Miramax Films / Andrew Schwartz

It seemed as though picking my year’s favorite films would be a snap this year. I keep a running list of some of my favorite films throughout the year, adding to it as new ones open. It was a long list. It should have been simple, right?

Yet as I scanned the list I realized that most of these films didn’t seem as electrifying now as they had back then. I still think, despite many naysayers, that Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was a good follow-up to the old derring-do adventure franchise. And although I liked WALL•E, I couldn’t come around to seeing it as the best film of the year as the Los Angeles film critics did a couple of weeks ago. I found it charming and pleasant for its first voiceless half; cartoonishly mayhem-filled in its second half. Watching it back-to-back with Kung Fu Panda recently left me solidly in the panda’s corner.

The latest Batman film, The Dark Knight, impressed. But was it the film or Heath Ledger’s maniacal performance?

Some films on my long list never found much of an audience. The Rocker, about a former drummer in a hit rock band who is still living on past dreams of rock ’n’ roll stardom until he gets a shot at a comeback by playing in a teenage band, barely lasted a week. Cadillac Records, about the early days of rock ’n’ roll at Chess Records, didn’t make much of an impact, despite good reviews and high praise for Beyoncé Knowles as troubled singer Etta James, probably because musical tastes have changed. Teens stayed away from the heartfelt documentary American Teen, Nanette Burstein’s documentary in which her camera got very close and intimate with a group of real teens at an Indiana high school. Instead teens went for the cotton-candy fluff of High School Musical 3.

I’m sorry I missed some of the “little films” of the year, too, which won praise, but didn’t stick around very long. On video I finally caught up with Rhode Islander Richard Jenkins’ fine performance in The Visitor, which earned him a Screen Actors Guild nomination for best actor. But I missed the World War II Holocaust drama The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, which arrived amid a flurry of holiday film screenings and which I had hoped to catch before it disappeared from local screens. It had come highly recommended by several people, including my parish priest. Sorry about that, Father Normand.

Fortunately, several strong films did open at year’s end to fill out my list — including Doubt, Milk and Frost/Nixon, which was originally set to open here Christmas Day but now is not expected to arrive until mid-January. Yet even with the year-end flurry of good films, some of the ones on my list still seem a stretch. For better or worse — you be the judge — here they are.

•Frost/Nixon. Director Ron Howard dazzles in this film based on the hit Broadway play about the three hour-long television interviews David Frost held with former President Richard M. Nixon in the spring of 1977. What one might fear would be a movie featuring a couple of middle-aged men sitting around talking is far from it, with excitement and laughs found in the most unexpected places. It’s a battle of wills with Frost, seemingly in over his head at first, trying to get Nixon, who resigned the presidency less than three years before over the Watergate scandal, to admit his guilt and apologize to the American people. We also get the background to the debates with both men seeing this as their last best hope: Frost, whose TV show in England was about to be canceled, saw it as a way of rejuvenating his career; Nixon, who left the White House in disgrace, saw it as a way to burnish his image. Fireworks are in the offing. Frank Langella, who played Nixon on Broadway, got best actor nominations for the film from both the Golden Globes and the Screen Actors Guild.

•Doubt. One of the best acted films of the year, Doubt is a tale of unsubstantiated suspicion and the price paid when someone acts on that suspicion. John Patrick Shanley wrote and directed the screen version of his Pulitzer Prize-winning play, set in 1964 Brooklyn. It revolves around a nun who comes to believe, with firm conviction but no proof, that the parish priest has made advances on the only African-American boy in St. Nicholas School where she is the stern principal. It’s a chilling tale that has grave consequences for both her and the priest. Cleverly, Shanley involves the audience, casting doubt all around. Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman have been nominated in the best acting categories by both the Golden Globes and the Screen Actors Guild; Rhode Island-raised Viola Davis got Golden Globe and SAG nods in the supporting actress category; Amy Adams received a SAG nomination as best supporting actress as well. All around, this is an all-star cast in top form.

•Milk. The story of Harvey Milk, a mild-mannered, closeted gay man who went on to become a lightning rod for the gay movement in San Francisco, is a story of courage and righteous indignation against injustice that is told with power and fire by director Gus Van Sant. He makes Milk a heroic figure, yet one who is also very human thanks to the very touching, funny and shattering performance by Sean Penn. Penn got well-deserved best actor nominations from both the Golden Globes and SAG. Josh Brolin also stands out as Dan White, the San Francisco city supervisor whose increasing frustrations with Milk’s cause led him to assassinate both Milk and Mayor George Moscone in San Francisco City Hall.

•Burn After Reading. This is a movie that a lot of people hated, perhaps because they were expecting to see something light and amusing from a film that starred George Clooney, Brad Pitt and Frances McDormand. What they got instead was a rollicking, offbeat black comedy, a madcap merry-go-round in which several unrelated characters get caught up in the importance of a computer disc that contains the memoirs of a disgruntled CIA analyst. The disc, found on the floor of the ladies locker room at a gym in suburban Washington, precipitates a chain of wacky events that includes more than one adulterous affair, plastic surgery, Russian spies, CIA spies, a hatchet murder, cyber dating, blackmail, divorce and divorce lawyers. When one of the principal characters gets murdered in mid film, some audience members were thrown for a loop. Brother writer-directors Joel and Ethan Coen wanted to shake people up … and in this highly original film they certainly did.

•Changeling. Ron Howard decided at the last minute that he’d rather make Frost/Nixon than this shocking and eerie drama about a mother in 1920s Los Angeles looking for her missing son. So Clint Eastwood took over the film and got a strong yet sympathetic performance from Angelina Jolie as the distraught mother who claims that the boy the police have returned to her months after her son’s mysterious disappearance is someone else. A police cover-up, city hall corruption and a mad serial killer are the main ingredients in this twisty, memorable tale. Jolie has received both Golden Globe and SAG nominations for her performance.

•Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who. Beloved by generations of children and their parents, this tale of an elephant who never gives up in his promise to save a teeny-tiny world that exists inside a speck of dust made the leap to the big screen with a script and style that were faithful to the spirit of the Seuss book. When one day Horton hears a faint voice of the mayor of Who-ville from inside the speck, he sets out on an odyssey to protect the teeny town and its microscopic inhabitants despite doubters who think the elephant has lost his mind. Adventures and excitement abound in this charming animated film.

•Kung Fu Panda. Fast, outlandish and wonderfully zany, this animated film is a zany trip to a Chinese Wonderland where a clumsy, chubby panda gets to live out his martial arts fantasy and become the masterful Dragon Warrior. This wild ride through a world of electric colors is a perfect marriage of inventive computer animation, captivating story and richly drawn characters that pull one into the magical tale of Po, a panda who may have serious doubts about his true worth, but in the end discovers his innate abilities and that his hero really lies within himself.

•Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist. An almost forgotten movie, Michael Cera plays a band member mending a broken heart. Kat Dennings plays a wallflower who is absorbed in music. Tossed together by fate, Nick and Norah join forces to find the site of a secret concert being performed later that night by their favorite band. Clues to their whereabouts have been left all over town. The unlikely magical ingredients that make Playlist nuttily endearing include an orange Yugo, the ladies room at the Port Authority Bus Terminal, a turkey sandwich, an ice cream freezer at a Korean deli, a drag queen Christmas revue and a much-chewed wad of gum. Include a very funny performance by Ari Graynor as Norah’s always inebriated gal pal and you have a film that percolates.

•Iron Man. Following his much-publicized problems, Robert Downey Jr. rejuvenated his career as the most unlikely superhero on the planet. Sort of a cross between Superman and James Bond, but with a snarky touch of sarcasm, Downey was perfect. He brought to life this Marvel Comics character as an all-too-human conflicted genius inventor-armaments dealer-playboy with a weakened heart who built himself an invincible Rocket Man-style suit to fight injustice. With funny moments, thrilling adventures and a touch of romance between Downey and Gwyneth Paltrow as his Gal Friday, Iron Man had everything an adventure film should have … and then some.

•Young@Heart. A group of singing, way cool septuagenarians and octogenarians from Northampton, Mass., who do punk, classic rock and a wailing R&B, captivated the world’s stages with their unexpectedly unique take on contemporary music. On screen they did the same in Stephen Walker’s documentary. It’s the singers themselves, seen in rehearsals or often funny asides at home, who pull one into Young@Heart and make it so vital and alive. The film has three music video-style production numbers, including one set in a bowling alley in which the mammoth Fred Knittle, who has congestive heart failure and travels with a breathing machine, dons a white suit to sing the Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive.” Alive with music and mirth it is.

Fondly remembered, too, are The Strangers, a truly scary movie about a couple in a lonely house who are terrorized by three masked strangers; Hamlet 2, an offbeat tale of a dreamer whose contemporary reworking of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, coupled with a rockin’ Jesus, were the insane ingredients; The House Bunny, a sweet surprise with a knockout performance by Anna Faris; The Spirit, Frank Miller’s imaginative CGI-based film whose superhero is dead but doesn’t realize it; The Spiderwick Chronicles, a fantasy about a parallel world that exists just outside the perimeters of a Victorian house in the woods; Zack and Miri Make a Porno, the sweetest dirty movie you are ever likely to see; Wanted, in which a young man is recruited by a gun-blazing Angelina Jolie into an assassination squad; Ghost Town, a wonderful fantasy-comedy that hardly anyone saw, about a dentist who awoke from a near-death bout during surgery with the ability to see ghosts.

mjanuson@projo.com