Philadelphia Weekly

Truthfully, Charles Burnett's reissued 1977 ghetto saga Killer of Sheep should top this list. But why honor the old when way back in May this was already the best year for movies since 2001? And that was before most of the world had seen the latest from the Coen brothers, Todd Haynes, Noah Baumbach and Paul Thomas Anderson. No cynical regrets; no gloomy predictions. Just revel ...

1) Zodiac
Advertised as Se7en 2, David Fincher's Zodiac killer epic turned out to be alarmingly uncompromising. Apparently some execs were either hoodwinked or hypnotized into thinking audiences everywhere were stoked for a maddeningly OCD investigation with an avalanche of facts, dozens of false leads, a "mere" two grisly murder scenes and only a faint shadow of an ending. Unpack it, though, and you have a chilling, trenchant portrait of the very human need to impose a narrative on chaos and closure on the unknowable.

2) Regular Lovers
Lesser-known French New Waver Philippe Garrel responds to Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers with his own account of the May 1968 Paris riots. A good deal bleaker (and thanks to the luminously grainy 16 mm B&W, infinitely dimmer), Lovers spends three leisurely hours depicting youthful idealism's slow decay into disillusionment, madness and inertia. Devastating.

3) My Kid Could Paint That
Is Marla Olmstead--the cute little girl whose abstract, Pollockesque paintings were fetching five figures when she was but 4 years old--actually part of a massive con put on by her parents? The year's most head-spinning documentary knows that's not the chief question to ask--that it's just part of a larger series of questions concerning everything from the public's relationship with art to the inevitable artifice of the documentary format. And it explores it all in 82 minutes.

4) There Will Be Blood
Having heroically aided Robert Altman in the last years of his life, Paul Thomas Anderson returns with what is, after Zodiac, the second most interesting "maturation" of the year. That Daniel Day-Lewis fella has got the goods.

5) Offside
Combining the polemic with the sports movie (at last!), Jafar Panahi's mostly real-time dramedy follows both a smattering of women who try to sneak into a Tehran football game disguised as men (women aren't allowed at sports functions in Iran) and the ineffectual grunts who must guard them after they're immediately arrested. Depressing, no? And yet Offside turns improbably hopeful, ending on the best high this side of The Bourne Ultimatum.

6) Grindhouse
So what if neither of its (excellent) features was terribly grindhouse-y? With talk of how home video is threatening projected cinema, a host of today's retro titans banded together to show how ecstatic and life-affirming sitting in a movie theater with a group of strangers could be. (And for a steal too.) Alas, everyone stayed home, figuring they could just throw it on their Netflix queues a couple months later. Whoops! Planet Terror and Death Proof wound up making their disc debuts separately and a month apart, each in different, inferior cuts. And those amazing fake trailers? Other than Machete, they're nowhere to be found. In an age when you can replicate just about any experience, Grindhouse has the cajones to say: You had to be there.

7) The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
Hey, the studios mucked up the release of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid too. Some things never change.

8) The Bourne Ultimatum
Swap the superior car chase from Supremacy and come up with a less exposition-heavy ending and this baby would be No. 1.

9) I'm Not There
Semiotics exercises should always go down this easy.

10) Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters
The longest stretch of unfettered surrealistic insanity since Luis Bu�uel and Salvador Dal� unleashed L'�ge d'Or in 1930.

And finally, the rest of the best: The Host, No Country for Old Men, Black Book, Colossal Youth, Bamako, Sunshine, Knocked Up, 28 Weeks Later ... , Day Night Day Night and Black Snake Moan.