The year in movies

Apparently 2006 was a better year than I remember. The trouble with spending so much time in the dark is that it becomes harder not simply to see the light but to revel in it. And the 10-best list is an act of judgment I've never been wild about. Why 10? And what, ultimately, is the difference between No. 3 and No. 9? I happen to like both a lot, for different reasons , in different ways.

Like any 10-best list, mine tells a story of the year, and that story seems to be the death of well-made frivolity. With a few exceptions, the year's best movies were heavy numbers, whose political and social ideas outshone whatever levity they contained. Regardless of how many hours we've spent obsessing over celebrity babies, these are not frivolous times.

John Cameron Mitchell's "Shortbus" is a comedy that feels like a more sober undertaking. Something more than just a laugh is at stake, which, of course, is what makes the film audacious: It takes life seriously, but not itself. Sacha Baron Cohen didn't appear to take anything seriously either. But "Borat" is not simply an anomaly. It's a miracle whose conceits could have gone wrong and stayed there. Other movies tried for timely satire this year -- Paul Weitz's "American Dreamz" comes to mind -- and lost their nerve.

Be it as a matter of realism or science fiction, 2006's best films, in their own ways, either pay tribute to humanity's persistence in a dark hour or bear witness to its vanishing -- in Brooklyn, Oregon, and Bucharest, and in a former French soldier's vision of occupied Paris and a Mexican's sense of a fascist-state London in 2027. The world is hurting. And if these movies don't ease the pain, they certainly give the hurt a voice.

SHORTBUS

New York used to be interesting. Then the money came, and Giuliani and 9/11, then even more money. So the interesting people, the ones who didn't get rich or elected, moved underground -- the artists, the gays, the outsiders. You could tell a version of this story in any big American city. John Cameron Mitchell tells most of his in a floor-through Brooklyn apartment. A couple of nights a week it becomes a bustling carnal funhouse where you can talk, you can look, you can touch. But this is hardly a sensationalist's paradise. Mitchell's movie, with its proudly amateur cast and homemade aesthetic, is about three disconnected, lost souls wandering from room to room, hoping to fix themselves. Anyone who's seen "Shortbus" has experienced something special, a movie as outrageously funny as "Borat" and as privately, emotionally transparent as some diary entries. While more grandiloquent directors were thinking globally (perhaps you caught Alejandro González Iñárritu's "Babel"), Mitchell acted locally. His movie is not revolutionary simply because it's the first to depict real sex in a life-size emotional context. It's that it dares to celebrate its dysfunctional heteros, homos, and uncategorizables as equal in eyes of love. Time magazine just paid tribute to our fractured culture by making "You" its person of the year. According to this eloquent movie, that person is "Us."

ARMY OF SHADOWS

The late Jean-Pierre Melville didn't have to dream up World War II. He'd lived it, having fought with the Free French Forces . The romantic portraits of the war (villains and heroes) that were common when Melville's magnum opus was made in 1969 -- and, astonishingly, never released in America -- didn't interest him. Adapted from Joseph Kessel's 1943 novel, "Army of Shadows" is a breathtakingly composed war movie with no battlefield. The chess-move skirmishes are made in the darkness, as the movie recasts the moral courage of clandestine resistance to France's Nazi occupiers as an opaque tangle of philosophical, familial, national, and circumstantial loyalties. The film's network of insurgents -- including the physically and emotionally compact Lino Ventura , who plays the agent protagonist; and the formidable Simone Signoret as the resistance outfit's lone woman -- are a motley band of regular people. And as is the case in Melville's best-known crime pictures, they're unknowable to us and to each other. But here Melville quietly laments the cruelest casualty in this aspect of the war: humanity.

THE DEATH OF MR. LAZARESCU

Cristi Puiu's watchful tragedy is the best movie ever made about a broken health- care system and the best movie ever made on the indignity of dying because of it. A 62-year-old man (Ion Fiscuteanu ) phones a Bucharest hospital for an ambulance that takes forever to come. When it arrives, he and the paramedic (a dour Luminita Gheorghiu ) are subjected to a night of overcrowded emergency rooms, vividly condescending doctors, and zombified nurses. Puiu is an uncommon talent. His movie is a perilously black comedy whose sense of humor is increasingly upstaged by the inexorable reality of its hero's straits. This is a moral, mortal work, free of sentiment but full of sympathy, and anchored by Fiscuteanu's masterful approximation of demise. Puiu has said he means this movie to be the first in a series of society portraits. His ambition is to make five more even better than this one. Godspeed.

CHILDREN OF MEN

Adapted from P.D. James's novel, Alfonso Cuarón's visionary epic was this year's other nativity story. It's set in a 2027 London where women can't reproduce, so-called illegal immigrants are caged like animals, and mankind is on its last leg. Clive Owen is charged with smuggling a miracle, a pregnant black illegal (Clare-Hope Ashitey ), to a rescue boat called Tomorrow. Along the way, Cuarón creates a bellicose pastiche from evocations of 20th-century atrocities and a few of today's. The director's ideas are provocative, but it's his directing that astounds. He dares to create his own version of Picasso's "Guernica, " with a sequence in which an image of utter holiness seems to stop blistering combat, only to see it explosively resume. The seeming naiveté of that moment explodes, too. This world is finished , Cuarón says, yet he's not a dire pessimist. He wants us to live to see Tomorrow.

INLAND EMPIRE

David Lynch's most harshly experimental movie denudes Hollywood of its frills. It isn't so much a considered critique of moviemaking culture (the glibness, the celeb-centricism, the masses' blind consumption) as much as an exhilarating and violent allergic reaction to it all. Dream-factory stardust turns to crematory ash. As with his previous Tinseltown nightmare, the masterpiece "Mulholland Drive ," Lynch's comedic surface story -- an actress (Laura Dern ) taking a part in a doomed antebellum romance, only to misplace the line between who she is and the character she's playing -- mutates into the horrors of the unconscious. But "Inland Empire" dissolves the previous movie's brilliant symmetrical engineering: It's an artistic wilderness of hookers, sing-alongs, murder, a family of people in rabbit costumes, and the intrepid Dern in full, wild flower.

HALF NELSON

Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden's staggeringly confident drama transcends its crackhead-teacher marketing hook. Dan Dunne (Ryan Gosling) is the Brooklyn public school teacher in question. Drea (Shareeka Epps ) is his student. And their relationship brilliantly personifies his schoolroom dialectics lessons, with the teacher on one side and the local drug dealer (Anthony Mackie ) on the other. They both want custody of Drea, figuratively speaking. The film perceives the limits of theory, while daring to hold white liberalism accountable for its delusions of salvation. How can Dan save Drea when he can't save himself? Praise for Gosling's heroic understatement tends to omit Epps's steely street mask. But for the movie's dialectic structure to work, she needs to be every bit as good as her co-star, and she is.

INSIDE MAN

Loving Spike Lee out loud can be a trial. So between this film and Lee's Katrina documentary "When the Levees Broke," it was exciting to watch the rest of America catch up 20 years and 18 movies after "She's Gotta Have It. " That "Inside Man" was a genre exercise -- detective Denzel Washington unravels a Manhattan bank heist -- may have required Lee to obey Russell Gewirtz's tricky script. But there's a lot to be said for coloring within the lines, especially when you're as good with crayons as Lee. From the zingy political asides to the glee of its cast (stars and ethnically panoramic bit players alike), every second of this movie entertains. And for the first time in his tremendous career, Lee doesn't see the crime in that.

DAVE CHAPPELLE'S BLOCK PARTY

Yes, Michel Gondry and Dave Chappelle's concert film is a big musical treat. But more sublimely, it's a civic-minded entertainment. A few years ago, Gondry followed Chappelle to Ohio, as the comedian sent busloads of locals to his outdoor concert in New York. The hipsters in this movie's audience showed up for an all-star jam: the Roots , Erykah Badu , Jill Scott , the reunited Fugees . But on this rainy day on a tiny Brooklyn street, the little people outshone the stars. The film is a masterpiece of democratization. For one afternoon there's no difference between Kanye West and the drum majors marching behind him.

BORAT: CULTURAL LEARNINGS OF AMERICA FOR MAKE BENEFIT GLORIOUS NATION OF KAZAKHSTAN

He came, saw, and conquered. Some of us laughed, some of us sued, some of us got up and walked out before that unspeakable hotel nude-athon. But for a great sustained moment, Sacha Baron Cohen's faux-naif faux-journalist made us wonder as much about who we were (as moviegoers, as citizens) as who this idiot is. Part Swiftian satire, part Buñuelian social X-ray, part de Tocqueville anthropology adventure , the movie, directed with knowing cruddiness by Larry Charles, is a tour de force of dangerous comedy and dubious exploitation, Baron Cohen as the biggest punch line of all.

OLD JOY

Kelly Reichardt's unsentimental friendship essay is just two dudes (Will Oldham and Daniel London ) out for a drive to an Oregon hot spring, hoping to overcome their estrangement. But the crack in the relationship has become an unbridgeable philosophical canyon. These two are a sort of Cain and Abel, and their return to Eden bears rotten fruit. This is a tiny movie, but it leaves a major impression.

RUNNERS-UP

Jean-Luc and Pierre Dardenne's "L'Enfant," Richard Linklater's "Fast Food Nation," Guillermo del Toro's "Pan's Labyrinth," Nuri Bilge Ceylan's "Climates," Hou Hsiao-Hsien's "Three Times," Pedro Almodovar's "Volver," Nicholas Hytner and Alan Bennett's "The History Boys," Andrew Bujalski's "Mutual Appreciation," Michael Mann's "Miami Vice," Billy Kent's "The OH in Ohio," Stephen Frears and Peter Morgan's "The Queen," and "Jackass Number Two."

Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com. For more on movies, go to boston.com/ae/movies/blog.