Quotes of the Day

1. THE WHITE DIAMOND and GRIZZLY MAN;
directed by Werner Herzog; Germany
Werner Herzog would make a great subject for a Werner Herzog documentary. The director is an adventurer of outsize ambitions and eccentric appetites. In 1974 he walked more than 800 km, from Munich to Paris, to visit the ailing 78-year-old film historian Lotte Eisner, in the belief that his pilgrimage would have curative powers. (She lived for another nine years.) He has said he would "climb into hell and wrestle the devil himself for one of my films" — which pretty much summarizes his working relationship with Klaus Kinski, the star of five Herzog features (including Aguirre the Wrath of God, Nosferatu the Vampire and Fitzcarraldo) and the subject of the Herzog bio-doc My Best Fiend.

For nearly four decades, Herzog has examined, and embodied, one grand theme: a charismatic man is seized by some magnificent idea or ideal, and his pursuit often drives himself toward madness and those around him near despair. Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo are two such obsessives; Herzog, as several documentaries about him indicate, is one too. Recently Herzog found two other suitable subjects,who inspired two extraordinary films. One is Timothy Treadwell, the engaging madman of Grizzly Man, who lived among wild bears each fall in southern Alaska, recording their strange behavior, and his. The other is The White Diamond's Graham Dorrington, a London University aeronautical engineer who has built an airship he wants to fly over the rainforest canopy in Guyana. "We can realize our dreams!" he exclaims. "Let's go fly!"

Dorrington stills feels guilty for the 1993 death, in one of his airships, of the wildlife cinematographer Dieter Plage. Now he is determined to fly again, in expiation and fulfillment. And when, accompanied by ethereal choral music, the airship finally soars over the forests, or is viewed as a reflection in the river water (where it looks like a giant white blowfish), the movie attains an astonishing spiritual levity. "I'm high!" Dorrington giggles. "High on helium!" The feeling is not only contagious, it is sacramental.

How to draw a line between Herzog's "fiction" and "nonfiction" films? Both kinds are genuine expeditions containing lots of fiction. Dorrington told a BBC interviewer that "some things were acted. The argument with Herzog in the film is completely fake — pure acting." This is in keeping with Herzog's dismissal of the documentary form called cinéma vérité is as "a merely superficial truth, the truth of accountants." Yet "there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth....that can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization."

Treadwell was beyond taking Herzog's direction; he had been mauled to pieces, with his girlfriend, on his 13th summer with the bears. What Herzog had were 90 hours of Treadwell footage, which proved that the man was a readymade self-dramatizer. A nice-looking guy with an easy enthusiasm the camera loves, he described his nearness to the bears as a cross-species symbiosis, when in fact he was courting the fate he eventually achieved.

In these heartbreaking films, Herzog again demonstrates that the most thrilling adventures are those that illuminate the beauty and the peril in man's quest both to tame nature and become one with it.

2. SARABAND
Ingmar Bergman, Sweden
Age has not mellowed Bergman; it has simply focused his fury. The great auteur, who at 85 directed his first film made for theatrical release in 20 years, is at peak form for this semi-sequel to his 1972 Scenes from a Marriage. in 1972, Reuniting the main couple, Johan (Erland Josephson) and Marianne (Liv Ullmann), Bergman creates an icy tri-generational trauma that involves Johan's widowed son Henrik (Börje Ahlstedt) and Henrik's teenage daughter Karin (Julia Dufvenius). Always forcing himself to peel emotions down to the skin, and beneath them, Bergman has created a naked emotional biography. He has said Saraband is his last film < — > a final primal scream < — > and we should be grateful for it. Here is a testament of love and anguish from the man who used to be called the greatest living filmmaker. Well, dammit, he was. And, as Saraband proves, he still is.

3. THE SQUID AND THE WHALE
Noah Baumbach, U.S.
All unhappy families are unhappy in their own way, Tolstoy said. But even he would be impressed by the ingenuity the Berkmans of Brooklyn bring to the mission of making themselves and each other miserable. Dad (Jeff Daniels) and Mom (Laura Linney) have just broken up, leaving their sons (Jesse Eisenberg and Owen Kline) to choose sides in a domestic war that could destroy them all. It doesn't sound that funny, but it is — funny-painful, funny-true. The film's catalog of deceits and embarrassments, of love pratfalling over itself, miraculously achieves both intimacy with the situation and distance from it; so the movie is simultaneously lacerating (in closeup) and funny (in long shot). Baumbach's direction of his company is exceptional; the cast deserves an ensemble acting prize, and Owen Kline's deadpan desperation will haunt and tickle me every time I think of it. The travails of the Berkman brood must have been hell to endure, but consider the upside. Baumbach based the film on his own parents' breakup. He not only survived it, he got a priceless souvenir this laugh-scream of a movie.

4. CACHÉ (HIDDEN)
Michael Haneke, France
Someone is threatening Georges (Daniel Auteuil) and his nice family, sending them surveillance videotapes and ominous drawings. Georges might be the standard thriller hero, sleuthing out the villain and exacting righteous revenge, But look closer. he is not as blameless as he seems; his long-suppressed memories of an incident from his youth lead him into a labyrinth of personal and political guilt, and a confrontation startling in its explosive violence. Haneke's cool, scary work, which this month swept the European Film Awards (Best Picture, Actor, Director and Editing), is both an exercise in mortal suspense and an essay on the complicity between those who create disturbing images (moviemakers) and those who take pleasure from looking at them (us). Till the very end of the film, you may ask, Yes, but whodunit? Who was the anonymous terrorizer? You can find an answer, as the closing credits appear over the final shot... if you look closer.

5. BLACK
Sanjay Leela Bhansali, India
This is an unofficial remake of the 1962 U.S. film The Miracle Worker, about the deaf-blind child Helen Keller and her teacher Annie Sullivan, who penetrated the wall of dark silence to introduce Helen to the world of words. Bhansali, whose last film was the mega-soap opera Devdas, extends and reconfigures Keller's real-life inspirational story. Now the girl, an Anglo-Indian called Michelle McNally, pursues her education at a "normal" university. And her Annie Sullivan is a man — the man of Bollywood cinema, Amitabh Bachchan. As the plot ripens, and the grownup Michelle (Rani Mukherjee) emerges from the girl (Ayesha Kapoor), she must cope with both her teacher's ambitions for her and her emotions for him. This is an unusual film for India: no songs, a running time under 2 hrs. and most of the dialogue in English; yet it became a box office hit. It could also be a test for Western audiences unused to the fever pitch of Indian melodrama; they may need a warning label — Caution: Extreme Sentiment (May Be Contagious). Everyone else can dive right into the bathos and savor the brave, passionate performances of Amitabh, who harnesses gravity and humor to his magisterial machismo in what may be his greatest role, and the two Michelles, who revere and adore their teacher as the one man who matters. In so many Indian films the deepest searches are for romantic ecstasy and for reconciliation with the father figure. By addressing both these needs, Black is more than a noble weepie; it is the ultimate Bollywood love story.

6. CITIZEN DOG
Wisit Sasanatieng, Thailand
Here's a rapturous, visually orgasmic Asian romance, the sophomore effort from Sasanatieng (Tears of the Black Tiger), based on a novel written by his wife. This Thai kaleidoscope of comedy, with brisk narration and fevered imagery, suggests the French film Amélie, but after a dozen beers and a couple conks on the head. The movie includes a missing finger found in a sardine can, killer helmets, a grandmother reincarnated as a gecko, a litter of puppies in blue dresses ... And it's a musical! All right, you had to be there. But, guaranteed, once you're there, you won't want to leave.

7. THE CONSTANT GARDENER
Fernando Meirelles, U.K.-U.S.-Brazil-Kenya
World cinema in a single movie: a Brazilian director films an adaptation of an Englishman's book (the John Le Carré novel) in Africa. A British diplomat (Ralph Fiennes) learns that his crusading bride (Rachel Weisz) has been killed on a trip into the bush, and goes searching for keys to her murder. It's a new version of Europe's colonial crimes against Africa; with toxic tests administered by a large pharmaceutical company, the whites are again blithely killing off the blacks. Meirelles, who in City of God made a story of Rio gangs both tragic and exhilarating, likes to probe and prod a subject from a dozen oblique angles. The result here is a First World story seen through the acute eyes of a Third World auteur — a film of nuance and power, flawlessly acted and an adventure to watch, with the aftertaste of a placebo laced with cyanide.

8. ONCE YOU'RE BORN...
Marco Tullio Giordana, Italy
A boatload of illegal immigrants is boarded by the Italian authorities and, in separate closeups, each of the dispossessed recites his or her name and home country. "Montenegro." "Pakistan." "Nigeria." "Bosnia." "Sudan..." The list of trouble spots could be endless; the wretched refuse numbers in the tens of millions; each face on that boat of illegal immigrants is a map of human misery and resolve. They wouldn't be there if they didn't think they could survive and thrive far from home. Among these figures are Radu and Alina, a Romanian brother and sister, and Sandro, a privileged Italian 10-year-old whom Radu has rescued from a near-drowning. In gratitude, Sandro's parents welcome the refugee kids into their home, and then... And then, what has been a lovingly detailed parable of discovery gets morally and socially complicated. Giordana and his screenwriters, who collaborated on the epic drama Story of Youth, lead Sandro and the viewer through many deep and conflicting emotions. It's a daring work — daring not to satisfy but to confound our wishes that movies give rosy answers to questions the world can't begin to solve.

9. WALLACE AND GROMIT IN THE CURSE OF THE WERE-RABBIT
Nick Park and Steve Box, U.K.
It was a very good year for films for children; I especially enjoyed the Disney cartoon Chicken Little, with a storytelling sense and graphic precision worthy of the old animation masters, and Danny Boyle's Millions,, in which magical realism comes to the English Midlands, where saints speak to little boys and dead mums offer tips on hair conditioners. But this slot belongs to The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, which extends to feature length Park's stop-motion short films about the irrepressibly (and unaccountably) self-assured inventor Wallace and the much saner, wiser dog who shares his master's home and saves his cheese. With their usual precision and fey wit, Park and his Aardman colleagues have created a horror-romance that borrows with equal cunning from Jane Austen's social comedies and the Hammer monster movies of yore. It's cracking good!

10. MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA
Rob Marshall, U.S.
This adaptation of Arthur Golden's best-seller strode onscreen with high hopes and big hype (including a cover story I wrote for TIME Asia). On opening day, the smarter U.S. critics slapped Geisha out of its reverie. But I'm sticking to my story: that this far-East fairy tale, about the geisha Cinderella (Zhang Ziyi), her wicked stepsister (Gong Li), her fairy godmother (Michelle Yeoh) and the faraway prince (Ken Watanabe) she dreams of, is a delicate, robust and emotionally satisfying throwback to the sweeping romances Hollywood once specialized in and now mostly ignores. I loved seeing most of my favorite Chinese actresses in one movie (even if they were turning Japanese), and watching Gong Li, in her first big English-language picture, snatch the acting honors with the same assurance that her character, the vindictive Hatsumomo, the Gongster flashes a stiletto stare that can burn in passion or turn on a rival with Freon fury. It's a good movie — though this recommendation now comes less as an early hint of Oscar glory and more as a guilty pleasure.

• TIME's Richard Corliss lists his pick of the flicks over the past 12 months