The best? Not necessarily — but these 10 films from 2014 should last awhile.

Trying to cram every awards-season double-wide into a couple of weeks — including several titles that won’t make it to Kansas City until January — can backfire. Watch Theory of Everything and The Imitation Game virtually back to back, and your brain may soften a little trying to keep the details straight, and your spirit may weaken enough that when someone asks you who should win an Oscar, you almost formulate an answer. As though such derbies speak to culture. As though I’m going to risk losing the office pool.

The truth is, after a December diet heavy on cheese and ham — earnest biopics, mainly — I’m almost ready for a commercials-and-all TNT pairing of, like, Malice and The American President, with a box of Golden Grahams close by and no cell signal. Almost.

But beyond what the awards season cranks out and away from the franchise-movie circus tents, a handful of 2014 movies stand out. Some of what I most liked this year feels to me almost objectively great — until I try to define greatness. (The first four titles on this list are pretty much tied.) Better to say that these are the pictures that I expect I’ll want to revisit in a few months or a few years (when I’m not catching up with all the films I missed this year, some of which likely belong on this list). They’re the movies that I’ll insist on watching with friends who somehow didn’t see them. The movies that I hope arrive on DVD with commentary tracks and bonus features and deleted scenes.

1. Ida

Writer-director Pawel Pawlikowski’s haunting masterwork shows us the Communist Poland of 1962, but his camera could be trained on the Eastern Europe of a previous century, rendered in Lukasz Zal and Ryszard Lenczewski’s luminous black-and-white cinematography. Its two stars are brilliant: Agata Trzebuchowska open-faced and beguiling, Agata Kulesza tragic and knowing. The dialogue is so terse as to be nearly epigrammatic, and though the film is just 80 minutes long, it unfolds with the deliberateness of a Catholic ritual. Pawlikowski’s static, square compositions and unhurried direction lend nearly every shot a photo-album quality. You replay certain moments in your head in a La Jetée–like sequence of stills that doesn’t seem all that different from the motion picture you saw, yet the movie — its drama, its performances and its eerie visual perfection — sits on your brain like something to which you’ve been invited to bear witness.

2. Boyhood

I didn’t expect to be among the countless critics who love Richard Linklater’s latest movie, a three-hour ramble shot over 12 years with a cast that ages in real time and a nonstory that finds simple truths in improvised-sounding, defiantly stilted conversation. But it’s a truly enveloping work, visually rich and emotionally authentic. It’s about the boy, sure (Ellar Coltrane, unpredictable in mostly the right ways), but it cuts deepest when you remember that it’s mostly his mother (Patricia Arquette, undeniable) who raises him.

3. The Grand Budapest Hotel

Wes Anderson, Ralph Fiennes, boyhood (with apple), prewar Europe, postwar Europe, chivalry, literature, snow, love and pastry. It’s in the running to be Anderson’s best, which means it’s in the running, period.

4. Inherent Vice

Paul Thomas Anderson attempts the impossible by adapting for the screen a Thomas Pynchon novel. Joaquin Phoenix and a big cast (with Josh Brolin biggest) help him pull it off. Weird, funny, beautiful. (Coming here in January.)

5. Whiplash

Miles Teller and J.K. Simmons: Believe their characters and their motivations, don’t believe them, whatever. The movie’s pleasures are in its staccato rhythms, and sometimes a big finish is the only finish that makes sense.

6. Birdman

Sometimes a big finish doesn’t help. But even though he muffs the ending, Alejandro González Iñárritu deserves credit for the sheer virtuoso assurance of his filmmaking — which would be impossibly self-conscious without Michael Keaton in the lead.

7. American Sniper

Clint Eastwood made a musical for the summer (Jersey Boys) and a war movie (that’s also a domestic drama) for the holidays. He turned 84 this year. And the war movie — in which Bradley Cooper turns 100 or so, redacting his Hangover youth in the year’s most stunning U.S. performance — is one of his best. (Look for it here in mid-January.)

8. A Most Violent Year

J.C. Chandor — the writer and director behind Margin Call and All Is Lost, two unlike but equally confident movies — goes three for three with a minimalist, masterful crime drama set three decades ago. (Yup: January.)

9. Only Lovers Left Alive

Jim Jarmusch outs himself as a vampire and, paradoxically after a decade of diminishing returns on all things undead, again finds his voice and his cool. Between this and her Terry Gilliam-like walk-on in the otherwise overrated Snowpiercer, 2014 was the year of Tilda Swinton.

10. Wild

What if a mainstream American movie about a woman contained zero romance but plenty of emotion, conflict and depth? What if most of that emotion, conflict and depth played out in that woman’s mind? And what if Reese Witherspoon didn’t just play that woman but, in fact, inhabit her fully? (And what if more movies come along with Wild‘s ambition?)