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"           Photo:Steffan Hill 1.  Hunger Harrowing and brilliant, the English video artist Steve McQueen&amp;#039;s feature-film debut uses the lens of Bobby Sands&amp;#039; historic IRA hunger strike in a notoriously abusive British prison to show you everything you&amp;#039;ll ever need to know about the ineradicable human urge for lethal conflict. Michael Fassbender&amp;#039;s performance is never less than astonishing.          Photo: \u00A9 Summit Entertainment 2.  The Hurt Locker Kathryn Bigelow and her remarkable star Jeremy Renner make this most suspenseful and beautiful of action movies, set in Iraq among the troops whose daily, deadly job is defusing the home-made bombs meant to kill them, an intimate portrait of what war gives men and what it takes from them.           Photo: Courtesy of X-Filme Creative Pool 3. White Ribbon Shot in soft, almost faded black-and-white and set in a rural German village on the eve of World War I, Michael Haneke&amp;#039;s latest film evokes a past so distant it feels almost dreamlike. But his quietly relentless exploration of the way a rigid, conformist society makes monsters of the next generation has the power to haunt you for days.           Photo: Courtesy of Oscilloscope Laboratories 4. Treeless Mountain  Korean-American director So Yong Kim&amp;#039;s precise, delicate, heart-in-mouth second feature is a survivors&amp;#039; story filled with surprises. Because the survivors are two little girls dumped by their mother on a feckless alcoholic relative, the way we&amp;#039;re shown how they cope with the adult world\u2014sometimes ingeniously, sometimes barely at all\u2014adds up to one of the most compelling films ever made about being a child.           Photo: Anne Marie Fox 5. Precious Lee Daniels&amp;#039; breakout as a director is flamboyant, shocking, laugh-out-loud funny, and altogether memorable. Gifted newcomer Gabourey Sidibe, Mo&amp;#039;nique&amp;#039;s demon mom, Paula Patton&amp;#039;s Grace-Kelly-elegant literacy teacher, Lenny Kravitz&amp;#039;s kind, commonsensical nurse, and Mariah Carey&amp;#039;s down-but-not-out social worker help make it an inspirational movie that cuts like a knife.          Photo: Courtesy of Apparition 6.  Bright Star  With this thoughtful, passionate tale of the doomed romance between John Keats and the young Fanny Brawn, Jane Campion hasn&amp;#039;t only made the most perfectly-wrought film of her career, she has raised the bar for all period dramas to come.           Photo: Courtesy of Warner Brothers Pictures 7. Where the Wild Things Are With Maurice Sendak&amp;#039;s blessing, Spike Jonze expands the much-loved children&amp;#039;s book into a deliriously imaginative and moving meditation on family, summed up in wild-thing Carol&amp;#039;s somber observation that it&amp;#039;s hard to be one.           Photo: Courtesy of Screen Media Films 8.  The Private Lives of Pippa Lee  Novelist and filmmaker Rebecca Miller takes that old chestnut, the woman&amp;#039;s picture, and blows impudent new life into it (and Keanu Reeves&amp;#039; wounded searcher) with smarts, sensuality, black humor, and a performance by Robin Wright Penn that is one of the most delectable of this or any year.          Photo: Courtesy of Weinstein Company and Universal Pictures 9. Inglourious Basterds  Quentin Tarantino takes on the Third Reich, so the woods are full of fierce Jewish warriors, Brad Pitt speaks nasal redneck and walks around with a big weapon sticking out of his pants, and Hitler, Goebbels, and assorted Nazi scum go to the movies only to get the surprise of their lives from the wiliest warrior of all, played by Melanie Laurent. The movie is two tons of fun, but what makes it great is the passion running through it like an underground stream.          Photo: Courtesy of 20th Century Fox 10.  Jennifer&amp;#039;s Body  Megan Fox and female revenge movies tend to bring out the hostile in a lot of people, but Girlfight director Karyn Kusama does both the genre and her star proud with this immensely clever, yet deadly serious piece of payback for every sexual insult\u2014and worse\u2014that women have had to contend with from an early age.           Photo: Courtesy of 20th Century Fox, Sony Pictures Classics and Lorber Films Plus: Highly honorable mentions to Aleksandr Sokurov&amp;#039;s The Sun, Lone Scherfig&amp;#039;s An Education, Jason Reitman&amp;#039;s Up in the Air, Wes Anderson&amp;#039;s Fantastic Mr. Fox, and Mateo Garrone&amp;#039;s Gomorra. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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