2. The Departed
Marty’s back in form with this punchy, testosterone-fueled adaptation of Hong Kong’s identity-swap thriller Infernal Affairs, thanks in large part to a firecracker script from William Monahan. Scorsese’s still busy paying homage to his favorite old movies (watch for hidden Xes throughout, a Scarface-inspired motif that forecasts which characters won’t make it ’til the end), but such film-geek references never detract from The Departed’s slick psychological mind games. Leonardo DiCaprio lets the adolescent insecurity show through his first thoroughly grown-up part, while Matt Damon makes a thoroughly convincing cold-blooded mole — to single out just two performances in an all-around stellar ensemble.

3. L’Enfant
You thought The Departed was tense? Try sitting through this astonishing story of a young father who sells his own newborn on the black market, then changes him mind and spends the rest of the day scrambling to get the baby back. That’s about as high-concept as it gets for the grim Dardenne brothers, who make movies about the pains of everyday existence in contemporary Belgium. In 500 years, their naturalistic slice-of-life stories will say more about our world than any other director’s oeuvre — today, they function as profound studies of ordinary people, as emotionally riveting as any action movie.

4. Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan
Comedy can never be the same after Borat. The movie mixes Candid Camera and Punk’d-style shenanigans with sketches by Sacha Baron Cohen, in character as a Kazakh reporter making his way across America. Though Cohen’s politically incorrect third-world caricature has drawn criticism from nearly every corner, his naive woman-hating, anti-Semitic persona actually serves to reveal the ignorance and unpleasant tendencies of his targets (a trio of frat boys, a homophobic rodeo cowboy and other all-American types). But laughter doesn’t necessarily exonerate the audience, either, who come face to face with their own biases in the process.

5. Our Daily Bread
Where does our food come from? Never before in the history of humankind have we omnivores felt more removed from the things we eat — which is precisely why Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s look at every corner of the European food industry is so fascinating. With its cold, Kubrickian aesthetic, Our Daily Bread features a series of beautifully composed, neutral tableaux of everything from salt mines to olive groves, chicken farms to slaughterhouses, with no contextualizing narration to make them any less alien. The processes aren’t nearly as unsanitary as Fast Food Nation would have us believe, but the mechanized efficiency is no less haunting.

6. Quinceañera
Sure, there are probably too many foreign films on my list, but this one only sounds like it. In fact, it’s an English-language indie movie set in Echo Park, Los Angeles, where a young Latina finds herself coping with pregnancy just shy of her fifteenth birthday. The movie takes us into Magdalena’s world at precisely the moment gentrification threatens to turn it upside-down. The directors thinly disguise themselves as the villains here, depicting a gay white couple who buy a house out from under her uncle, but their empathy wins out in this rich multicultural portrait featuring primarily nonprofessional actors.

7. Pan’s Labyrinth
Guillermo del Toro’s latest represents as fully realized and uncompromised a director’s vision as audiences will see all year, boasting a parallel wonderland original enough to make Tim Burton or Terry Gilliam nervous. A career fantasist, del Toro has clearly been working up to this. Pan’s Labyrinth demonstrates an artful synthesis of virtually all the Mexican-born, Catholic-raised director’s idiosyncrasies and obsessions: magical insects, alternate realities, Freudian overtones, precocious child-heroes and pure, unadulterated evil. This macabre adventure pits his young heroine against all manner of twisted-original creatures — a faun with carved-wood features, a faceless monster with eyes in the palms of its hands.

8. The Lives of Others
Not since Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation have we witnessed such a poignant example of an Orwellian antihero compensating for the emptiness in his personal life by eavesdropping on the lives of others. Here, the surveillance expert is a Stasi agent in Cold War-era East Germany who volunteers to spy on a state-sponsored playwright, not realizing that his boss has his own reasons for wanting the man arrested. A formidable debut from German newcomer Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, this elegant look behind the Berlin Wall explores the gray areas around invasion of privacy just as such issues resurface here at home.

9. Breaking & Entering
Irony and cynicism may rule at the megaplex, but director Anthony Minghella takes an admirable step in the opposite direction by daring to be optimistic. A smaller, more personal movie than his last three epic adaptations (The English Patient, The Talented Mr. Ripley and Cold Mountain), this original screenplay hinges on the idea that when things don’t go as planned, “maybe before you replace the window you should smash a few more.” In the tradition of Krzysztof Kieslowski, Minghella uses his plot — a posh British architect (Jude Law) gets involved with a Bosnian immigrant (Juliette Binoche) — to confront his characters with moral choices.

10. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu
The sad truth is most audiences will give up on this deeply moving, ultra-realistic Romanian movie long before it even gets started. That’s because this tragic indictment of modern-day healthcare spends the first third of its 2 1/2-hour running time trapped inside the irascible old drunk’s apartment while he resists going to the hospital. But that slow opening goes a long way to humanize someone who might’ve been just another statistic, since Lazarescu spends the rest of the movie practically comatose as the paramedics ship him from one E.R. to the next before he finally expires on the operating table.

Honorable Mention: The Puffy Chair
You want real? Forget Babel, with its pretentious “pain is the universal human experience” routine and try the Duplass brothers’ dead-on debut instead. Wince-inducing by design, this shoestring-budgeted indie comedy captures the joys of heterosexual love at the tail end of Generation X — from schmoopy-talk sessions to nonconfrontational relationship-maintenance conversations (“Hey are you mad? … You seem mad.”) — in the raw, informal John Cassavetes tradition. If you can get past the handheld camera, with its focus slips and random zooms (Babel’s only slightly more bearable in the cinematography department, mind you), then you’re in for a refreshingly honest, heartbreaking treat.