The year in movies

Wesley, my brother, I feel your pain. Top 10 lists are a diversion in a movie year that addressed such hard topics and so well. 9/11 was re-created in two multiplex dramas, documentaries fanned out across all aspects of the war in Iraq, and eco-catastrophe was the subject of the third-highest-grossing nonfiction film in history and two of the year's most successful CGI family films.

It was a year of ambitious looks at society's ills, from "V for Vendetta" to "Babel" to "Children of Men." Dysfunctional families were played for the uneasy comedy of "Little Miss Sunshine" and the tragedy of "Little Children." Hollywood entertainments, meanwhile, generally failed us. "The Da Vinci Code" was a pale photocopy of the book and the year's top-grossing movie, "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest," was a cynical shell kept afloat by hype and gullibility. "The Illusionist," by contrast, told an old-fashioned tale with old-fashioned craft and shocked everyone by becoming a hit.

Some movies grappled more obliquely with current anxieties. Torture porn like "The Hills Have Eyes" and "Saw III" were the cinematic equivalent of adolescent cutting, prompted by the need to feel something, anything in a numb culture.

And yet there were honest, well-told tales, too -- "Old Joy" or "The Great New Wonderful" or "Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont," a 2005 release that belatedly captured the hearts of local audiences looking for substance and taste.

The best movies of this year, by and large, aren't interested in tastefulness. This is their strength, and it has nothing to do with lists. They confront, they hector, they insist that all is not well with the world and that the appropriate responses are clear-eyed engagement or savage, cauterizing laughter. They make one look forward to the movies of 2007 with fear and with hope.

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

Look, comedy is supposed to hurt. It can be cruel, uncomfortable, juvenile, cretinous, all for the sake of advancing a sharp observation or two, or blasting through a taboo, or simply cramping you up with laughter. Comedy is not nice. The Greeks knew this. So did Lenny Bruce. Most people, however -- Americans included -- are obsessed with being perceived as nice while sometimes saying not-so-nice things. This is what "Borat" is really about. Well, that and a naked fat guy running through a sales convention. Sacha Baron Cohen's tatty, low-budget prank-a-thon was both the most overhyped movie of the year and the most underrated, the smartest and the stupidest, the most bigoted and the most open-minded. (It was also the funniest. Hands down.) In other words: a movie that encapsulated the extremes of our culture and our times better than almost any serious movie you can name. In all, this plucky little fellow from a mythical Kazakhstan -- acting extremely nice while spewing ignorance in every direction -- fit right into the American scene. Sinclair Lewis would have recognized the people Borat meets, and even Chaplin might have found in him a rude, crude modern descendant: a Little Tramp for an age of industrial-strength complacency.

THE DEATH OF MR. LAZARESCU

That said, if you were bothered by Sacha Baron Cohen's casual appropriation of Romanian villagers for his shtick, here's an antidote: Actual Romanians in a movie portraying actual Romanian life -- or, rather, the cessation of it. Cristi Puiu's audacious drama, apparently made in response to the TV theatrics of "ER," starts with a 63-year-old man (Ion Fiscuteanu) in mild pain and ends, two and a half quietly epic hours later, with his probable ascension to the afterlife. In between is a transfixing look at the ordinary angels and devils of a country's health-care crisis, from arrogant doctors to an EMS nurse (the wonderfully no-nonsense Luminita Gheorghiu) who becomes a beacon of sanity and caring. A rough-hewn work of realism that keeps hinting at the poetry of the big picture.

UNITED 93

How do you commemorate an unprecedented national trauma? 9/11 has left such a cleft in our consciousness that the Before seems unimaginably distant from the After we're still waist-deep in. The achievement of Paul Greengrass's staggeringly un-epic recreation is to give us back the last minutes of Before and allow us to ponder the many things that have since gone missing. Instead of scenery chewing and emotional manipulation, "United 93" watches the day as it rolled forward, and it eerily recaptures the concussive force of events -- the constantly widening sense of how big and how awful this was. Air traffic controllers play themselves, the passengers of the title jet are cast for anonymity rather than Hallmark moments, harried nobility rises from the ashes of human fallibility. A work of remarkable craft and hushed sorrow.

OLD JOY

Kelly Reichardt's pellucid little drama was in and out of Boston theaters in a week, but its spell lingers. Two old friends go backpacking in the Oregon woods, hiking to a hot spring. Mark (Daniel London) is settling down, has a kid on the way. Kurt (Will Oldham) is right at the line where hippie activism shades into angry eccentricity. Not much happens and not much is said, yet the film covers acres of ground: the death of the '60s, the responsibilities of friendship, idealism's discontents, the unknowability of other people. Shot in rich Rousseau greens and earth-tones by Peter Sillen, it's a mesmerizing experience (stone dull if you're not attuned to it) that says one man's sell out is another man's satori. And vice versa.

LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA

Clint Eastwood made two movies about one World War II battle this year, and where "Flags of Our Fathers," told from the US point of view, was heartfelt and over-thought, the flip side may someday look like one of the great war movies. Shot in desaturated near-black-and-white, "Iwo Jima" shows the abandoned Japanese forces falling apart as the American assault nears: the stress fractures eventually separate the zealots from the human beings. Ken Watanabe as a general who admires the enemy about to crush him and Kazunari Ninomiya as a former baker trying to survive in the caves carry themselves with the self-awareness of Renoir characters; the Grand Illusion still holds sway. The storytelling here is oddly simple, as if Eastwood had burned off affectation to reach a state of moviemaking grace.

THE DEPARTED

All our quaint little town's ugly secrets seemed to spill over the edges of this dark but absurdly enjoyable gangster flick, Martin Scorsese's return to form. The class wars, the racial thuggery, the Southie striving: local kid William Monahan's screenplay captured everything up to and including the appropriate Boston slur to be used against an opposing teammate ("homo!"). "Departed" is a monster movie, and a brilliantly nasty one: Jack Nicholson's Frank Costello is a creature of operatic vileness (much more interesting, really, than the man who inspired him), and the two kids, Damon and DiCaprio, are mirror mutations of shifting good and evil. Not a perfect film -- that final shot is a groaner -- but mighty, mighty close.

CHILDREN OF MEN

In the hands of the wrong director, it could have been another "Logan's Run" or "The Island" -- a dumb future-thriller with kitschy décor. Heaven knows the premise is silly enough: It's 2027, the human race is infertile, and Clive Owen has to ferry the last pregnant woman on the planet (Clare-Hope Ashitey) to safety. But Alfonso Cuarón ("Y Tu Mamá También," "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban") is behind the camera, and so this adaptation of the P.D. James novel is muscular and convincing, with a depiction of social apocalypse that feels distressingly right around the corner. Michael Caine is a hoot as the last hippie in England, but this is serious business and seriously thrilling filmmaking, with a battle sequence two-thirds of the way through that plays like Iraq cubed.

DUCK SEASON

It was a very good year for Mexican filmmakers with epic ambitions (see above, below, and "Babel"), but this tiny black- and-white charmer by director Fernando Eimbcke took the opposite tack and sailed into the blue. It's basically "Home Alone" meets "The Breakfast Club" in a dingy, anonymous Mexico City high-rise apartment: two teenage boys (Daniel Miranda and Diego Catana) hack around playing "Halo," ignore the cynical girl next door (Danny Perea), torment the pizza delivery man (Enrique Arreola) -- and somehow, over the course of 90 minutes, progress from one level of their lives to the next. Eimbcke moves it along at the r.p.m. of a Jarmusch film, making this a teenage movie most teenagers would probably be bored to tears by. Their loss: "Duck Season" is an ode to that exact moment when a kid suddenly understands life can be lived on his or her own terms.

THE QUEEN

Helen Mirren's performance is a marvel of imposture that colors in the outlines of a public cartoon we know as Elizabeth II. Each raised eyebrow, each ritual flip of the wrist is suddenly given human weight, and we finally see the haughty, uncertain elderly woman who may or may not actually be there. "The Queen" is more than its central performance, though. Director Stephen Frears and writer Peter Morgan know that the 1997 death of Diana, Princess of Wales, was a flashpoint in the relationship between the queen and her people, and they dramatize the ensuing public/private spat with a skill that makes your heart ache for both sides. Michael Sheen and Helen McCrory are very funny as the incoming Blairs, asking the question many of us are silently thinking: What do these people do, anyway? The point of "The Queen" is that, for the briefest of moments, Elizabeth wonders too.

PAN'S LABYRINTH

The Mexican niño terrible Guillermo del Toro ("Hellboy," "The Devil's Backbone") comes of age with a violent, exquisitely touching phantasmagoria. Set in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, it's one of those movies dealing with a young girl's imaginative response to horrible situations, but where similar films (Terry Gilliam's dreadful "Tideland," for example) lose their grip, del Toro tightens his with realism and passionate fancy. A trio of startling performances anchor the tale -- Ivana Banquero as the girl, Sergi Lopez as her sadistic Loyalist stepfather, and Maribel Verdu ("Y Tu Mamá También") as a housekeeper with conflicting agendas -- while the Wonderland-meets-Tim-Burton fantasy sequences lift it into a dark, enchanted realm. A children's movie for grown-ups.

RUNNERS-UP

"Army of Shadows," "Casino Royale," "Fateless," "49 Up," "The Good Shepherd," "The Great New Wonderful," "Half Nelson," "The Heart of the Game," "Inland Empire," "Inside Man," "Lady Vengeance," "Little Miss Sunshine," "Miami Vice," "Neil Young: Heart of Gold," "Notes on a Scandal," "The Proposition," "The Pursuit of Happyness," "Quinceañera," "The Science of Sleep," "Shortbus," "Something Like Happiness," "The Syrian Bride," "Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story" "Venus," "Volver."

THE FIVE WORST

"The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things," "Tideland," "An American Haunting," "Basic Instinct 2," "Let's Go to Prison."

FIVE GUILTY PLEASURES

"A Good Year," "The Lake House," "Slither," "Snakes on a Plane," "Step Up."

Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. For more on movies, go to boston.com/ae/movies/blog.