3. "Munich": Stephen Spielberg's film may be the bravest of the year, and it plays like a flowing together of the currents in "Crash" and "Syriana," showing an ethnic and religious conflict that floats atop a fundamental struggle over land and oil. Working from a screenplay by Tony Kushner, Spielberg begins with the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympiad of 1972, and follows a secret assassination team as it attempts to track down the 11 primary killers. Nine eventually die, but not before the Israeli (Eric Bana) who leads the team loses his moral certainty and nearly his sanity, and not before the film sees revenge as a process that may have harmed Israel more than its targets.

2. "Syriana": Stephen Gaghan's film doesn't reveal the plot, but surrounds us with it. Interlocking stories again: There is less oil than the world requires, and that will make some rich and others dead, unless we all die first. The movie has been called "liberal," but it is apolitical, suggesting that all of the players in the oil game are corrupt and compromised, and in some bleak sense must be, in order to defend their interests -- and ours.

The story involves oil, money and politics in America, the Middle East and China. The CIA is on both sides of one situation, China may be snatching oil away from us in order to sell it back, and no one in this movie understands the big picture because there isn't one, just a series of tactical skirmishes. "Syriana" argues that in the short run, every society must struggle for oil, and in the long run, it will be gone.