“Ashes of Time Redux”
Less a martial arts epic than the memory of one, Wong Kar- Wai’s “Ashes of Time Redux” is an act of remembering, reconstituted from dust-gathering warehouse scraps. That its official release came a decade and a half after its completion—and five years after the suicide of its star—seems predestined.

“Beauty and the Beast”
With mentor Spike Jonze in front of the camera, cinematographer Aaron Meza shot “Beauty and the Beast,” the best full-length skateboarding video yet made. Forget “Paranoid Park,” here is proof that there’s no greater fun than pushing around with your friends, even when you’re a pro. A sublime take on the road movie.

“In the City of Sylvia”
Jose Luis Guerin’s sunny elegy “In the City of Sylvia” posits cinema as a magnificent obsession with the past, which implicates viewers as stalkers of nostalgia. The funniest “Vertigo” remake since “The Black Dahlia.”

“Still Life”
Jia Zhangke works with a panoramic canvas in the gorgeously shot “Still Life,” opening with a mural-like pan across a crowded boat. Amid the massive demolitions of the Three Gorges Dam project, an upheaval: a rural worker searching for his estranged wife. One of the most crushing moments comes when the two finally meet, nearly too exhausted to react.

“Flight of the Red Balloon”
“Flight of the Red Balloon” brings the subtly shifting timescapes and beautiful compositions of Hou Hsiao-Hsien to Paris. Juliette Binoche is a whirligig as a mother and puppet theater artist. Hou finds a calm center in her son’s relaxed sense of play.

“A Christmas Tale”
In “A Christmas Tale,” there are 12 outsized personalities, 11 bottles of Chardonnay, 10 packs of Gauloises, nine lifts from other movies, eight quotes from authors, seven contrapuntal music cues, six cinematographer’s tricks, five shouting matches, four ideas a minute, three dead relatives, two diagnosed schizos, and at least one infidelity.

“Reprise”
“Reprise” could be called “Erik’s Infinite Playlist” for its playful punk references postered on the walls, but its self-doubt—alternately manic and depressive—gets at the agony and the ecstasy of influence.

“Summer Palace”
Lou Ye’s “Summer Palace” understands the excitement of living history, cutting to Tiananmen newsreels only after breathing the same charged air as its student idealists—and then following their sleepwalks to the present.

“United Red Army”
Director Koji Wakamatsu even demolished his own house for the sake of the climactic siege sequence.

“My Winnipeg”
Guy Maddin’s Soviet montage-German expressionism-avant-garde-amalgams were nothing but numbing until “My Winnipeg,” a personal journey through the director’s strange and besieged hometown that’s one of the few films to document how a professional sports team can devastate an urban populace.