones, rage, reality, and great blasts of cinema into J.K. Rowling's magic macrocosm.

KILL BILL, VOL. 2

The impatient thrill-seeker in me prefers the electro-disco tableaux in last year's first installment. But this better-made second half, in which the Bride rescues her little girl and, indeed, kills Bill, is where Quentin Tarantino, the trash movie junkie, proves he can do more with Uma Thurman's heart than just jam a great big needle through it.

RUNNERS-UP

I thought about a worst list, but why bother: You know who you are, and you're all dead to me.

Instead I'd like to say to the following movies, I'm sorry. If a top 10 could fit 22 films, the rest of you would be there. So, briefly, a shout out to the rest of the best:

''I [Heart] Huckabees": the greatest French movie ever to come out of America.

''Kinsey": Carnality has rarely had a higher IQ, better acting, or better structure.

''Since Otar Left": In a year of fierce melodramas, only you managed to make me cry for past, present, and future.

''Maria Full of Grace": Filmmaking so skillfully focused on character that in a picture about drug mules, morality never gets in the way.

''The Brown Bunny": I don't care what people say. I felt something. (Vince, call me!)

''Dogville": Nicole Kidman suffers for Lars von Trier's America-bashing art; even with its reductive thinking, the movie stings.

''Bright Leaves": The tremendous nonfiction artist Ross McElwee again makes history his own.

''A Dirty Shame": For one hour it's the craziest-funniest thing John Waters has ever done (in public).

''Control Room": The rare documentary that could play at either party's convention; ''fair and balanced" is not just a tag line.

''The Saddest Music in the World": From ''Shrek 2" to street traffic, Winnipeg's Guy Maddin should direct everything.

''Distant": Nuri Bilge Ceylan's buddy movie is the ''Sideways" of Turkey.

Speaking of ''Sideways": Don't worry, you're everybody else's movie of the year!

Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com.