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6. Deliver Us From Evil
You may think you know all that you want to know about the child-sex-abuse scandals of the Roman Catholic Church, but Amy Berg's brilliant and psychologically transfixing documentary is a cathartic exposé. It brings us searingly close to the victims and their families, to the damage that was done, presenting ''Father Ollie'' O'Grady, a former priest who preyed on their trust, as a study in delusional candor: The more he owns up to what he did, the more he seems blind to why it was wrong. The movie is most devastating when it takes on how, and why, the Nixonian church authorities covered up for a man like O'Grady. They were looking out for their careers, but they also believed that even the deepest sins could be confessed away. That's the film's terrifying paradox: It's a portrait of how dogma became crime.

7. Infamous
If you see only one film about how Truman Capote, the gossip-queen gadfly of New York high society, entered the stern Kansas heartland to create the masterly portrait of murder that was In Cold Blood...well, actually, you did see that movie, and it wasn't this one. Yet as worthy and compelling as Capote was, Douglas McGrath's one-year-too-late companion piece is the bolder, zestier, more revelatory vision. Toby Jones' eerie, hologram-perfect Capote is, from the outset, a figure of the most vibrant and disturbing duplicity, and since Perry Smith, embodied by the smoldering Daniel Craig, is played (unlike in the earlier film) with appropriate menace, Capote's relationship to him takes on the ambiguity of tragedy.

8. Sweet Land
If this movie had Terrence Malick's name on it, it would have been praised to the heavens for its grand vision of a hardscrabble rural utopia. At once intimate and pictorially sweeping, it's set in 1920, when a winsome, fresh-off-the-boat lass (the luminous Elizabeth Reaser) arrives in Minnesota's Scandinavian farm country as a mail-order bride. Director Ali Selim re-synchs your heartbeat to a slower, pretechnological time, touching chords of collective memory about love, ancestry, and the American immigrant dream.

9. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu
For one long night in Bucharest, Mr. Lazarescu, a lonely old wreck of an alcoholic played with decrepit grace by Ion Fiscuteanu, is shuttled from hospital to hospital, as assorted doctors try to figure out what's wrong with him. There are hints of morbid comedy — forget his body; can he survive the Romanian health-care system? — but Cristi Puiu's enthralling drama takes no cheap shots. It offers a spectrum of humanity, as jadedness meets compassion, death tussles with life, and Lazarescu becomes a Lazarus for the age of bureaucratic entropy.

10. Cars
Not a Pixar masterpiece, like The Incredibles or Toy Story, but John Lasseter's witty, enchanting, gorgeously designed NASCAR fantasia is a luscious piece of American pop art, the niftiest computer fable in a year of animated overkill (e.g., that penguin-boogie commercial in search of a soft drink, Happy Feet). It celebrates speed, but it's also a candy-colored homage to an early-'60s boomer America now chain-stored out of existence. Cars also rolls out the greatest piece of cartoon acting in years, with the grandly gruff daddy-o presence of Paul Newman as an aging champion stock car who teaches arrogant upstart Owen Wilson to slow his motor.


Posted Dec 22, 2006 | Published in issue #913-914 Dec 29, 2006 | Order Article Reprints
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