December 31, 2008--To quote Roger Ebert, whom I cannot top: “I am violating the age-old custom that film critics announce the year’s 10 best films, but after years of such lists, I’ve had it. A best films list should be a celebration of wonderful films, not a chopping process. And 2008 was a great year for movies, even if many of them didn’t receive wide distribution.”
Here, then, are the very cream of the crop of U.S. film releases I’ve seen in 2008. The listing is alphabetical as well because, like Ebert, I cannot decide what should go in what order. I have, however, picked my favorite film of the year, followed by a first runner-up.
Here, then, are the very cream of the crop of U.S. film releases I’ve seen in 2008. The listing is alphabetical as well because, like Ebert, I cannot decide what should go in what order. I have, however, picked my favorite film of the year, followed by a first runner-up.
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The Top 20: |
1. Synecdoche, New York |
Here is an astonishing, dizzying, beautiful, melancholy, sardonically amusing, lovely, apocalyptic, powerful, low-key, brilliant, bewildering and inspiring work of staggering genius (Have I used every single superfluous adjective known to man yet? Good). Philip Seymour Hoffman stars as a struggling playwright who is faced with having to live up to the receiving of a “Genius Grant.” Mass confusion and hints at the meaning of life ensue. An exhilarating masterpiece from Charlie Kaufman, the writer of Being John Malkovich (1999), Adaptation. (2002), and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004). This is a life-changing experience that will be analyzed and, perhaps, misunderstood for decades to come.
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2. Happy-Go-Lucky |
Mike Leigh, the great British theater writer-director turned filmmaker again improvises his way to comedic gold with this portrait of a profoundly good London woman, a school teacher named Poppy (Sally Hawkins in a stunner of a performance), who meets her match in a violent, misanthropic driving instructor (Eddie Marsan).
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3. Ballast (alphabetically): |
A quietly devastating drama about three damaged souls attempting to learn to heal the deep-seeded wounds of the past, to live together and move on. A store owner in the heart of the Mississippi Delta loses his twin brother to suicide. The brother’s adolescent son and the son’s mother live nearby and struggle to make ends meet. The son, getting into trouble at school for fights and drugs, is now out of school but drifting in and out of the orbit of a local gang. The mother, a good woman, is trying to do her best. An exceptionally moving debut film from writer-director Lance Hammer.
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4. Chop Shop |
Ramin Bahrani’s sophomore effort is a raw, effective, moving slice of life which doesn’t just observe its characters, or paint a portrait of their lives – it appears to actually live and breathe them. The film was co-written, edited and directed by Bahrani, an Iranian-American director who previously made the absorbing Man Push Cart (2005), about a former rock star from Pakistan now working as a Manhattan street vendor. His characters are ordinary people living on the fringes of society, unseen by the majority of people around them, who have small goals, perfectly capable of being realized, and who want desperately to attain them.
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5. The Dark Knight |
The greatest superhero movie to date had Christian Bale return to Gotham City as the Caped Crusader following Batman Begins (2005), the triumphant reimagining of the franchise by Christopher Nolan (Memento, Insomnia). However, the late Heath Ledger steals the show in perhaps his best performance as the Joker, a positively demonic force of evil, insanity and chaos reigning supreme over Gotham’s criminal underworld.
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6. Doubt |
Starring Philip Seymour Hoffman as a priest in a 1964 Catholic school in the Bronx, friendly and charismatic – perhaps too much so? Meryl Streep is the powerful, draconian Principal who suspects Hoffman of impropriety with the school’s only black student, and Amy Adams is also very good as the hopeful, innocent young nun who has her suspicions but doesn’t want to cause trouble. Viola Davis shows up for one long scene in the middle and brings down the house. Written and directed by John Patrick Shanley (Moonstruck, Joe Versus the Volcano), who adapts his hit stage play.
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7. The Fall |
Tarsem Singh’s film, a mad folly of a cinematic extravaganza, is like the most lucid yet surreal dream translated into an audacious cinematic experiment, somewhat akin to the pioneering work of Werner Herzog or David Lynch crossed with Guillermo Del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth). It’s also a celebration of the innocence of childhood, and the fertility of the imagination. The plot: In 1920s Hollywood, a stunt man called Roy (Lee Pace of TV’s Pushing Daisies) is injured on the set of a Western and becomes an in-patient at a large Catholic hospital. He soon befriends a little Romanian orphan named Alexandria (Catinca Untaru), and decides to tell her a fantastical story – one which changes all the time, depending upon the kind of story she wants to hear, and which takes shape (for the audience) in the form of how she imagines what he’s telling her.
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8. Frost/Nixon |
The best film yet from Ron Howard, the maker of Apollo 13 (1995) and The DaVinci Code (2006), based on the play by Peter Morgan (The Queen), illustrates the dramatic true story of former President Richard Nixon (a magnetic Frank Langella), disgraced in the wake of Watergate, and his controversial interview with British talk show host David Frost (a pitch perfect Michael Sheen).
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9. Frozen River |
Melissa Leo gives a stunningly tragic performance as a desperate single mother and dollar store employee living on the border between New York State and Canada who, forced to overcome dire circumstances, must help a near-sighted Mohawk (Native American) woman (Misty Upham, every bit her equal) smuggle illegal immigrants across the border from Quebec to make ends meet. A powerfully assured debut for writer-director Courtney Hunt.
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10. Hunger |
A disturbingly accurate-feeling portrait of life inside Maze Prison, focusing on a British security guard, two IRA prisoners who become hunger strikers, and their ringleader, the stubborn and resolute Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender). The long two-shot of Sands conferring with a priest about the ramifications of his hunger strike, which will effectively result in suicide, is hypnotic, tense and gut-wrenching; written and directed by artist-turned-filmmaker Steve McQueen.
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11. In Bruges |
A charming darkly comedic thriller from Ireland, playwright turned writer-director Martin McDonagh’s feature debut is about two hitmen (Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson) who take a sojourn to the beloved medieval tourist village of the title (it’s in Belgium) in the wake of a tragic miscalculation on the job. Ralph Fiennes steals the show as their foul-mouthed, bloody-minded boss.
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12. Milk |
A powerfully moving portrait of the first openly gay elected official in U.S. public office, Gus Van Sant's film features a wonderful marvel of a title performance from Sean Penn as Harvey Milk, San Francisco’s “Mayor of Castro Street,” who gained a great deal of support and political capital and gave a lot of people hope before being senselessly gunned down by colleague Dan White (Josh Brolin, in an effectively chilling performance).
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13. My Winnipeg |
Guy Maddin’s odd, often funny and surreal mixture of documentary and dramatic recreation (though the documentary aspects feel fictional on some level as well) is the tongue-in-cheek treatment of how he tries to get out of his home town in Manitoba, Canada (a land of “sleepwalkers”) and how he reminisces about the past which lead him to this tough decision. Amusing and bizarre work from the unique and talented creator of such films as Brand Upon the Brain!, The Saddest Music in the World, and Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary, the most original Canadian director working today.
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14. Rachel Getting Married |
Jonathan Demme does his best work in over a decade, a million miles away from The Silence of the Lambs (1991) with this delightful dramedy from writer Jenny Lumet (filmmaker Sidney Lumet’s daughter). Anne Hathaway is all grown up here as the family’s black sheep, fresh outta rehab on a weekend pass for the wedding of her sister Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt).
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15. Revolutionary Road |
A portrait of middle-class suburban hell like only the director of American Beauty (1999) could devise, Sam Mendes' adaptation of Richard Yates’ tragic novel features Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet (reunited for the first time since 1997’s Titanic) as a young 1950’s Connecticut couple suffering through lives of quiet desperation. Michael Shannon (Shotgun Stories, Bug) pops in for two scenes of emotional evisceration that are positively devastating.
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16. Shine a Light |
Martin Scorsese, America’s greatest living director, captures a rollicking good time (in IMAX no less!) at a Clinton Foundation benefit concert featuring the Rolling Stones. You feel like you’re there!
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17. Shotgun Stories |
Jeff Nichols’ debut is a Southern Gothic melodrama revolving around a blood feud which has its roots in the past and spirals down through time, infecting the lives and minds of an entire family, soiling the present and almost claiming the future. First one side of the family does something, then the other retaliates, and on and on. So entrenched in this rivalry will these men become that it never once is said out-right that they all have the same father (how they’re related) and thus they never consider themselves one big family, but rather like two small warring tribes from the same culture. Where will it end? Not where you think, amazingly enough. The performance by Michael Shannon (Bug, World Trade Center) is intensely and fiercely controlled; he’s one of our finest “unknown” actors. It is surprising, then, that he turns out to be less than a hero; his mother raised he and his brothers to hate her dead husband’s second family and they have resented Son and his kin for their hatred of their shared father.
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18. Slumdog Millionaire |
Vikas Swarup’s novel provides the inspiration for this affecting and inventive tale of a Mumbai youth whose difficult life experiences inform his ability to correctly (if improbably?) answer questions on the Hindi Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? A joyous stylistic leap by filmmaker Danny Boyle into an Oliver Twist-ian world of shady criminals and disbelieving adults.
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19. W. |
An oddly empathetic, if satirical, biopic from Oliver Stone about the life and times of George W. Bush, played superbly by Josh Brolin – from his difficult youth to his sudden shift into the family business, from his governing of Texas to his controversial first election to the Presidency of the United States (it’s almost over!). A mostly spot-on cast of terrific actors (especially Thandie Newton and Richard Dreyfuss as Condoleeza Rice and Dick Cheney) joins in on the fun.
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20. The Wrestler |
In this stunner from the brilliant young mind behind Pi (1998) and Requiem for a Dream (2000), Mickey Rourke gives a career-best performance as Randy “The Ram” Robinson, a has-been circa-1980’s professional wrestler who works unloading trucks in the back of a New Jersey supermarket by day and still performs attempts at recapturing his glory days by night. The closest thing he has to love (outside of his vocation, of course) is an intimate relationship with an aging, soul-bruised stripper (Marisa Tomei). He even has a desire to reconnect with his estranged young daughter (Evan Rachel Wood). All of this could’ve made for the stuff of overwrought melodrama, but somehow Darren Aronofsky, Rourke, the supporting cast, the gritty cinematography by Maryse Alberti, and the beautiful screenplay by Robert D. Siegel pull out all the stops to make this a one-of-a-kind, gut-wrenching slice of painful life.
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Special Jury Prize
Zack and Miri Make a Porno
Writer-director Kevin Smith (Clerks, Chasing Amy) is a master of the profane and here he makes one of his funniest and oddly sweetest comedies, possibly the year’s best comedy, a tale of two lifelong friends who face dire financial straits and must… well, just read the title. Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks are hilarious and the supporting cast (from Craig Robinson to Jason Mewes) is a dream.
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Every year at film festivals, the jury picks a kind of tie for first place for a film or films they wish to honor despite running out of awards to give. This year, a comedy that made me laugh harder than anything else I've seen... |