Images, lines, gestures, moods from the films of the year...

By Richard T. Jameson and Kathleen Murphy
Special to MSN Movies

• "Flags of Our Fathers": How the whole movie is suspended between the desperate "Where is he?" and finding out who "he" is...
  
• The calm, ecstatic beauty of the opening shot of "A Prairie Home Companion": Mickey's Dining Car glowing in the night, the turned back of narrator Guy Noir (Kevin Kline) visible through the window as he finishes his cheap meal, pays, and rises to step out into a heartland street painted with light and color after rain...
  
• Business-as-usual in "The Departed": Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson) disappears into a back room for a while. When he comes back to reenter the conversation, he's wearing a bloody apron. We never know why...
  
• "Brick": The Pin's (Lukas Haas) mom interrupting a kitchen showdown with offers of cookies and apple juice...
  
• "Half Nelson": Ryan Gosling's heroin-addicted teacher storms into the drug-dealer's hangout to tell the charismatic fellow (Anthony Mackie) to stay away from a little girl he's taken under his wing -- and gets detoured by the lure of shooting up...
  
• A lively mandrake root swims in a pan of milk beneath a pregnant woman's bed -- "Pan's Labyrinth"...
  
• "Beowulf & Grendel": A dead-white, clawed hand strikes straight up out of the sea, reaching for Beowulf (Gerard Butler)...
  
• "Letters from Iwo Jima": Fountains of blood and flesh, as Japanese soldiers suicide by grenade ... the same sequence heard, in "Flags of Our Fathers," as distant underground thwumps...
  
• "Casino Royale": The philosophical quarry assures the gunman who's got the drop on him that the second kill is ... he would have said "easier," but he's already dead. Ice-cold Bond (Daniel Craig) puts his own period to the sentiment: "Considerably."...
  
• "Miami Vice": A hi-def aerial shot down into the warm, velvet-dark Florida night, sensing almost more than seeing the opalescent wake of a fast boat making its way up the Inland Channel...
  
• The abstract regional overviews that open each chapter of "Days of Glory," and fade into the photographic reality of a landscape about to become battleground...
  
• "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Great Nation of Kazakhstan": A Southern gentleman of a certain age being obliged to explain that he is "retired," not "a retard"...
  
• In "For Your Consideration," the two screenwriters of "Home for Purim" are asked to name their ideal spaces. One (Bob Balaban) says, "Chicago." The other (Michael McKean) says, "Under my mother's kitchen table."...
  
• "Shortbus": Enjoying a smoke in a sensory deprivation tank...
  
• The way Madolyn's (Vera Farmiga) toes curl under as she makes love with Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio) -- "The Departed"...
  
• In "Apocalypto," Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood), crouched in a tree high above bloodthirsty pursuers, whips around at the sound of a growl, to spy a fiesty kitten ... but turning back, he comes face-to-face with a huge, black, plenty pissed-off jaguar mom...

Next: More Moments in Time