It was a year fit for a king, especially a furry, 25-foot-tall one answering to the name Kong. It also wasn't too shabby a year for queens, at least as evidenced by a couple of titles that turned up on our annual Top 10 (the regally swishy heroes of Breakfast on Pluto and Capote certainly qualify, just to name a few).

Yep, there were lots of outstanding movies in 2005, although some of the very best things I saw this year didn't wind up making our list. The reason for that is simply because those films (a) haven't officially opened here yet, and (b) their distributors didn't see fit to arrange at least one local advance screening — the minimum requirement for making our annual Top 10. Among the remarkable films not included on this year's list because of that technicality are Michael Haneke's Cache, The Dardenne Brothers' L'Enfant, Alexander Sokurov's The Sun, Lars von Trier's Manderlay, Philippe Garrel's Regular Lovers and the devastating Romanian slice-of-life The Death of Mr. Lazarescu — all of them films that will hopefully show up in a theater near you over the coming year, and all films that may very well earn a place on our 2006 list.

Among the excellent but more readily available movies that barely missed making the cut this year were a couple of megaplex winners, Batman Begins and Land of the Dead, and a veritable slew of arthouse gems such as Nobody Knows, A History of Violence, The Best of Youth, Mysterious Skin, My Summer of Love, Off the Map, Downfall and Good Night and Good Luck.

But, good as they were, so much for the also-rans, the might-have-beens and the maybe-someday's. Here now, the best of the best of 2005.

1. Brokeback Mountain Ang Lee's big, iconic, deliriously romantic new film is as good as you've heard. Brokeback Mountain's epic tale of two cowboys amazed to discover they only have eyes for each other might appear to be breaking new ground, but the movie is essentially a classic love story, albeit one that works on several levels. As visually ravishing as Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and as emotionally wrenching as his Ice Storm, Brokeback offers the most subtly subversive critique of American gender politics this side of a vintage Douglas Sirk melodrama, even as the movie fills a glorious new niche all its own.

2. Breakfast on Pluto A sort of companion piece to his 1997 Butcher Boy, Neil Jordan's wonderful new movie features Cillian Murphy as a beautiful cross-dressing dreamer who serves as our tour guide on an irreverent, enlightening and enormously entertaining romp through the history, politics and pop culture of 1970s Ireland. Breakfast on Pluto is a smarter, edgier Forrest Gump minus all the pandering, and a movie that screams to be seen.

3. King Kong Every once in a great, great while, we actually do get a big, fat blockbuster that lives up to the hype. Peter Jackson's magnificent beauty-and-the-beast tale lives up to the hype and then some. Jackson's new King Kong satisfies us in all the ways that made the original Kong so enduring, using state-of-the-art technology and classic storytelling to create a monster worth caring about.

4. 2046 An enigmatic trip for the head and the heart, Wong Kar-wai's 2046 is an intoxicating, audacious blast of pure cinema brimming over with elaborately sensual sights and sounds. A loose sequel to the director's masterful In the Mood for Love, 2046 is also about frustrated passions and romantic near-misses, but the mood is even more fatalistic this time out and the metaphysical concerns even more slippery. Connections are made and unmade, relationships play out, events repeat themselves and time slips away only to be regained once more in this magnificent but maddening meditation on memory and desire.

5. Moolaadé The most recent film by the brilliant, 83-year-old Senegalese director Ousmane Sembene, a man often referred to as the father of African cinema. A wise, witty and richly nuanced slice of African village life that just incidentally tackles the immensely off-putting subject of female genital mutilation, Moolaadé is one of the strongest statements yet from an artist who has over the years dazzled us with his ability to make powerful yet entertaining cinema out of such topics as colonialism and class struggle in Africa.

6. Capote A meticulously constructed account of Truman Capote's struggle to create In Cold Blood, his groundbreaking "non-fiction novel," Capote moves with understated grace and confidence, galvanized by an astonishing performance by Philip Seymour Hoffman as a complex and surprisingly focused Capote (before fame, booze and inertia turned him into a bloated caricature of himself). Hoffman's performance gives us traces of all the Capotes that we think we know — the narcissistic dandy, the sensitive artist, the twee fop with the whiny baby voice, the literary powerhouse — and fuses them all into a character too complex and human to be pigeonholed by any of those descriptions.

7. Howl's Moving Castle The latest gem from Japanese master animator Hayao Miyazaki (Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, My Neighbor Totoro), Howl's Moving Castle presents us with yet another fantastical world unlike anything seen before on a movie screen. Magic is afoot here, and almost everyone in the movie seems to be under the power of some sort of spell or another, including a young girl transformed into a 90-year-old woman, a tortured young wizard who can't seem to stop himself from turning into a monster now and then, and a landscape filled with shape-shifting demons and an assortment of other wonders.

8. Sin City Robert Rodriguez's extravagantly brutal live-action cartoon boasts a ravishing look, an all-consuming attitude and, above all else, a devotion to excess. A series of vignettes set in a Mickey-Spillane-meets-Grand-Guignol universe (where bad people do bad things in a very bad place), Sin City is willing to go to just about any length in its mad rush to constantly one-up itself in eye-popping depictions of over-the-top behavior. That the movie does most of this with a big fat wink only mitigates the intensity slightly, prompting occasional giggles as well as gasps at scenarios so extreme they often cross over into the absurd.

9. The Squid and the Whale Up-and-coming director Noah Baumbach digs deep into his own past for this account of the Brooklyn-based Berkmans, a monumentally neurotic family splitting apart at the seams. Like Baumbach's previous and much underrated Mr. Jealousy, The Squid and the Whale is not an easy project to classify. Mining moments of tenderness and eloquent humor from material that in clumsier hands might have been simply awkward or painful, the filmmaker takes a story about the unpleasant realities of divorce and raises it from something potentially depressing to something that is, at its best, revelatory.

10. Grizzly Man/In the Realms of the Unreal A pair of documentaries so good I found it impossible to choose between them, here are two lovingly horrified looks at obsessives and holy fools. In Grizzly Man, that old cosmic clown Werner Herzog seems to have found a perfect subject in the bizarre life and death of Timothy Treadwell, an insecure, egomaniacal environmentalist and self-appointed protector of wildlife, who died at the claws of one of his beloved grizzlies. Jessica Yu takes a similar approach to the life and work of outsider artist Henry Darger with In the Realms of the Unreal, beginning by acknowledging the fundamental mystery being addressed and then stepping back and luxuriating in its contradictions. The result is a fascinating connect-the-dots, and one of the most satisfying movies you may ever experience about that curious process by which human beings are compelled to create what we call art.

This article appears in Dec 28, 2005 – Jan 3, 2006.