Top 10 films that made our year - and 3 that ruin it

Here are the films that made our year -- and three that threatened to ruin it:

 

"There Will Be Blood"

Anderson's lacerating epic about the birth of the oil age. Daniel Day-Lewis, in the best performance of the year, is extraordinary as the prospector entirely consumed with his own enterprise; Paul Dano the evangelist who may be his nemesis.

 

"Into the Wild"

Director Sean Penn's sublime end-of-the-road movie invests its story with beauty and spirit -- in a strange way it's a very heartening tragedy. With Emile Hirsch and vivid support from Catherine Keener, Brian Dierker and Hal Holbrook.

 

"Zodiac"

David Fincher found a story to match his own obsessive need for control in this infuriating but brilliant and original film about the elusive (and in some ways debilitating) quest for truth.

 

"The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford"

Filmed in languid, wispy vignettes by cinematographer Roger Deakins, this is an elegiac, rueful evocation of the death of the Western hero, a slow passing that occurs long before Jesse (Brad Pitt) draws his last breath. Affleck is the disillusioned, romantic Ford -- and the film is his tragedy more than anyone's.

 

"No Country for Old Men"

Also shot by Deakins (and in the same location as "There Will Be Blood"), the Coen brothers do right by Cormac McCarthy's compelling thriller, a kind of lament at the new nihilism.

 

"Once"

In an exceptional year for musicals, this shoestring Irish picture seemed freshly minted: a spontaneous and authentic alternative to overproduced schmaltz.

 

"Black Book"

"Robocop" director Paul Verhoeven's first Dutch film in 20 years is a blistering World War II movie featuring sympathetic Nazis and duplicitous Resistance fighters. But this isn't just role reversal: There is no moral high ground in war, only naked self-interest, desire and desperation. It's something to compare with the fall's Iraq movies.

 

"Persepolis"

An autobiographical animated film by Marjane Satrapi, an Iranian who grew up in a liberal anti-monarchy Tehran household in the 1970s, then came of age under the ayatollahs and completed her education in Europe. This poignant, very funny memoir puts a personal face on the world's most pressing culture clash.

 

"Syndromes and a Century"

There are directors who become heroes for bending the rules. Then there are those who throw the rule book right out the window. Thailand's Apichatpong "Joe" Weerasethakul is making movies like nobody before or since. This is one of the strangest art movies of the year, but it's entirely accessible to anyone open to new experience.

 

"4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days"

 

The Cannes Film Festival prize winner (which screened in Los Angeles for an Oscar qualifying run) is a prodigious if harrowing piece of work. This intense Romanian drama by Cristian Mungiu shines a spotlight into those dark places where angels fear to tread, yet it's a profoundly moral film.

 

And the three worst ...

 

"Because I Said So"