Every movie fan with the slightest scholarly or antiquarian bent carries around a canon culled from film history, a register of consensus masterpieces, important milestones and significant developments, from “The Birth of a Nation” to “Saving Private Ryan,” with a roster in between that seems, in hindsight, to be as fixed as the reading list in a college literature survey. (And of course is really every bit as much a result of argument, changes in fashion and wholesale revisionism.) There is “Citizen Kane” and the first two “Godfathers.” There are Ingmar Bergman and Yasujiro Ozu and Jean-Luc Godard.

But alongside the official pantheon occasionally incarnated in lists offered up by institutions like the American Film Institute and The New York Times, every film lover carries around a more subjective canon, an ever-shifting, impressionistic personal cinematheque. That horror movie that gave you nightmares as a child. The love story you saw on your first date with the love of your life. The dramas that ended or started friendships, soothed you in your lonely moments or made the loneliness more acute. The westerns that taught you something about courage or treachery, the comedies that schooled you in sex, the epics and biopics that overshadowed what you learned in history class.

No one, not even professional critics, lives through film history in proper chronological order. Two of the best, most lavishly praised movies of the past decade were “Le Cercle Rouge” and “Army of Shadows,” crepuscular classics by the great French director Jean-Pierre Melville that had fallen through the cracks of the distribution system back in 1969 and 1970, when they were made. And when Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis,” an anti-utopian, early science-fiction monument desecrated in its own time and venerated ever after, appeared in a restored and expanded version, its timeliness was at least as striking as its durability. The best new movies carry intimations of permanence along with their novelty and very quickly start to seem as if they had been around all along.

Perhaps the easiest and most satisfying way to make sense of the unruly cinematic abundance of the past 10 years is to sift through it for masters and masterpieces, kicking the tires to see what has been built to last. Whatever else was going on, a handful of great filmmakers made a handful of great films, just as in other decades. Steven Spielberg, freed in the ’90s by the successes of “Schindler’s List” and “Saving Private Ryan” from the burden of importance, made a series of bracingly imaginative entertainments — “Minority Report,” “Catch Me if You Can,” “War of the Worlds,” “Munich” and “The Terminal” in addition to “A.I.” — that were both nimble and deeply resonant. Clint Eastwood, in his 70s, entered the most prolific and diverse phase of his career as a director, breathing new life into long-established Hollywood genres, including the boxing picture (“Million Dollar Baby”), the crime thriller (“Mystic River”) and the combat epic (“Letters From Iwo Jima”). Martin Scorsese collected his overdue Academy Award for “The Departed”; Joel and Ethan Coen won their first Best Picture Oscar, for “No Country for Old Men,” in the midst of popping out a film a year. Gus Van Sant, Robert Altman, P. T. Anderson, Spike Jonze, Spike Lee, Steven Soderbergh, Todd Haynes. The canon of American cinema, since the early ’60s a catalog of acknowledged auteurs, expanded significantly in the new century.

Outside Hollywood, Pedro Almodóvar continued to mature into the post-sexual-revolution cinema’s most exalted and authentic exponent of the melodramatic tradition. In France, the geriatric New Wave generation (Rohmer, Rivette, Resnais, Chabrol) proved remarkably spry, even as a middle generation, including Claire Denis, Olivier Assayas and others, competed with the old-timers for prizes and attention. Every year, the Cannes Film Festival, the leading world-heritage site for the veneration of filmmakers, presented a remarkably consistent roll call of directorial renown. Wong Kar-wai, Michael Haneke, Lars von Trier, Abbas Kiarostami, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. These may not be household names even in movie-mad American households, but they are inscribed in the registry of important international filmmakers.