By Susan Gerhard

THAT BIRD, oil on its wings, under the refinery tank of some sort, not quite realizing what it had gotten itself into on its pit stop on a north-south journey over the earth is the cinematic image I'm left with as the calendar page turns. It wasn't going to continue that flight; it was going to drop off into the great blue sea after accidentally thinking a petroleum puddle was a watering hole. We see it in perhaps its last moments, when a happy rest turns into a hijacking. It was doomed, and so am I, in that I can't stop thinking about it. It follows me when I'm driving down the highway spewing fumes into the air. I flash back on it when they talk about shooting the geese that have decided not to migrate anymore because there's too much good food hanging around Oakland's Lake Merritt. It stalks me on those ever more frequent "rare" hot summer days in San Francisco when you can't enjoy yourself without wondering just how much warmer our post-no-Kyoto-Protocol world will get. Most certainly dead by now, that Winged Migration bird is burned, Imax-size, into my brain, a result of eye-widening filmmaking I didn't quite believe was possible these days.

Documentary films this year were too good and far too real. They demanded too much from us, in some cases forced us into compromising positions – viewing footage we felt, perhaps, we were never meant to watch. You might have been inclined to "escape" to fiction, if only those features weren't involved in the same practices making documentary so popular. Forward-thinking viewers of documentary have noted that the best nonfiction films have been using techniques that were formerly the sole province of fiction: unreliable narrators, the building of suspense, shifting points of view. The strange newer twist is that in actuality, the best of fiction is borrowing from documentary. It works for me: I do prefer true stories to false ones, and I prefer false stories that feel true to true stories that feel false – because I have a problem suspending my disbelief. This year fictional stories found a way around it.

Topping my fiction feature list is the Dardenne brothers' The Son – the most unrealistic story ever to be filmed vérité style – like an institutional observation by Frederick Wiseman, in which we follow a man obsessed by the killer of his son. Its twist is that he doesn't want to (spoiler alert) exact vengeance from the boy, but rather mentor him. He teaches him the art of carpentry, of all things. Compassion as a "trick" ending: we really are entering a new century.

Then there's Gus Van Sant's Elephant, which, for me, really was not going to be able to compete with the saddest few seconds I'd ever seen on film. Those few seconds were from Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine last year: Moore had the Columbine library surveillance footage – kids shouting and scrambling in real time as killers are loosed on their supposed suburban idyll. What Elephant had, by contrast, was cinematographer Harris Savides and a crew of nonprofessional actors. In the same way that fictional features about the Holocaust can feel just wrong, given the abundance of scorchingly horrifying documentaries that have been made on the topic, Elephant had to contend with a more dramatic truth than it might have been able to re-create. Yet Elephant worked: The lensing was either so transparent and clean it entered the brain unfiltered, or so godlike it was hypnotizing. Van Sant toyed with time and perception as he reworked the truth of Columbine but came up with a dream space that was eerily real, proving unknown actors once again superior to their marquee counterparts in drawing in viewers. (You don't have to flash forward to the prestige pic you'll be seeing them in next month as you try to feel for them ducking death under their school desks.) Van Sant made me forget all the bad moves he's made in the past couple years with his other achievement, Gerry. Its script, created with the help of Matt Damon and Casey Affleck, built on the relationship between the two friends and Van Sant – and it was a document, if not a documentary, that took me with it all the way to its bitter end.

As I found with Lost in Translation – which moved from one of my top films of the year to one of my favorite films of all time when I heard the news about Sofia Coppola's marital situation – the very best way to tell the truth is to simply call it a lie.

Susan Gerhard's favorite fictions, 2003

1. Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola, USA/Japan)

2. Gerry (Gus Van Sant, USA)

3. The Death of Klinghoffer (Penny Woolcock, Canada/U.K.)

4. Divine Intervention (Elia Suleiman, France/Palestine)

5. Irréversible (Gaspar Noé, France)

6. The Son (Luc Dardenne and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Belgium/France)

7. Ten (Abbas Kiarostami, France/Iran/USA)

8. City of God (Kátia Lund and Fernando Meirelles, Brazil/France/USA)

9. Finding Nemo (Andrew Stanton and Lee Unkrich, USA)

10. Elf (Jon Favreau, USA)

B. Ruby Rich's top 12 (in alphabetical order)

1. American Splendor (Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, USA)

2. Bus 174 (Jose Padilha and Felipe Lacerda, Brazil)

3. Chaos (Colline Sereau, France)

4. Divine Intervention (Elia Suleiman, France/Palestine)

5. Elephant (Gus Van Sant, USA)

6. The Fog of War (Erroll Morris, USA)

7. Lilya 4-Ever (Lukas Moodysson, Sweden)

8. Raising Victor Vargas (Peter Sollett, USA)

9. The Revolution Will Not Be Televised (Kim Bartley and Donnacha O'Briain, Ireland/Venezuela)

10. Suddenly (Diego Lerman, Argentina)

11. Waiting for Happiness (Abderrahmane Sissako, Mauritania)