It could be that the year's economic downturn motivated filmmakers to work harder, or at least more. The year's box office tally will be likely run around $9.2 billion in domestic sales, up from last year's $8-ish billion. This record-breaking production and consumption is related, somehow, to an abundance of multitaskers and overachievers. These take two forms: hyphenated talents -- director-actor Denzel, director-producer-actor George Clooney, producer-actor Sandy Bullock, rapper-actor Eminem, singer-actor-parfumier-designer-divorcee-bride J. Lo; or purveyors of multiple projects -- Spielberg, Soderbergh, Jake Gyllenhaal, Meryl Streep, John C. Reilly, Tim Blake Nelson, Nicolas Cage, Samantha Morton, Adrien Brody, Edward Norton, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Adam Sandler, Charlie Kaufman, Kirsten Dunst, Phillip Noyce, Tom Hanks and Leo Leo Leo Leo.

As notable as all this double-duty may be, far more interesting are the ways that it has been thematized in the work itself. The most effective representation of dual/mutual desires and memories comes in Pedro Almodóvar's Talk to Her, in which Javier Cámara and Darío Grandinetti grieve for comatose women. Telling stories and projecting fantasies -- talking -- they come to understand themselves and each other in their shared sense of loss and need. The film's giant vagina scene deserves special mention as the year's most audacious and alarming metaphor.

Also bound up in multiplicity is Paul Thomas Anderson's Punch-Drunk Love, at once an homage to and brilliant deconstruction of romantic comedies. Slamming, smashing, banging, crashing: Adam Sandler is hammered by his sisters and beaten down at work (he sells bathroom supplies), then finds miraculous solace in the pink-sweatered arms of Emily Watson. Set against Jon Brion's vividly percussive score, their love story is violent, delicate and comic. Just like in the movies.

Todd Haynes' Far From Heaven similarly loves and breaks down its source material, in this case, Douglas Sirk's aching 1950s melodramas, complete with craning cameras and studio-perfect autumn leaves. Here, Julianne Moore and Dennis Quaid must come to terms with their dissolving marriage, as he realizes his long-repressed homosexuality and she finds compassion and affection with her gardener, Dennis Haysbert, whose simple line at film's end, "Oh, Mrs. Whitaker," speaks to a (personal and collective) history of pain and longing. And as the façade of her life collapses around her, Moore's Connecticut housewife can only let go.

In profoundly different (low-budget) ways, Mike White and Miguel Arteta's The Good Girl also explores the non-options confronting Retail Rodeo clerk Jennifer Aniston. Imprisoned by her learned desire to be "good," she finds a sort of soulmate in angsty adolescent Jake Gyllenhaal, with whom she cheats on her obtusely loving husband, John C. Reilly. Never condescending to its characters (unlike, for instance, About Schmidt), the movie invites compassion and appreciation for the complexities of lives that look, on their surfaces, simple.

Even more urgently revising concepts of "simplicity," storytelling and situation is Zacharias Kunuk's Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner), winner of the Camera d'Or for best first feature at Cannes. Based on an ancient Igloolik legend, this three-hour opus features stunning, widescreen digital video camerawork (by Norman Cohn), bringing to light another way of thinking about individual stories and communal histories, but more crucially, another way of thinking about victory and revenge.

Alfonso Cuarón's Y Tu Mamá También also reimagines cinematic storytelling. Painfully intelligent and emotionally nuanced, it traces a teen road trip, undertaken by Tenoch (Diego Luna), Julio (Gael García Bernal) and Tenoch's cousin's wife, Luisa (the incredible Maribel Verdú). Their interactions lead to lessons learned that are compelling in their own right, but viewers are also enlightened by a third-person narrator, observing images and thoughts that the characters cannot, probing into secrets they keep from one another. This strategy turns an ostensibly straight-ahead narrative -- on the road -- into a series of reflections and refractions, equally discrete and interdependent. While it's easy to glean from this the familiar idea that the pursuit of truth is noble, Y Tu Mamá's point is far more profound: If truth is irretrievably subjective, honesty and generosity remain vital aspirations.

24 Hour Party People is Michael Winterbottom's shrewd unraveling of the life and career of Factory Records co-founder and TV journalist/dance club impresario Tony Wilson (Steve Coogan). Gorgeously shot by Robby Müller, the film also features Andy Serkis (currently receiving much attention as the model/voice for The Two Towers' digital Gollum) as producer Martin Hannett, and traces a recent history -- roughly, punk into rave, or 1976 into the early '90s, with special attention to the rise and demise of Joy Division/New Order -- that parallels Wilson's own ego and career, spinning into increasing self-interest, escapism and consumption. Wilson's self-deceptions provide an intriguing gloss on the history happening all around him.

An even more peculiar dismantling of a "real" life appears in George Clooney's Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (opening in Philadelphia early next year), based on the autobiography of game show producer and host Chuck Barris, in which he claims to have also been a CIA assassin. Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman's been busy this year, what with his writing himself and his fictitious twin brother into Spike Jonze's Adaptation and the bizarre "science" conjured in Michel Gondry's gonzo Human Nature. But the script for Clooney's directorial debut is Kaufman's most outrageous and deft investigation of relations among celebrity and authorship, violence and creativity, making art and selling out.

Still more painful truths come to the surface in Michael Moore's essay on gun violence in the U.S., Bowling for Columbine. Aggressively opinionated, the film takes Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold's 1999 assault on their classmates and teachers as a point of departure, then considers a range of contexts -- legal, cultural, political and media -- in order to pose the question, "Why are people scared?" Interweaving his own story into his search for answers, Moore comes to complex, multiple answers, tangled up in a "campaign of fear and consumption" (premised on racism) that continues to divide Americans.

As smart, frustrating, and ambitious as any of Spike Lee's movies, 25th Hour (also opening next year) builds to a trenchant critique of what pass as "American values," and the costs of privilege and passivity. On his last night before he goes to prison for seven years, drug dealer Monty (Edward Norton) takes stock, with his girlfriend (Rosario Dawson), best friends (Barry Pepper and Philip Seymour Hoffman) and retired firefighter father (Brian Cox). Monty's fate is not, as many read it, comparable to the tragedy of 9/11, but his moral myopia runs parallel to a national self-regard as innocent victims. The incredible final sequence, an alternative future narrated by Cox, suggests that overcoming fear of difference is the way to survive.

Special mention for Eminem, who has managed the best remix of life-as-art-as-life in the movie 8 Mile and the single/video, "Lose Yourself." Whether or not Mr. Mathers receives an Oscar nomination for his self-performance, the mere thought of his possible appearance at this endlessly self-loving event, in the company of Jack and Julia, Scorsese and Spielberg, is surely a good thing.