Okay. It's time to get down to brass tacks. I'm going to get up on my soapbox and hope that the right Academy members read the column this week, because it's time to re-do the rules of the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar category. Do you know how long it has been since a great film, a truly great film, won in this category? I'm talking about a film made by a genuinely great artist of the cinema, a film for the ages, and not just a perfectly good film, or a film about one of the great world wars. Here's your answer: twenty-five years ago. Ingmar Bergman's Fanny and Alexander (1983) was the last great one. That leaves 25 years of pretty good, just OK, forgettable, or flat-out awful winners (mostly forgettable). This year's winner, The Counterfeiters (41 screens) had to be one of the worst movies I saw all year; at it's center is a perfectly good (true) WWII concentration camp story, but it's warped by an entirely inept director, responsible for one of the worst movies I've ever seen, All the Queen's Men (2001). How did it win? How did it get past all the truly great films of 2007?

2007 was an above average year at the movies, far better than the depressing state of 2005 or 2006. And for me it was also the year of the Western. By coincidence I happened to be studying the Western in a graduate course taught by Jim Kitses, who is arguably the #1 Western movie scholar in America. During my semester, 3:10 to Yuma, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and No Country for Old Men opened in theaters, and we studied them in class. Two of these would have made my top ten anyway, but looking at them in-depth gave me even greater pleasure and made me even surer of my choices. Seraphim Falls and There Will Be Blood were also Westerns of a sort, and the number and general high quality of these films make this the strongest year for the genre since the early 1970s, or perhaps even the late 1960s.

The most frustrating thing about the year is that three of my favorite movies didn't qualify for list consideration. David Lynch's Inland Empire opened in 2006 but didn't screen for the San Francisco press until early 2007. (You can look for it on my best-of-the-decade list instead.) Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep is a masterpiece, and an essential part of the history of American cinema. It had its official theatrical debut in 2007, but I decided that its contribution to cinema has more to do with 1977, when it was made, than 2007. Finally, Quentin Tarantino's uncut version of Death Proof was a revelation, and far, far better than the truncated version that most people saw in Grindhouse. It screened at Cannes and then went straight to DVD in the U.S., so it, too, was disqualified. No matter. I came up with ten excellent films anyway.

1. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Andrew Dominik, USA)
Normally I like to save my #1 slot for a film by a proven master, and Dominik is far from that; his only other film, Chopper, failed to prepare me for the astonishing, haunting dreamlike quality of this new film. I have to admit I thought about this movie just about every day since I saw it. It's too easy to label this as a "revisionist Western," since it contributed so many new ideas to the genre. It's by far the best Jesse James movie ever made, and certainly one of the greatest Westerns I've ever seen.

Earlier this week, I along with 20 other San Francisco film critics assembled at an undisclosed location -- okay, it was a café -- to vote on the best films, best performances and best other stuff of 2007. It's an interesting experience. I spent a few weeks combing through the year's releases, coming up with my own choices. Then I second-guessed some of them, deciding whether I should eliminate certain choices. If I was absolutely certain that someone would make the final ballot, then I would cast a vote for someone more obscure, someone I really liked. After doing that, I scrapped the whole thing and went back to my favorites in each category, regardless of where they placed.

For Best Supporting Actress, I selected Amy Ryan in Gone Baby Gone (301 screens) as my #1 choice, comfortable in my certainty that she was a dark horse and that no one else would pick her. She was far from being the focus of that film, but she knocked a home run in her few scenes as a horrible, drug-ridden mother who has lost her baby girl. As a bonus, she was also in Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (321 screens), a film that also made a decent showing on my personal ballot. (She lost a few points by being in the wretched Dan in Real Life, but gained them back again by being on TV's "The Wire.") In any case, Ryan not only made our final ballot, but she actually won. Congratulations, Amy! My other picks, Taraji P. Henson in Talk to Me, Kristen Thomson in Away from Her, and Maggie Smith in Becoming Jane, didn't make it so far. As for my fifth pick, Cate Blanchett in I'm Not There (148 screens), you've not heard that last of her.

A glance at DVD Journal's release calendar reveals a jam-packed week. My personal pick is Jafar Panahi's superb Offside, which manages to pack drama, humor, tension, sports, feminism and social commentary into an Iranian girl's burning desire to watch an important soccer match in person. It's entertaining too! Cinematical's Erik Davis was positive in his review and so was Jeffrey M. Anderson.

If your cinematic diet includes thrillers, check out Antibodies (from Germany) or Red Road (from the UK). Antibodies borrows an idea from Silence of the Lambs by featuring a serial killer who will only talk to a local bumpkin cop. The cop has become obsessed with catching the killer of a local girl, to the point that his family is falling apart and he's suffering from nightmares. As a whole, the film doesn't completely work, the narrative crumbling as it dives deeper into madness, but director Christian Alvart has a terrific visual sense. Andrea Arnold's Red Road is a quieter work that relies more on the slow building of tension. Jeffrey M. Anderson's positive review has all the plot details you'll need.

In the indie comedy/drama aisle, we have Year of the Dog, written and directed by Mike White, which received nods of approval from both Scott Weinberg and Kim Voynar; when those two agree, it's an automatic "must rent." Molly Shannon stars as a lonely women dealing with the loss of her beloved canine companion. Joe Swanberg's second feature, LOL, gets the deluxe treatment from new distributor Benten Films. Karina Longworth quite liked it when she saw it at SXSW last year -- and Mr. James Rocchi offers a brand-new review right here.

Though I haven't seen either The Beautiful Washing Machine (from Malaysia) or The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros (from the Philippines), both received good reviews. For example, David Ng of the Village Voice said Washing Machine "demands at least two viewings" and Dennis Lim wrote that Maximo was "further evidence of a mini renaissance in the country's long dormant cinema."

2007 is now one-third over, and four movies have broken $100 million: 300, Wild Hogs, Ghost Rider and Blades of Glory. Eddie Murphy's Norbit is creeping up on a $100 million score as well. Only Blades of Glory is interesting in the slightest. It's a poorly-directed, uneven comedy, but with plenty of laughs, all thanks to Will Ferrell. I guess I could waste time wondering why people are paying good money to see these so-called movies, but the fact remains that they all opened on more than 3000 screens, and were available for just about everyone in the country to see.

Despite these duds, the year in movies hasn't been so bad so far. I'd rather focus on some of the year's really good entries, the ones that will probably be forgotten eight months from now when the list and awards season starts all over again. I haven't been able to see it yet, but Syndromes and a Century (1 screen) from Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul should be enlightening. His Mysterious Object at Noon (2000), a beautiful combination of documentary and storytelling, is on my personal list of the best films of the past ten years. His amazing Blissfully Yours (2002), among other things, rolled the credits right in the middle of the movie, and his Tropical Malady (2005) had a gay romance far more tender and engrossing than the more widely celebrated Brokeback Mountain.

Two buses roll down the streets of Tehran, bound for Azadi Stadium. Packs of wild soccer fans hang out the windows like colorful streamers, shouting victory chants at the occupants of other, similar buses. On one bus, a concerned man searches for his daughter. On another bus, a lone figure sits quietly at the front. She is clearly a girl, with a soft face and a cute, turned-up nose. But she has done her best to disguise her gender, wearing a cap with flaps down the back, baggy clothes, and face painted in Iran's colors. Several of the boys on the bus immediately see through her disguise.

The girl (Sima Mobarak-Shahi) is on her way to see the big Iran vs. Bahrain game, a real-life qualifying match for the 2006 World Cup. The boys warn her that she'll never make it into the stadium, but she persists. She pays exorbitant fees for tickets, and is almost immediately nabbed by a security guard. Thus begins Jafar Panahi's Offside, a movie outraged by the ridiculous rules that keep women from attending live soccer matches in Iran. It has been pleasing audiences all over the world -- except in its native Iran where it has been banned.

With his new film Offside, director Jafar Panahi (Crimson Gold, The Circle) decided to use a real-life experience as the inspiration for a fictionalized story. Set in Tehran (the capital city of Iran), Offside follows a day in the life of a group of young Iranian girls desperate to watch their football (or soccer) team's World Cup qualifying match against Bahrain live and in person at the stadium in Tehran. The only problem is women are forbidden from entering the stadium during a football match because of the potential dangers they might face when mixed in with a bunch of rowdy, foul-mouthed fans.

Thus, the girls go to great lengths to disguise themselves as men in an attempt to sneak past the guards and gain access. What follows is a hilarious (and at times, poignant) glimpse into the life of hardcore football fans denied the simple luxury of watching their hometown team toss a ball around all because of their sex, and the harsh realities that go along with being a woman in a country that refuses to treat them as equals.

The powers that be behind the New York Film Festival have announced their full lineup for 2006, a list that features 28 films unfolding over a relatively leisurely two weeks of screenings. In addition to the previously-announced The Queen, Volver, Reds and Pan's Labyrinth, the slate -- like that of any good small festival -- is a mix of high-profile and obscure; domestic and foreign. The full list can be found here, but some highlights include: David Lynch's The Inland Empire (Can you imagine how many people will flip out if this thing is bad? We've been waiting for it for so damn long.), Johnnie To's Election Election 2, South Korea's smash-monster-hit The Host, Marie Antoinette, Poison Friends, Egyptian street kids doc These Girls and Offside (It's about soccer! And Iranian!).

The festival opens on September 29; watch the NYFF website for ticket info.

Despite all the buzz surrounding The Road to Guantánamo and Robert Altman's charming A Prairie Home Companion, the Golden Bear award - given to the best film at the Berlin Film Festival - went to Grbavica, a film from Bosnia. The first feature from documentarian and short film maker Jasmila Zbanic, Grbavica is about "Bosnia's post-war trauma and the lingering impact of the systematic rape of women by Serb soldiers during the 1992-95 conflict." Profoundly troubling though it undoubtedly is, the film was very well-received when it screened at the festival early this week. Unfortunately, no American distributor has yet been brave enough to acquire its rights, so this might be another one for the region-free DVD players.

Other major awards went to Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross for their direction of The Road to Guantánamo, and German pair Sandra Hüller (Requiem) and Moritz Bleibtreu (The Elementary Particles), who were named best actress and best actor, respectively. Additionally, the jury gave out Silver Bears (essentially best picture runners-up awards) to Offside, an Iranian film about women and soccer, and Danish/Swedish production A Soap, which examines "a budding romance between an emotionally confused woman and her troubled, pre-op transsexual neighbor."