Best Scene, Comedy
We finally stopped laughing during Shane Black’s comic noir ‘Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang,’ when the amateur detective played by Robert Downey Jr. took a quiet moment in front of the toilet. Then he spied a corpse on the floor next to him. Realizing that he’d been framed for murder, he turned in shock, and, yes, urinated on the body. Played perfectly, it was the most audacious scene of the year, even before the motor-mouth Downey delivered the punch line: “Can’t they get, like, DNA evidence?!”

Best Reason to Stay at Home
The massive Unseen Cinema DVD collection of early avant-garde cinema, from Joseph Cornell’s collage films to Walker Evans’s documentaries. New York curator Bruce Posner even threw in a valentine DVD devoted entirely to experimental visions of his hometown.

Fine film, great poster.   (Photo: Courtesy of 20th Century Fox)

Best Poster
The flame-licked Johnny Cash portrait designed for ‘Walk the Line’ by Shepard Fairey, the man behind those Andre the Giant stickers.

Best NYC-Made Documentary Your Teenager Should Be Required to Watch
‘The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till,’ a definitive account of the 1955 lynching that infuriated and invigorated a movement.

Best NYC-Made Documentary Your 12-Year-Old Should Be Required To Watch
‘Mad Hot Ballroom’

Best NYC-Made Documentary Everyone Should Watch Next Year
At the Toronto Film Festival, the work-in-progress screening of Michel Gondry’s hilarious doc ‘Dave Chappelle’s Block Party’ (filmed at a concert the comedian threw in Bed-Stuy) was the most raucous screening of the year—a party onscreen and off (March 3).

Best Wingmen
Edging out The 40-Year-Old Virgin’s Paul Rudd and Steve Carell, Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson (“I think we only use 10 percent of our hearts”) were the year’s funniest duo in Wedding Crashers.

Most Beautiful Sex Scene
Tony Leung and Ziyi Zhang in Wong Kar-Wai’s sumptuous sci-fi romance ‘2046,’ a Hong Kong wonder that united two of the world’s most striking leads with the inimitable cinematographer Christopher Doyle.

Best Comeback
Even more surprising than Robert Downey Jr.’s hilarious return, Woody Allen’s ‘Match Point’ (December 28) shocked us, from its London location to its perfectly cast lovers (Scarlett Johansson and Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) to the slick execution of its steamy love triangle.

Best Career Moves
Terrence Howard’s one-two punch of Hustle & Flow and Crash suddenly made the middle-aged actor an A-list name.

Best New Action Star
Tony Jaa, the improbably flexible lead of Ong Bak: The Thai Warrior.

Best Action Scene, Live
The hysterical living-room battle between Angelina & Brad in Mr. & Mrs. Smith.

Best Action Scene, Animated
The fantasy battles of the year’s best animated film, Hayao Miyazaki’s ‘Howl’s Moving Castle.’

Humans just get in the way of the wild, effects-driven King Kong.   (Photo: Courtesy of Universal Studios)

Best Action Scene, Computer-Animated
The wild, thudding, nearly never-ending battle between ‘King Kong’ and the Tyrannosaurus rexes is the early peak of the film: Unlike most too-deliberately choreographed CGI fights, this one felt like a real, messy scrap.

Best Robot
Trumping Robots and War of the Worlds, John Malkovich was glam as the gold-plated, thousand-legged cyborg of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Best Romantic Comedy
Alice Wu’s openhearted debut ‘Saving Face’ dominated a weak field (Fever Pitch, Must Love Dogs, The Wedding Date) with a savvy script about two generations of Chinese-American women in Brooklyn.

Best Title of a Movie
‘Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang’

Best Foreign Director, New Guard
Korean master Park Chan-Wook’s brutal revenge trilogy, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Oldboy, and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, was a gut-punch of visual genre vigor and a vital, Bush-era commentary on our common inability to turn the other cheek.

Werner Herzog, still crazy after all these years. Thank goodness.   (Photo: Jamie McCarthy/Wireimage)

Best Foreign Director, Old Guard
German auteur Werner Herzog proved that old-school mastery still matters in the age of digital video with his three documentaries, Wheel of Time, The White Diamond, and Grizzly Man.

Best Muckraking
While the glut of Iraq documentaries floundered in the shadow of Michael Moore, ‘Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room’ was a Devil’s Dictionary for white-collar crime.

Best Actor Who Really Wants to Direct—And Can
Edging out John Malkovich, actor Tommy Lee Jones makes a strong directorial debut with Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (December 14), a mestizo murder mystery about the death of a ranch foreman’s best friend.

Best Trailer for a Good Movie
‘Wedding Crashers’

Best Trailer for a Mediocre Movie
‘Jarhead’

Best Trailer for a Bad Movie
‘Star Wars: Episode III’

Breakout Performance, Adult
Gilbert Gottfried, poisonously crass as the man who revitalized comedians’ favorite dirty joke in the documentary The Aristocrats.

(Photo: Courtesy of Sony Classics)

Breakout Performance, Teen
Lou Taylor Pucci, as a pent-up teen who suffers through suburbia and finally makes it to New York in the final shot of Mike Mills’s indie Thumbsucker.

Breakout Performance, Child
Wilson Castillo of Washington Heights and Michael Vaccaro of Bensonhurst, two dashing, diminutive 11-year-old ladykillers who got on the good foot in the documentary Mad Hot Ballroom.