I’ll skip the usual laments about the cruel arbitrariness of list making. There were a lot of movies this year — more than 950 reviewed in these pages — and quite a few good ones. Here are 21, a 10 Best list followed by runners-up, arranged alphabetically. It is, as always, a highly personal selection. These are the movies that touched, excited, challenged and haunted me most in 2014.

1. In my 15 years of professional movie reviewing, I can’t think of any film that has affected me the way “Boyhood” did. It is not just that I was moved — I’m frequently moved — but that my critical impulse seemed to collapse, along with my ability to find the boundary between art and life. Some of this is a matter of coincidence. Arriving in the summer that my only son and oldest child graduated from high school and prepared to fly the parental nest, this chronicle of a boy’s life from 6 to 18 would have wrecked me even if it had been more conventional. As it happened, it took a second and a third viewing for me to appreciate the ingenuity of Richard Linklater’s idea and the artistry of his methods.