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It was a terrific year for Hollywood movies — if I’m unhappy with anything about my final top-10 list, it’s the absence of non-English-language films. Yes, that’s partly a function of a lack of moviegoing adventurousness on my part, and I should take the rap for that. But the foreign-language films I enjoyed the most — The Lives of Others, The Host, the first section, at least, of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly — just didn’t seem to quite belong in this company. (The much-lauded 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days — which I won't see until next week — is a 2008 film for my purposes.)

The films here are also dominated by men. They’re directed by men (the single documentary is the one woman-directed exception) and they deal with traditionally male concerns — cooking, adventure travel, police work, drilling for oil, hunting down and killing your tormentors. You have to go all the way down to number eight to find a movie with a female character who does more than just play sidekick (unless you count Angie in Gone Baby Gone, which I don’t), and that doesn’t make me happy. I could have slipped Day Night Day Night, Margot at the Wedding, Red Road, or even Black Book onto the list for the sake of gender balance — though none of those boast what you’d call female role models. (Maybe I could have listed Juno.) You can pretend they’re there if you like, but they weren’t my favorites.

Again, it was a terrific year for Hollywood movies. These are the best ones I saw.

With the arrival of this new R-rated promo-clip montage, it becomes obvious that Warner Independent is still trying to figure out what the fuck to do with Michael Haneke's sure-to-be-unpleasant Funny Games remake.

One of my favorite things about the Manhattan screening rooms where press screenings typically take place is the pitch darkness you fall into before every show. The room dips to an even black — and the best ones are designed thoughtfully enough that you won't even be distracted by a red "Exit" sign during the show. Also the sound is excellent. Reference-level dynamics might not be everybody's cup of tea, but there's a tightness and immediacy to the mix that you just don't get in a larger room, even when that room is properly tuned up for audio.

Sadly, your average multiplex does not boast particularly good sound — nor even a particularly dark room. I grew up in Colorado, and when I moved to New York in 1994 I noticed a definite uptick in presentation quality in Manhattan theaters, where theater management is likely to be hassled by filmmakers themselves if the specs are out of whack. Of course, New York theaters have their peculiarities, too — unidentifiable odors, radically uncomfortable seats and/or angles of sight, sudden explosions of indecipherable verbalese from the octogenarian gentleman in the back row, and the intermittent but unmistakable rumble of subway cars running underneath the floor.

The very best venues in Manhattan tend to get everything right most of the time, and it's a pleasure to see movies in those theaters. In the suburbs where I actually live, that's not the case. The dominant chains (National Amusements and AMC/Loews) have built impressive theaters and come frustratingly close to maintaining standards of exhibition. But almost invariably there's something wrong at every suburban screening, be it soft focus, poor sound, a dirty projector gate, or bad framing. It all gets me thinking about how great it would be if movie-theater patrons actually demanded some level of respect from their multiplex tyrants — but as a practical matter it seems the queen simply expects us to eat cake. I saw Lars and the Real Girl in White Plains, NY, with the picture framed very poorly — the bottom of the image was cut off, and there was too much headroom at the top of the frame, which allowed the regular intrusion of boom mics onto the screen. (This is actually an indicator of Bad Projectionist Syndrome. Read on.) My complaints during the screening and afterward were both ignored.

On the other hand, I did successfully badger the manager on duty in Greenburgh, NY, to get a screening of Casino Royale precisely into frame after some of the opening credits were projected on the black masking below the screen, instead of the screen itself.

Here's my list of things that paying theatergoers deserve — and that careless theater management routinely screws up. If you suspect your local theater is guilty on one or more counts, you can take it up with the theater manager. If you don't like confrontation, or if you just don't get satisfaction, a letter to corporate headquarters may be in order. Often, you'll get an offer of free passes to a future screening in return. It's a nice gesture, but I'd rather pay for the screenings at a theater that gets it right. (It's not impossible — the worst transgression I've ever seen committed at my local arthouse, the Jacob Burns Film Center in Pleasantville, NY, was a screening of Rififi that was projected at 1.66:1 instead of the intended 1.37:1, which resulted in the slicing off of eyeballs in the film's centerpiece musical number. I complained afterward by mail and received a quick and apologetic response from management.)

Anyway, be patient with me. This might turn into a little bit of a rant.

So I just saw the Saturday-night sneak of The Golden Compass and I have to say that while the film's signature polar-bear smackdown is much cooler than just about anything on current release, the last reel represents one of the dumbest things a Hollywood studio has done all year. Yes, Philip Pullman's novel had a cliffhanger ending — but it was an actual ending, and a pretty great one at that. The movie has no ending; it only has a swelling of strings, an extended VFX shot, and a slow fade to black. Kid-flick audiences are likely accustomed to their status as second-class citizens, and non-readers of Pullman's trilogy don't know just how egregious the elision really is (basically, the story's emotional payload has been excised, or at least deferred to the opening reels of a potential second film), but there's something deeply unsatisfying about an ending that explicitly promises a confrontation that it declines to deliver. It represents, I think, a failure of nerve. If Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy was the product of a studio with big, swinging cojones, this is a release from a studio that's scared of its own shadow — a studio that had no business adapting the notoriously problematic His Dark Materials trilogy in the first place.

Moviegoers — even some cinephiles — probably don't know as much as they should about aspect ratios. It took the dominance of DVD to educate mainstream consumers about the difference between "widescreen" and "pan-and-scan" formats, and many viewers don't even care about the distinction as long as their TV's screen is fully filled. (Making matters worse, new HDTVs have a different aspect ratio from conventional sets, meaning that movies that appear full-screen on one will likely be letterboxed on the other.) Here's a crash course.

Not long ago, a friend emailed me to say she had recently NetFlix'd a "little B movie." She said she enjoyed it, but her tone suggested that she was reluctant to go too far with an endorsement of such a lowbrow film. Had I seen it, she asked?

The name of the movie was Exotica. Why did that blow my mind?

It's time for some shameless self-promotion aimed at my day job. I didn't write Film & Video's new story on the obsessive visual-effects work that went into Zodiac, but I did build the Flash presentation that presents video clips and before-and-after slides showing some of the results. Crack VFX guru Barbara Robertson actually wrote the story, which goes into great detail on the digital imagery that saturates the first third of the film. I did write the new F&V story on creature effects for The Host, which isn't as detailed but has some tidbits about how San Francisco VFX shop The Orphanage communicated with Bong Joon-ho back in South Korea. (Also, if you've ever muttered to yourself, "Hrmm, possibly there is some connection between Tod Browning's Freaks and Bong Joon-ho's The Host, but I can't put my finger on it", well, wonder no more.)

Sweeeeeet. The "e" stands for "electronic" as well as for "English". Mais oui. Now I don't have to keep typing sentences into translate.google.com and hitting just to figure out what those crazy French critics at Cahiers du Cinéma are on about this month .... Google Video has Iraq: The Hidden Story, an utterly engrossing hour-long piece from Channel 4 on the difficulties television journalists are having getting the real story out of Iraq — as well as the general squeamishness of television producers in the U.K. and the U.S. when it comes to airing graphic war-zone footage (some of which is included here, so be warned) that could influence public opinion of the current military escapades in the Middle East .... If you're like me (and you have a decent computer and a fast Internet connection), you've already loaded up and become mesmerized by the globetrotting wonders of the Google Earth software. Well, Google Earth became a huge time sink for me over the Presidents Day weekend as I found this old post at WFMU's Beware of the Blog in which DJ Mark Allen discusses various film locations that can be viewed from a satellite's eye using the system. I was most fascinated by the overhead images of the park from Blow-Up, but he has instructions for finding locations from La Dolce Vita, Heathers and even Friday the 13th. A category search for film locations at Google Earth Hacks turned up more time-wasting goodies, including the houses from E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial and Poltergeist. (I am a child of the 80s. I can't help it.) The dudes who wrote Deja Vu totally had a copy of Google Earth loaded up — I actually started getting frustrated that the system wouldn't let me move forward and backward in time.

I don’t know where you live, but the weather here in New York is "unseasonably mild." (Temperatures in the 50s, no snow as of January 4 for the first time in freaking recorded history — a real climate-change scenario.) Coincidentally, “unseasonably mild” also describes moviegoing over the last couple of months, as the Oscar bombs dropped by the studios in the year-end run up to awards season have detonated with a series of wet thuds. Your mileage may vary, but I’ve been decidedly underwhelmed by the likes of Letters From Iwo Jima, Notes on a Scandal, and even the seeming sure thing that was Pan’s Labyrinth (to be fair, I’ve never really been on Guillermo del Toro’s wavelength). Among studio Oscar contenders, the only satisfactory hype machines seem to be The Departed, which lived up to advance billing and is only now crawling into the awards spotlight and sniffing the air, and Dreamgirls, which I simply don’t feel like dragging ass out to see. (I wasn’t invited to an advance screening, and the ridiculous $25 ticket price for the film’s limited engagement at the Ziegfeld ensured that I wasn’t going to catch it in time to have an opinion before the wide release anyway — by the time Christmas Day rolled around, I figured anything I might have to say was likely already superfluous beneath the thunderous volume of the Hudson rocks/Beyoncé sux consensus.)

The best Oscar bait I saw was Peter O’Toole’s performance in Venus — I was very glad to have caught that at a press screening, because I’m doubtful I would have had the inclination to catch up with the one about the old man wooing the very young woman in the year-end rush of prestige pics. (Also, did anyone at all end up seeing The Good Shepherd, which was partially shot in my neighborhood?) Bilge Ebiri recently opined that this sudden flood of wannabe “quality” pictures at the end of the year has the unfortunate effect of reinforcing the status quo, since some folks end up so busy that it’s easier to take cues from (and therefore reinforce) the building groupthink rather than apply one’s self to a thoughtful study of the year that was.

I'll confess that I was a bit annoyed when the film I had decided was the closest thing to perfect I saw all year suddenly became the critics' darling in highbrow end-of-the-year polls. I knew the reviews were good, but I hadn't realized they were quite that good. Anyway, there it is — uncompromised and uncompromising, and never less than absorbing over a two-and-a-half-hour running time, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu is officially The Best Thing I Saw All Year. And there were some other good ones, too.