"BATMAN BEGINS," "The Beat That My Heart Skipped," "Capote," "Darwin's Nightmare," "Duma," "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room," "The 40-Year-Old Virgin," "Funny Ha Ha," "George A. Romero's Land of the Dead," "Good Night, and Good Luck," "Grizzly Man," "Head-On," "The Holy Girl," "Howl's Moving Castle," "In Her Shoes," "Keane," "Match Point," "Millions," "Mondovino," "Mysterious Skin," "No Direction Home: Bob Dylan," "Police Beat," "Pulse," "Red Eye," "Rize," "The Squid and the Whale," "The Sun," "Syriana," "The Talent Given Us," "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada," "Three Times," "Tony Takitani," "Tropical Malady," "Waiting for the Clouds," "Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit," "Who's Camus Anyway?" and "The World."

Was this a good year for the movies or what?

While industry reporters have been busy filing doom-and-gloom analyses, reports about a disputed box-office slump and prognostications about the narrowing gap between a movie hitting your local multiplex and your local home-video store, a lot of filmgoers have been enjoying an exceptional year of movies. I don't know any film critic who had an easy time whittling this year's offerings down to a neat 10 titles, which is why so many critics have instead trotted out a baker's dozen of favorites, sometimes more. And while the doom and gloom suggests that something major is happening in the American movie industry, it is also clear that those who spend too much time in the dark, including most industry watchers, have no idea what the future bodes for the movies.

Steven Soderbergh, for one, believes that we are in the middle of a paradigm shift. "The economics don't work," he said last September, while promoting his most recent film, "Bubble," at the Toronto International Film Festival. "Everybody on both sides, from top to bottom, needs to rethink the issue of compensation and participation. It just has to be redesigned. Movies cost too much. People are getting paid too much. And a dollar should be a dollar, in my view, no matter where it comes from. It just needs to be rethought. It's already starting to happen. There are already deals being made that acknowledge the fact that it's broken. But whether you're going to see that change in a broad sense prior to the digital changeover, I don't know."

That digital changeover will certainly be part of this paradigm shift, encompassing how movies are produced - the new technologies, the complex financial deals - and how they are consumed. In November, Jeff Robinov, president of production at Warner Brothers Pictures, which bankrolled one of Mr. Soderbergh's frothier entertainments ("Ocean's Twelve"), told Laura M. Holson of The New York Times: "Something is changing in the movie experience. Is it piracy? Is it commercials? Is it the availability of movies? Or are we not creating enough things to drive people out of the home? My biggest fear is having a movie that deserves to be seen, but is not."

Whatever you think of the state of the art and the health of the industry, there is no denying that the experience of moviegoing has changed as radically as our perception of what the movies mean to our lives. Entertainment news now assumes an increasingly prominent place in the culture, notably in the mainstream press, even as the movies themselves seem less and less relevant to the culture, no matter how hard filmmakers try. It's hard to know what to make of this state of affairs, though given that the movies have survived previous threats like the introduction of sound, television and the government-enforced breakup of the studio system, there is hope that they will survive all this old- and new-media attention, much of which, as it happens, has little to do with whether the films are any good.

For some, Hollywood remains a catchall for all that's wrong with American movies, but the same company, NBC Universal, that bankrolled "King Kong" is also behind "Brokeback Mountain." Ang Lee's film found studio backing partly because the time was right for this story and partly because the independent-film movement of the 1990's, while short-lived, provided Hollywood fresh blood. "Batman Begins," after all, was directed by Christopher Nolan, who also made the indie cult film "Memento," while the love interest in "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" is Catherine Keener, an indie film goddess. Genuine independent filmmakers like Andrew Bujalski ("Funny Ha Ha") face a brutal time in today's market, but the D.I.Y. ethos that spurred filmmakers to edit on Macs now finds them self-distributing: you can buy Mr. Bujalski's latest, "Mutual Appreciation," online at www.mutualappreciation.com.

The brutality of this market also means that today's film lovers, especially those living outside the major movie markets, often have to work harder and wait longer than they might like to see the good stuff, but the good stuff is out there - if not necessarily at the local multiplex, then in film festivals, video stores, mail-order rental outfits and those online companies that sell movies from around the world. The committed moviegoer has more and arguably better choices than at any time in history. That's especially true if you live in New York or most other big cities. And if you do, don't blame Hollywood if you haven't yet seen "A History of Violence" or any of the year's best films. Nobody put a gun to your head and forced you to see "King Kong."

Here, in no particular order, are my best films of the year:

The first time I saw "A History of Violence" from the great Canadian director David Cronenberg was at the Cannes Film Festival, where it was shown in competition. During its first press screening, an outraged European cinephile angrily chastised audience members who were laughing during the film, wrongly believing that they weren't giving proper respect to this story about a small-town paterfamilias, brilliantly played by Viggo Mortensen, whose violent past comes down on him with a vengeance. That many of those laughing the loudest were American spoke to the fact that we recognized that the Midwestern pastoral Mr. Cronenberg had created was at once a movie-made fantasy and horribly real. Our laughter was as much that of the appalled citizen as the appreciative movie lover.

If Heath Ledger has attracted so much attention for his performance in "Brokeback Mountain" it's partly because he has finally made good on his early overhyped promise and partly because his character in Ang Lee's romantic tragedy, Ennis Del Mar, represents a kind of impacted masculinity that a lot of us recognize: I don't know a single straight woman who hasn't been involved with a man as emotionally thwarted as Ennis, the man who can't tell you how he feels because he may not honestly know. And because the film is, in many respects, about how difficult it is to live in a culture that punishes men who give the appearance of being too soft, too weak and too feminine, I imagine that a lot of men, gay and straight, recognize Ennis, too.

Unlike Ennis, Jake Gyllenhaal's doe-eyed Jack Twist wears desire as openly as pain. Without his sensitive performance, without his ache and yearning, "Brokeback Mountain" wouldn't work half as well as it does. The beauty of the performance is fully evident in the scene in which the older Jack remembers when Ennis gently wrapped his arms around him during the men's first summer together. It's a devastating moment both because it juxtaposes the men's idyllic past with their difficult present, and because it reminds us of how memories live inside us as promises, rebukes and ghosts. When the scene returns to the present, you see in this man's face a lifetime of hope blur together with a lifetime of disappointment, as well as the beginning of the lovers' end.

In the movie theater of my dreams, I would put two of the gutsiest films of the year, Michael Haneke's "Caché" and Steven Spielberg's "Munich," on a double bill. (In this same dream theater, you could also buy a bottle of beer, which you would really need while watching these two.) Both films are explorations of this year's most fascinating smart-movie theme: the return of the repressed. "Caché" explores the personal cost of France's involvement in Algeria; "Munich" tracks Israel's response to the slaughter of its athletes at the 1972 Olympics. The French director Philippe Garrel tackles this same theme in "Regular Lovers" by returning to May 1968. This tender, beautifully made film, which played at the New York Film Festival, ends on a note of piercing political despair that is offset by Mr. Garrel's artistry.

Among the year's greatest surprises is Terrence Malick's compromised triumph, "The New World," which while overly long and burdened by too much Colin Farrell is a work of astonishing ambition and beauty. Arnaud Desplechin's "Kings and Queen" offers further proof that this French director is one of the most interesting filmmakers working today; Wong Kar-wai's "2046" proves, yet again, that this Hong Kong filmmaker ranks among the greatest. Gus Van Sant's elegiac "Last Days" verifies that the director is enjoying a terrific second act. The outrageously entertaining "Princess Raccoon," from the Japanese master Seijun Suzuki, afforded me two of my happiest movie hours of the year. This trippy genre hybrid about an adventurous royal raccoon (a delightful Ziyi Zhang) cleared half the theater at Cannes, but its craziness is pure joy.