2. Brothers
It started as a crazy stunt. Ten years ago, a handful of Danish filmmakers issued a mandate called "Dogme 95," giving Hollywood the finger and trying to get back to the essence of cinema. Most of the movement's movies stunk, but out of that aesthetic came a style that gets to the essence of everyday melodrama. In that vein, Dogme 95 vet Susanne Bier brings a fierce realism to her parable of two rival brothers through spot-on acting and a careful attention to human nature.

3. The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada
The western may be dead, but 2005 proved that in the right hands, a well-crafted horse opera can still pack a strong social statement. With its snakebite sense of humor, Tommy Lee Jones' directorial debut is just as craggy and understated as he is: A West Texas ranch hand tracks down the man who murdered his best friend and hauls both the corpse and the killer to Mexico for some retribution. Blind to borders, the journey suggests a man's character is determined by his actions, not his birthplace.

4. Brokeback Mountain
Meanwhile, the two cowboys in Ang Lee's all-American romance are a good deal more than just friends. When they're not wrangling sheep up on Brokeback Mountain, they're barebacking like bunnies down at the base camp. The beauty of Lee's picturesque love story is how matter-of-fact it remains about the same-sex twist. "It's nobody's business but ours," grumbles Heath Ledger's deeply closeted character. What he doesn't realize is just how universal his experience truly is.

5. Good Night, and Good Luck.
George Clooney redeems himself for 2003's gonzo Confessions of a Dangerous Mind with this deeply personal, narrowly focused look at the days when Edward R. Murrow and the CBS team took on red-scare-meister Joseph McCarthy. With history on your side, it's all too easy to demonize a fallen tyrant, but this stylish film also functions as a reminder of a time when newsmen held themselves to a different standard of both ethics and expression — when patriotism meant speaking up, not quiet compliance.

6. A History of Violence
David Cronenberg has a history of asking audiences to peer into the darker realms of obsession, mutation and sexual dysfunction lurking deep within their subconscious. It's usually not a pretty picture, and neither are the secrets lying dormant in his latest hero, a mild-mannered family man (Viggo Mortensen) awakened by a brutal act of self defense. Beyond its psychological merits, the film also works like Jim Jarmusch's Ghost Dog or the Wachowskis' Bound as an art-house riff on the old gangster-movie formula.

7. Murderball
2005 was a great year for docs, from Alex Gibney's great Enron exposé to personal essays like Grizzly Man (in which a tree hugger becomes bear fodder) and Los Angeles Plays Itself (Thom Andersen's exhaustive — and exhausting — three-hour look at Hollywood's love-hate relationship with its own turf). But my personal favorite was this eye-opening intro to quad rugby in which a team of tough-guy athletes refuse to let something as trivial as partial paralysis limit their game.

8. Mysterious Skin
This mesmerizing mystery, based on the novel by Scott Heim, reveals the way two small-town Kansas kids cope with childhood sexual abuse — the more introverted young man convinces himself he was abducted by aliens, while the other turns to a life of hustling for attention. What sounds like gritty subject matter proves far more challenging in director Gregg Araki's hands. Instead of demonizing the pedophile, Araki's seductive approach dares audiences to examine their own reactions.

9. Pride & Prejudice
Finally, a Jane Austen adaptation that divorces us of the shameful Merchant Ivory image of pre-19th-century England as one never-ending tea party. It's no Sense & Sensibility, but Joe Wright's take on the author's best-loved book looks beyond the formal Edwardian-era portraits and suggests how a family of five unwed daughters might actually behave when it came time to start marrying them off. The result is a storybook romance with a tangible sense of history.

10. Heights
Speaking of Merchant Ivory, my last pick marks the directorial debut of Ismail Merchant's former assistant, Chris Terrio. As a refugee of New York, I couldn't help but love a movie that captured what drove me crazy about the city — namely, that the residents of our country's most populous city could be so single-mindedly focused on themselves. Relationships don't work unless the other person comes first, and Heights illustrates that with half a dozen piercing examples.

Honorable Mention: Aurora Borealis
This crowd-pleaser is still languishing on the festival circuit, probably because the story of a directionless twentysomething (Joshua Jackson) who gets his life on track after spending time with his Alzheimer's-stricken grandfather (Donald Sutherland) sounds like the worst kind of Hallmark-movie treacle. A better comparison might actually be Pieces of April as imperfect characters, furious with one another for whatever reason, learn to appreciate the relationships they have.