It's not as if violence is a new theme in movies. And yet, even acknowledging that cinema was conceived in and as violence—comic, dramatic, horrific, pornographic—this year's permutations provide acute commentary on the world beyond the screen. It's not just that violence is terrifying or bad, though that much is made clear in Munich's breakdown of the costs of counter-terrorism. It's that violence is pervasive, woven into the fabric of everyday life, indicated when young Emma Biegacki, in Marilyn Agrelo's excellent Mad Hot Ballroom, tells her interviewer that "11-year-olds are targets for kidnappers." This in a wonderful documentary focused on New York City kids learning how to rumba.

While it's easy and not especially helpful to point out the disorder that violence delivers, the year's best films took up the subject by trying to make sense of it, probing roots, deciphering rationales, dismantling socio-political contexts. Efforts to make sense of violence ranged this year from nostalgia for good war-making (The Great Raid, North Country) and protests against bigotry (Brokeback Mountain, Dear Wendy) to uneasy commemorations of street thuggery (Secuestro Express, Green Street Hooligans, Get Rich or Die Tryin') and lamentations for lost innocence (Oliver Twist, The New World). Not to mention those pictures that celebrate the comedic joys of crotch kicks (Kicking & Screaming, Wedding Crashers) and bloody body parts (The Devil's Rejects, High Tension, Wolf Creek).

But if these generic exercises tend to repeat what you already know about violence—it tells a story, it shapes character, it provides release—other films in 2005 take apart such conventions to posit alternative ways of reading. Perhaps the most obvious instance of this process is David Cronenberg's brilliant A History of Violence. Based on a graphic novel by John Wagner and Vince Locke, the film examines the slippage between myth and realism as predominant modes of representing violence. Though good father Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen) is revealed to have been a killer in his former life, the film is less interested in his spectacular lethal skills than in his small-town family's response. How to accept a gentle husband exposed as brutal, a loving father turned suddenly, chillingly ferocious?

As the movie makes Tom a model for the violent legacy that grounds America's image of itself, it ponders both the fear and respect such hard-bodied deadly force inspires. Sam Mendes' jarhead takes up such questions from another angle. Based on Anthony Swofford's memoir of the Gulf War, the film is simultaneously abstract and visceral, following Marine Jake Gyllenhaal's noncombat experience, dashed expectations and confrontations with unspeakable, technologically enhanced violence. It takes seriously Swofford's critique of the U.S. military as an institution, a means to indoctrinate warriors so that the business of war might continue indefinitely, even as battle becomes a matter of pushing buttons and long-distance targeting.

The battering of state-sanctioned violence and national/tribal mythologies is also at the heart of Apichatpong Weerasethakul's gorgeous, utterly inventive Tropical Malady. As a young soldier becomes involved with a country boy in the Thai forests, the film posits simultaneous connections and distinctions between fantasy and reality, romance and violence. Essentially arranged into two halves (a love story and a folk tale), the film uses traditional imagery and lyrical rhythms to link emotional, spiritual and fabulous experiences, as these create identities and dreams, elegiac and celebratory.

Another sort of nostalgia is evoked by George Clooney's Good Night, And Good Luck. The film, shot in striking black and white, focuses on the showdown between Edward R. Murrow (David Strathairn) and Joseph McCarthy in 1953-54, underscoring the point that McCarthy was symptomatic, not deviant. With examples ranging from McCarthy target Annie Lee Moss to Murrow's secretly married co-workers at CBS, the film points out ongoing, official oppressions of marginalized individuals and communities. If Murrow's defiance of the bully McCarthy is sensational and rousing, the quieter resistance of these supporting characters (Moss appears as herself in footage from the HUAC hearings) exposes the ominous extent of the problem.

Stephen Gaghan's expansive Syriana makes this extent more overt with a sprawling interrogation of official violence and intimidation, indicting the CIA, oil companies, legal firms and all levels of governments in cahoots to preserve power and wealth. While the film boasts terrific performances across the board—by Clooney as an aging CIA agent, as well as Alexander Siddig, Jeffrey Wright, Matt Damon, Amanda Peet, Chris Cooper and Mazhar Munir, among others—its particular effectiveness has to do with its furious sprawl, its charges against the intricate, enduring, entrenched systems of violence against individuals and resources.

Gaghan's aesthetic is handheld and scratchy, drawing from the claims to "truth" typically associated with documentary. Ironically, perhaps, the year's exceptional documentaries challenge such generic connotations of veracity. Gunner Palace, Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker's profound profile of troops in the Iraq war; Darwin's Nightmare, Hubert Sauper's portrait of the withering effect of globalization on Tanzania's ecosystem and culture; and Winter Soldier, the remarkable testimony of U.S. troops during the Vietnam War only now, at long last, getting a theatrical release, all focus on the subjectivity of truth. But even if these films argue against simple answers, all insist on the moral and political imperative of the search for elucidation and solution, the struggle against violence as the first and only response to crisis. (Winter Soldier will screen at International House Jan. 22 and 24.)

In this context, Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man may be the year's most remarkable inquiry into the ways cultures are premised on violence. Culled from the footage shot by self-documenter Timothy Treadwell, the film becomes part tragedy, part argument and part analysis of the shifting, difficult relationship between man and nature" Tracing Treadwell's efforts to protect and bond with Alaskan grizzly bears, and his and girlfriend Amie Huguenard's mauling death by a bear in 2003, the movie (especially through Herzog's ongoing voiceover) looks at the disturbing intersections of ambition and trepidation as uncertain means to shape and contain violence.

Violence seems almost uncontained in Park Chan-wook's Oldboy (which, like Park's earlier Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, got a belated U.S. release this year). Reviled or extolled as a conjurer of extreme cinematic violence, Park makes explicit the complete devastation produced by violence, even the sort inspired by the vengeance plot that is typically revered in movies. Sustained by Choi Min-sik's extraordinary performance as the driven victim-monster, the movie offers grand martial arts set pieces and ghastly assaults, never letting viewers feel the usual action movie's emotional catharsis or visceral thrills. This is film violence with costs at every turn.

These costs are not always plainly embodied or even explicitly bloody, as demonstrated in the year's least conventional, most evocative and impressionistic fiction features, all premised on limited points of view. Gus Van Sant's Last Days offers a delicately poetic, overwhelmingly visual guess at what went on during Kurt Cobain's final moments on earth. Hirokazu Kore-eda's No One Knows exposes the effects of adults' ignorance and abandonment on young children, taking the kids' point of view as they struggle to exist on their own.

And Michael Haneke's Caché is perhaps the year's most haunting dissertation on cultural violence, in this case French-Algerian relations, embodied by a television book show host (Daniel Auteuil), troubled by mysterious videotapes documenting his daily activities and unable at last to forgive his own abuses of a childhood friend. It's a stunning, unresolved revelation.