This undated promotional photo shows actors Heath Ledger, left, and Jake Gyllenhaal in a scene from "Brokeback Mountain." The film logged the highest per-screen average over the holiday weekend. It's playing well in limited release and opens wide in the new year. (AP Photo/Focus Features, Kimberly French)

Hollywood had a bit of schizophrenia the past 12 months. While it clung to the same formulaic popcorn pics that year-after-year line its coffers ("Fantastic Four," "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire," and the list goes on), the folks in Tinseltown decided to grow up for a change, turning out films that engaged viewers’ emotions ("Brokeback Mountain," "Munich," "Walk The Line"), confronted middle-class malaise ("The Weather Man"), took on the corruption tainting contemporary politics ("Syriana," "Lord of War"), raised questions about America’s problem in Iraq ("Jarhead") and frankly discussed race ("Crash"). Even when working within normal Hollywood sure-fire conventions, cookie-cutter flicks like "Batman Begins" and "Sin City" didn’t substitute story and style for cheap blow ‘em up action. So it wasn’t all doom and gloom (Hollywood bean counters take note).

Here are my picks for the year’s best films:

10. Sin City - Robert Rodriguez' insistence that comic scribe, Frank Miller, co-direct Dimension’s adaptation of Miller’s popular "Sin City" graphic novels forced him to resign from the Director's Guild of America. That’s the bad news. The good news is that the pair of upstarts managed - for the first time in celluloid history I might add - to truly make the comics come to life, filming a frame-for-frame recreation of Miller’s noir-classics, "That Yellow Bastard," "The Big Fat Kill" and "The Hard Goodbye." Capturing his actors in shadowy hues of digitalized black and grey, with plenty of violence, it’s everything a grown-up nerd needs.

9. Jarhead - It doesn’t seem novel - filming a movie set during the Gulf War in the early Nineties as a comment on 2005’s redux - but Oscar-winning director Sam Mendes and screenwriter William Broyles Jr. ended up crafting a war story that engaged viewers’ precepts about armed conflict, and the men and women we send to fight our battles. Jake Gyllenhaal (in the first of two Oscar-worthy performances) nails his role as a sharpshooter with no one to shoot.

8. Lord Of War –Nicolas Cage as a rouge arms dealer with a sudden crisis of conscience, and Ethan Hawke as the eager FBI man on the hunt, is one way of looking at this movie. But sift a little deeper and you’ll see that Andrew Niccol has written and directed a disturbing tale that confronts the intersecting points of greed and armed conflict. And like Cage’s other stellar film this year – "The Weather Man" – don’t look for any happy endings here, just when you think humanity might win over bullets and dollars, Niccol pulls the wool from over your eyes to let audiences see how things really work.

7. Syriana – Writer-director Stephen Gaghan does to oil what his Oscar-winning screenplay for "Traffic" did to drugs. Like a musician penning a nine-part symphony, he adds layer upon layer to a dense tale that shows how everything – from the boardroom deals in Houston, to a Middle Eastern suicide bomber – is connected. "Corruption is how we win," gets uttered midway through. That’s the biggest truth you’ll hear from anyone this year. Too bad the character saying it is fictitious.

6. Crash – Though it premiered at 2004’s Toronto International Film Festival, "Million Dollar Baby"- scribe, Paul Haggis’ multi-storied tract of intersecting fates became something of a phenomenon after Oprah endorsed it last spring. Not since Spike Lee’s "Do The Right Thing" has a film so shatteringly delved into how we look at each other, and how more often than not, our preconceived notions about race end up affecting our judgment.

5. The Weather Man – I pity the poor folks at Paramount who got stuck trying to hawk this downer. But I applaud Gore Verbinski and writer Steve Conrad for making a movie that sticks in the craw of that erroneous good job and good pay, equals happily ever after equation. Nicolas Cage stars as a soon-to-be-divorced television weatherman. He should have it all, but his kids are indifferent, and his Pulitzer Prize-winning father (played by Michael Caine) looks at him with unending disappointment. You want the forecast to be a little brighter for Cage’s weather guy, but some things that are broken can’t be fixed.

4. Walk The Line – Director James Mangold’s biopic captures the confused, drug-addled, narcissistic world of Johnny Cash in storybook fashion. Played with dead-on precision by Joaquin Phoenix, Mangold’s Man-In-Black story makes no apologies for the irascible singer’s careerist attitude in his early years, or his subsequent unfaithfulness to his first wife. There’s not a false note up on screen.

3. A History Of Violence – The audience at Cannes was hoping that this was going to be David Cronenberg’s stab at pervasive violence in the United States. The director cut things a lot closer to the bone however, showing how violent acts are hardwired into modern-day living. Viggo Mortensen’s idyllic life is shattered when big city mobsters – who think he’s the bad guy who double-crossed them years ago – show up in town. Is it possible that he’s not the clean-living family man he’s made himself out to be? Is he really a cold-blooded killer trying to escape his past in small-town USA? Is violence cyclical? Here, Cronenberg shows that it may be way beyond our control, passing from generation to generation with an eerie kind of grace.

2. Munich – The movie has controversy written all over it. Based on George Jonas’ "Vengeance," Steven Spielberg’s "Munich" doesn’t flinch from showing us the terror that befell 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics, or the violence that followed. With help from a script by Tony Kushner and Eric Roth, the director makes an elegiac statement on catharsis achieved through violence. No matter what your stance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the film, from its beginning to a closing shot of New York’s skyline, will have you wondering if perpetual eye-for-an-eye-style justice can only make us blind. It’s the kind of subject matter most directors wouldn’t want to handle, but Spielberg takes the kid gloves off and holds a mirror up. No matter how ugly the reflection.

1. Brokeback Mountain – A lot has been said about Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal knocking boots in this movie. But like director Ang Lee’s other little masterpiece – "The Ice Storm" – "Brokeback" is about so much more. Tracing the decades-long relationship between Ennis Del Mar (played by Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (played by Jake Gyllenhaal), screenwriter Larry McMurtry breathes a landscape of emotion and wonderment into E. Annie Proulx’s tragic story. How many people are you going to meet that change the way you look at your life? "Brokeback" takes that question and follows it through to its painful conclusion. Not to be missed.

Honourable mentions: "The Matador" (I loved hearing Pierce Brosnan cuss), Johnny Depp in both "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" and "Corpse Bride," Liev Schreiber’s adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer’s "Everything Is Illuminated," Peter Jackson’s "King Kong," and the scene where Anakin finally becomes Lord Vader – jaw dropping.