Slant Magazine

25. Coraline. A 3D CG marvel conceived in writer-director Henry Selick's traditional stop-motion aesthetic style, this visually rich adaptation of Neil Gaiman's Coraline proves a dark and magical portrait of adolescent sorrow and identity development. With sumptuous imagery that twirls and tumbles with delirious abandon, Selick's story about a young girl who discovers a doorway to a mysterious, seemingly idyllic alternate reality brings real menace back to the too-often innocuous kid's film. A wondrously creepy trip down the rabbit hole, it's a film seemingly born from its plucky heroine's psyche, overflowing with surrealist flourishes and carnival-barker showmanship. NS

24. The Box. An astute political pulse-tester in a wonky, thriller chassis, The Box ingeniously employs a bicentennial setting characterized by suburban triumphalism and scientific optimism to illustrate a robust democracy nevertheless beset by opaque, external pressures. Richard Kelly's signature stirrings of cosmological imbalance presage the arrival on a family's doorstep of a miraculous button unit-cum-ballot box, its consistently obfuscated ownership and crassly-appealing security-for-indirect-murder proposition serving as a biting critique of modern, buffered democracy. "Can't I be forgiven?" is the regretful plea of Cameron Diaz's Virginia belle after opting in, to which Frank Langella's hideous, interdimensional PR man memorably responds with an affronted, I-just-work-here shrug. Ryan Stewart

23. Police, Adjective. It takes commitment to turn the act of leafing through a dictionary into a riveting cinematic moment, but Corneliu Porumboiu's great, deadpan moral inquiry is a work of such concentration. Structured as a dreary police procedural, it slowly weaves a Kafkaesque cosmos as its protagonist, a drudging Bucharest cop reluctantly investigating a minor case of pot-smoking high schoolers, gradually grows engaged in the interpretation of the signs and meanings around him. Not just a wry portrait of the clash between changing attitudes and rigid laws, but also a call for active consciousness in life and in cinema. Fernando F. Croce

22. Antichrist. It's hard not to take Antichrist as a mythically macabre put-on. Only Lars Von Trier would pepper an incoherently spooky gore-horror flick with such perplexing embellishments—from the coruscating black-and-white opulence of the humpfest prologue to the clumsily allegorical Eden where He (Willem Dafoe) and She (Charlotte Gainsbourg) lock horns in a grisly, grief-provoked battle of the sexes. But the ramshackle, surrealist humor isn't mocking the audience: It's obscuring the fidgety undercurrent of yonic apprehension that drives the plot's feverish mutilations. We laugh at the fox who intones "chaos reigns" in a gravely basso; we might laugh even harder if we recognized his accuracy. Joseph Jon Lanthier

21. Still Walking. A family drama that gets the family dynamic exactly right, Hirokazu Kore-eda's triumph brings three generations of the Yokoyama clan under a single roof for a round of tearful remembrances, unspoken resentments, and domestic rituals. Unfolding over the course of a single day, the film lays out the family's decades-old beefs but never brings them to a point of crisis, instead suggesting—through its generous fixed-camera framings, its witty-wise screenplay, and the subtle interplay of its characters—the ways that unresolved conflicts tend to harden into regrets and how, for all our sorrows, life continues heedlessly on. Andrew Schenker

20. Cargo 200. In Cargo 200, writer-director Aleksei Balabanov uses dread as a meathook on which to suspend the bloody barbarism and squalor of provincial, pre-perestroika Russia; this film's scabrous narrative makes his post-USSR gangster chronicle Brother seem like the frothiest of comedies. At the grotesque climax, a rodent-like police captain makes use of soldiers' coffins (and bodies) to cover his homicidal tracks as his sloshed mama sits in the next room, obliviously bathed in the flicker of state-spooned TV images. The dark laughs don't stick in your throat, but lodge in the mind, suspended between shock and the sting of Balabanov's fury. Bill Weber

19. The Window. The domestic metaphysics of The Window undulate as lyrically as that of the South American modernist masters. Director Carlos Sorín perceives his deathbed-ridden protagonist, the senescent writer Antonio, as the focus of a swirling collection of household textures—pianos being tuned, meals being prepared, grown children being grumpy—that seem to mock the living in their perpetual pedestrianism. Antonio's feeble, 11th hour search for immortality is an archetypal premise, but Sorín's transcendently tactile imagery and sprinklings of magical realism offer the plot the gentle eeriness of a serene ghost story. It's as though we're watching a man listlessly supervise his own burial. JJL