The year in film 2008

Two years ago, the five of us—the core writers for The A.V. Club's cinema section—decided that there was so much overlap among our individual year-end Top 10 lists that we could come together, Borg-like, with a collective (nay, definitive) Master List that would reflect our consensus on the best films of the year. Then 2008 happened, and that plan went kaflooey. We all agreed that 2007 was a peak year in the new millennium, offering up such instant, diamond-cut masterpieces as No Country For Old Men, There Will Be Blood, and Zodiac, among others. This year, whether it could be called weak or merely diverse, we had a harder time seeing eye-to-eye. Only the #1 choice on the Master List appeared on all five lists, and #2 topped three of the five lists. Beyond that, we wound up with a catch-all of films that we championed passionately as individuals, but not necessarily as a whole. To reflect this lack of group-think, we've instituted a new category called "Outliers" that calls attention to some of the unheralded films that appeared on one list and no others. In the big list below, as well as the individual ballots and commentary that follow, you'll find the quirks and wonders of an off year.

The Master List

10. Surfwise (dir. Doug Pray)

Much like Andrew Jarecki's 2003 list-maker Capturing The Friedmans, Doug Pray's Surfwise is an irresistibly intimate, uncomfortable portrait of an eccentric family; they're such an odd collection that even a so-so filmmaker could easily have assembled their interviews into a fascinating film. In the capable hands of Doug Pray (Scratch, Hype!), their story is mesmerizing. In the '60s and '70s, Dorian Paskowitz traveled the country, living in an RV with his wife and nine children, who were schooled in surfing and Paskowitz's anti-consumerist, antisocial, rabidly family-centric philosophy. Pray digs up a ton of old footage of them causing sensations at surfing contests, but also talks to them all as adults, and discovers how the kids' unconventional childhoods turned them into independents, mavericks, and in some cases, deeply bitter messes. Pray doesn't condescend or judge; he just lets viewers in on their remarkable history and their musings on how far they've come, and how far they have to go.

9. Wendy And Lucy (dir. Kelly Reichardt)

Echoing Vittorio de Sica's neo-realist classic Umberto D. and Agnès Varda's Vagabond, but keeping an American shoestring spirit all its own, Reichardt's follow-up to Old Joy captures a life lived in the margins most of us choose to ignore. Disappearing into an unglamorous role, Michelle Williams plays a drifter who, on her way to a potentially lucrative job in Alaska, runs into car trouble and shoplifts in order to stay within her unforgiving budget. Detained and released, she returns to the store to find her dog missing, and embarks on a desperate quest to find her. Without sentiment, the film hopefully portrays a passing friendship forged in the process, but keeps the emphasis on how easy it is for those without means to fall between the cracks.

8. Man On Wire (dir. James Marsh)

The A.V. Club wasn't initially falling over itself to see a documentary about a 1974 daredevil stunt involving a French high-wire walker. We should have known better, given that it came from James Marsh, director of Wisconsin Death Trip and The King, one of the best (and least-seen) features of 2006. Marsh deftly assembles vintage film and photographs, unobtrusive recreations, and recent interviews to tell the story of how adorably engaging thrill-lover Philippe Petit and a pal snuck into the then-under-construction World Trade Center towers, where they strung a wire between them for Petit's death-defying enjoyment. Marsh lets Petit's boundless energy and excitement set the pace; his outsized, crazy adventure ultimately becomes so nerve-racking that the young Petit's life seems constantly threatened by his schemes, even though there's an older version of him right there, safely recounting the adventure. Without resorting to exclamation points, Marsh summons up all the old terror and excitement of a truly grandiose piece of derring-do.

7. 4 Months, 3 Weeks And 2 Days (dir. Cristian Mungiu)

Following The Death Of Mr. Lazarescu and 12:08 East Of Bucharest, this harrowing drama about the quest to procure an illegal, black-market abortion in Ceausescu's Romania confirms the country as the newest garden of first-rate world cinema. Though it isn't set in real time, 4 Months has that kind of urgency, especially once the seedy abortionist comes into the picture and tries to leverage his power in extraordinarily unsettling ways. But abortion rights aren't at issue so much as the general atmosphere of fear and paranoia that gripped the populace during that period. It says something about the tension Mungiu generates that a banal, bourgeois dinner conversation, placed in dire context, stands among the year's most gripping scenes.

6. Paranoid Park (dir. Gus Van Sant)

Before making the fine mainstream biopic Milk, Van Sant indulged himself with another of his periodic exercises in aestheticizing ennui. Paranoid Park is based on a YA novel about crime and punishment among the skateboarding crowd, but Van Sant merely skirts along the edge of the plot, preferring to linger on slow-motion shots of boys doing skate tricks. Nevertheless, this is still arguably the most accessible film of Van Sant's recent art-film era, because its characters and emotions are immediately relatable. Doesn't everyone remember adolescence as a constant shift between euphoria and panic—not unlike riding a skateboard high into the air, then tumbling back down?

5. Milk (dir. Gus Van Sant)

Gus Van Sant's biopic of pioneering San Francisco politician Harvey Milk does right by both the man and the era that led him into politics. The film takes its cues from Sean Penn's fully realized performance, which emphasizes the endearing charisma that made Milk the right man to take the gay-rights charge into the arena of mainstream politics in '70s San Francisco. It's a performance and film with abundant humanity in the way it treats the personal motives behind Milk's careers, the toll it took on his personal life, and even Milk's rival and eventual assassin, Dan White. Josh Brolin portrays White as a tortured family man pushed over the edge, a fragile personality crushed by the times Milk helped change.

4. The Dark Knight (dir. Christopher Nolan)

Even before Heath Ledger's death by misadventure instantly made him his generation's brooding answer to James Dean, The Dark Knight was subject to a culture-wide tidal wave of hype that made widespread disappointment seem inevitable. Yet The Dark Knight miraculously lived up to the hype by exploring the soul-sickness of a Gotham City that hovers uncomfortably between repressive order and total anarchy. That spiritual corruption is embodied unforgettably in Ledger as The Joker, a smiling lunatic who seems to be dirty and deranged on a biological level. He's a singular combination of hilarious and terrifying that's nicely balanced by the more straightforward yet still morally ambiguous heroics of Christian Bale's caped crusader and Aaron Eckhart's district attorney Harvey Dent. The year's biggest, most popular film was also one of its best.

3. Synecdoche, New York (dir. Charlie Kaufman)

Viewers could go nuts trying to figure out which parts of Synecdoche, New York are real, and which parts are in the head of its hero, a regional-theater director (Philip Seymour Hoffman) who's turning his life into an elaborately staged drama. So at a certain point, the audience for this rambling meditation on truth and artifice has to stop thinking of it as a movie with a story to tell, and start thinking of it as an environment to get lost in. Writer-director Kaufman freely mixes absurdity and honest pathos in Synecdoche, and the mix is sometimes messy, and even unpalatable. But the scope of Synecdoche's imagination—and the deeply personal pain it explores—make it arguably 2008's most visionary film. At the least, it's likely to be challenging viewers long after most of this year's Oscar-bait has been forgotten.

2. Rachel Getting Married (dir. Jonathan Demme)

Weddings are organized madness under the best of circumstances. Demme's transcendent comedy-drama Rachel Getting Married drops a potent variable into this already-combustible mix, in the form of Anne Hathaway as a narcissistic junkie who leaves rehab so she can attend her sister's wedding. Hathaway is an omnipresent threat to everyone's happiness and security, a brittle collection of zealously nursed grievances, resentments, and demons that constantly threaten to swallow her whole. Demme brings a you-are-there immediacy to the proceedings, while Jenny Lumet's fine script cycles masterfully through a stunning array of emotions, from bile and contempt to joy and contentment. It's paradoxically a warm-hearted, tender, and tremendously moving film about a raging misanthrope, and a low-key, gloriously life-sized masterpiece.

1. WALL-E (dir. Andrew Stanton)

Beyond their state-of-the-art animation, consistent wit, and emotional depth, part of what makes Pixar films stand so far above the rest is that they somehow feel like personal expression, even though they're released by the commercial monolith Disney, and freighted with stratospheric box-office expectations. How many other animation houses would have the courage to counter the trend of bright, yammering animals with movie where the first third is so notable for its silence and dust-choked desolation? And how would any other studio film smuggle in such a bold satirical message about a future society consumed by its own slothful consumption? Add to that all the clips from the 1969 musical flop Hello, Dolly!, and WALL-E feels downright iconoclastic, in addition to being the funniest and most achingly beautiful story of robot love the universe has ever witnessed.

Outliers

Burn After Reading

The Coen brothers' follow-up to the Oscar-winning No Country For Old Men is broadly cartoonish and deeply cynical, and not everyone appreciated the Coens' vision of a world in which everyone's an incompetent misanthrope. But Burn After Reading's darkly comic riff on the D.C. thriller genre is also hilarious and brilliantly constructed, with a script that adds and subtracts elements exactly when necessary. Plus, it's a true take on how we live now: skeptically scrutinizing our government while letting Internet predators and the beauty industry have their way with us. (Murray)

Let The Right One In

Swedish director Tomas Alfredson unblinkingly combines a sensitive drama about a bullied teen with a chilling vampire movie as if the two elements naturally went together. And in his hands, they do. In Let The Right One In, two different sorts of outcasts form a sensitive bond whose full price isn't revealed until a final scene that's equally sweet and tragic. It's a far cry from the jolt-a-second adrenalized remakes and rip-offs that have come to dominate American horror movies, and a far better hope for the genre's future. (Phipps)

Operation Filmmaker

The best intentions lead to the worst possible outcome in Operation Filmmaker, a scathing non-fiction satire about a plucky young Iraqi filmmaker named Muthana Mohmed, whom actor-turned-filmmaker Liev Schreiber discovers on an MTV special and hires to work on his directorial debut, Everything Is Illuminated. Mohmed quickly wears out his welcome and tests the patience and generosity of his Western benefactors with his arrogance, terrible attitude, incompetence, and flair for manipulation, not to mention some spectacularly ill-chosen words about the greatness of George W. Bush. Yet Mohmed keeps failing upward; at one point he even gets Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson to pay for a year of film school. By the end of Filmmaker, Mohmed is cynical, calculating, utterly shameless, and willing to do anything to get ahead personally and professionally. So maybe he's learned more from his American collaborators than they'd like to admit. (Rabin)

The Fall

Tarsem Singh's mad labor of love only gets better on subsequent viewings. The backstory is crazy—it was shot in more than a dozen countries, piggybacking on Tarsem's commercial shoots, and made with a star (Lee Pace) who spent weeks living life as a paraplegic to provide verisimilitude for his 6-year-old co-star Catinca Untaru, a Romanian girl who barely spoke English and thought she was shooting a documentary, or conversing with Pace in private, away from the well-hidden cameras. The film itself is an equally crazy blend of high-toned, gorgeously rendered fairy tale and vivid melodrama about a hospitalized stuntman befriending a child in order to force her help with his suicide. On first viewing, it comes across as a gloriously ambitious mess of craft, contrivance, and unashamed pretension, but it's worth watching over and over, not just for the preposterously beautiful cinematography and settings, but for the way Pace and Untaru's performances gradually reveal themselves as sweet, tender, and admirably real. (Robinson)

Funny Games

A movie so nice, he made it twice, Michael Haneke's nearly shot-for-shot English-language remake of his 1997 Austrian provocation has to rank among the most perverse undertakings in recent memory. The original film agitated quite a few critics at the time for using a relentless home-invasion thriller as a scolding treatise on film violence, and those same critics were equally agitated when he made the exact same movie again. But miraculously, Haneke pulls it off again in a new language and with a new cast, proving once again his unrivaled talent for sucking the oxygen right out of the theater. And by remaking the film in English, for an American audience, Haneke gives himself the opportunity to take his ideas about violence to the viewers he originally intended to reach. Funny Games punishes the audience for its casual bloodlust by giving them all the sickening mayhem they could possibly desire. Neat trick, that. (Tobias)

Individual Ballots

Individual Ballots

NOEL MURRAY

Top 10

1. WALL-E
2. Burn After Reading
3. Synecdoche, New York
4. 4 Months, 3 Weeks And 2 Days
5. The Dark Knight
6. Surfwise
7. Rachel Getting Married
8. Paranoid Park
9. Milk
10. My Winnipeg

The next five

In a strong year for documentaries, two offbeat issue docs stood out: Chris Bell's Bigger Stronger Faster* overcomes its Michael Moore-isms to become a remarkably probing, personal look at the culture of steroids, while Tony Gerber and Jesse Moss' Full Battle Rattle explores an Army war-simulation exercise that rivals Synecdoche, New York in its confusion of fake action and real reactions. In the oft-shoddy world of mainstream animation, Kung Fu Panda delivered a ridiculously entertaining martial-arts comedy that didn't skimp on the balletic action or the corny-but-sweet "follow your destiny" philosophizing. Joe Swanberg and Greta Gerwig's Nights And Weekends elevated "mumblecore" to a higher plane by actively criticizing the kind of passive-aggressive romantic gestures that their previous movies have fetishized. And Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler managed the neat trick of balancing earthy indie miserablism with a good-hearted, touching redemption story, all carried by the remarkable Mickey Rourke.

Performance

Mickey Rourke, The Wrestler

It's impossible to conceive of any other actor who could've played the role of a once-hot pro wrestler in steroid-addled decline as convincingly as Mickey Rourke, who clearly didn't need much makeup or mental preparation to get into this part. Even more impressive is how likeable Rourke is. His character in The Wrestler has been a heel in his personal life, but he's basically a good dude, beloved by everyone who doesn't have to follow him home to his drafty, lonely old trailer.

Overrated

Slumdog Millionaire

For all its kinetic style and emotional uplift, Slumdog Millionaire is a frustratingly one-note film, using its game-show framing device not as an opportunity to explore myriad accents of Indian poverty, but to tell one preposterous love story, propped up by contrivance upon contrivance. Director Danny Boyle can be somewhat excused for making a Bollywood-influenced "fairy tale," and he's to be commended for putting so much emphasis on garbage, shit, scars, and other signifiers of a hardscrabble life. But sheesh… that plot! Too many people recognize each other by voice or by sight after being separated for years; too many details of India's Who Wants To Be A Millionaire don't make sense; too many moustache-twirling bad guys complicate the hero's life for the sake of melodrama the movie doesn't need. Slumdog Millionaire has its charms, but in a way, its charms are part of the problem—the film seems to be trying too hard to make poverty relatable by equating rising out of poverty with a love that transcends all obstacles, or underdogs who beat the odds. The movie is rousing in all the wrong places.

Underrated

Hancock

Since it fell between the surprising Iron Man and the genre-redefining The Dark Knight on the '08 summer blockbuster calendar, the decidedly rattier Hancock came off as something of an also-ran, and the movie certainly didn't do itself any favors with a mid-film plot twist that throws its dominant theme out of whack. But in its own way—and for the first hour, especially—the offbeat, ground-level Hancock is pretty daring, using a moody, alcoholic superhero and his frazzled do-gooder PR man to register a puckish critique of how the public treats its heroes. It's a surprisingly personal film about the responsibilities of fame, directed by Peter Berg with a you-are-there approach that makes superheroics look grippingly real.

Most pleasant surprise

Iron Man

Robert Downey Jr. gave one of 2008's best performances as cocky-but-flawed, motor-mouthed playboy Tony Stark, a billionaire arms dealer who grows a conscience when he straps on a life-saving, super-powered suit of armor. Some of the big action sequences devolve into uninspired clanging and ray-shooting, but Iron Man soars whenever the hero soars, and does even better when Downey is on the ground and unsuited, bantering freely with Gwyneth Paltrow, Jeff Bridges, and Terrence Howard. This is the rare big-ticket superhero movie that gives its cast the space to do some actual acting, all while sporting fancy duds amid cool-looking sets.

Guilty pleasure

Australia

Baz Luhrmann promised to drop the aggressive artificiality of his "Red Curtain Trilogy" for his first real stab at an epic, but in trying to combine a Western, a war film, a Harlequin romance, a magical-realist fable, and a tongue-clucking piece of social history, he apparently couldn't help but fall back on camp. And no wonder: the individual elements of Australia are too flat and bold to really work. Combined, though—and topped with game performances by Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman—this audacious genre-mash is pure escapist entertainment. And Kidman delivers one of the year's comic highlights when she tries to sing "Over The Rainbow," forgets the words, and keeps belting it out anyway. That moment alone earns Australia a lot of goodwill.

Future Film That Time Forgot

The Hottie & The Nottie

When early-21st-century pop-culture historians look back at the career of half-lidded, frozen-faced no-talent Paris Hilton, they will study The Hottie & The Nottie for signs of why Hilton was so famous. And as they suffer through the story of a hairy, dentally challenged girl who wins the heart of a shallow schlub by making some obvious cosmetic changes—changes that her image-conscious best friend Hilton never bothered to suggest in all their years as pals—those historians will be every bit as confounded by Hilton's popularity as we are today. So that's reassuring.

Individual Ballots

KEITH PHIPPS

Top 10

1. Rachel Getting Married
2. WALL-E
3. Wendy And Lucy
4. Ché
5. The Dark Knight
6. Milk
7. Vicky Cristina Barcelona
8. Reprise
9. Let The Right One In
10. Happy-Go-Lucky

The next five

Cloverfield arrived amid a sea of hype and the almost instantaneous backlash that hype creates, but looking past it revealed a horror movie perfectly suited for an America that's learned to live with the threat of chaos and destruction. But more personal journeys to the edge dominated some of the year's best films. Synecdoche, New York's self-referential games would have gotten the best of a less adept artist than Charlie Kaufman, whose directorial debut was simultaneously mind-bending and moving. Mickey Rourke found the perfect role as the down-and-out protagonist of The Wrestler, and the film—directed by a back-to-basics Darren Aronofsky and written by former Onion editor Robert Siegel—granted a Springsteen-esque dignity to his quest for respect and peace at the bottom. Paranoid Park (Gus Van Sant's other 2008 movie) and Martin McDonagh's assured debut In Bruges featured protagonists forced to find different means to reclaim their souls from the violent paths their lives have taken.

Performance

Benicio Del Toro, Ché

As the eponymous revolutionary of Steven Soderbergh's epic, Del Toro manages a powerful, understated performance. In his hands, Ché's charisma comes mostly from leading by example, and in keeping with the day-to-day approach of Soderbergh's film, that means many, many scenes in which he has to tend to the minute details of managing a revolution. It's a lived-in performance, short on showy moments and no less magnetic for it. Del Toro scarcely gets an introspective moment until the film's final scenes, but when that moment arrives, it beautifully sums up the accomplishments and doubts of an historical figure about whom the film refuses to draw any simple conclusions.

Overrated

Pineapple Express

This stoner comedy has its share of laughs and winning moments, but the combined talent of star and co-scripter Seth Rogen and arthouse-favorite director David Gordon Green could have produced something unforgettable. Instead, we got a movie with a few great moments surrounded by a steady stream of chuckles until a terrible action finale. The film's warm reception suggested that critics and audiences were watching the movie they expected to see instead of the one they got. Or they were stoned.

Underrated

My Blueberry Nights

Maybe Wong Kar-wai shouldn't have tried to go Hollywood with one of his signature expressions of loneliness and missed connections, but that doesn't explain the disastrous reception given to My Blueberry Nights, in which Norah Jones traipses across America in search of a love that will stick. It has its share of awkwardness, to be sure, but the outsiders' awe at the American landscape—and the essential Wongness at the film's core—make it well worth a look.

Biggest Surprise

Vicky Cristina Barcelona

Woody Allen making a great movie in 2008 was only a surprise to those who weren't awed by his alleged 2006 comeback Match Point. But surprising to everyone: Vicky Cristina Barcelona not only slipped through the misogynist knots Allen has been tied up in for years, but featured two of the most fully realized female characters of 2008.

Future Film That Time Forgot

Mad Money

Mad Money's premise about financially strapped Federal Reserve employees teaming up to siphon off some extra cash at least had prescience on its side when it landed with a thud in January. But mostly, the economic-downturn comedy proved that a triple-threat cast—Diane Keaton, Queen Latifah, and Katie Holmes—could make a film that's already been forgotten 12 months later. And that Holmes should never play a kooky rock 'n' roll chick again. Ever.

Individual Ballots

NATHAN RABIN

Top 10

1. Rachel Getting Married
2. The Dark Knight
3. Synecdoche, New York
4. WALL-E
5. Operation Filmmaker
6. Reprise
7. Stuck
8. The Wrestler
9. Happy-Go-Lucky
10. Milk

The next five

Pierce Brosnan's post-James Bond creative renaissance continued with a sly turn in the droll, twisty, surprisingly moving Eisenhower-era character study Married Life. Critically and commercially, 2008 was the year of The Dark Knight, but it was a damn good year for superhero movies in general: Jon Favreau's meticulous adaptation of Iron Man cemented Robert Downey Jr.'s remarkable comeback and dominated the early summer, but it was overshadowed by Dark Knight mania; so was Hellboy II: The Golden Army, Guillermo Del Toro's wildly imaginative, bigger, and better follow-up to his cult 2004 adaptation of Mike Mignola's comic book about a loveable demon and his war on evildoers. Playwright-turned-filmmaker Martin McDonaugh hid a big heart and a deep sentimental streak behind oceans of pulpy profanity and swaggering gangster attitude for In Bruges, a downbeat tale of hit men stuck in Belgium. Iraq-war movie fatigue kicked in hard last year, but Errol Morris' Standard Operating Procedure, a bleakly funny, revelatory exploration of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, proved it was possible to find a new, vital angle on the lingering nightmare of our military misadventure in the Middle East.

Performance

Bill Irwin, Rachel Getting Married

Anne Hathaway scrubbed away multiple layers of Disney gloss as a drug addict tentatively re-entering polite society during a furlough from rehab to attend her sister's wedding in Rachel Getting Married. She walked away with the best reviews of her career. Hathaway and Rosemarie DeWitt's rightfully acclaimed performances have unfortunately overshadowed the equally powerful performance of Bill Irwin as a good father trying mightily to maintain a fragile peace between his daughters amid the high spirits and intense emotions of the titular wedding.

Overrated

Kung Fu Panda

After a stellar start, this crazily overhyped DreamWorks animated hit eventually becomes yet another star-strangled cartoon about loveable anthropomorphic animals learning important life lessons about believing in themselves and following their dreams. It's a good example of that ubiquitous subgenre, but it seldom transcends formula. The difference between, say, WALL-E and Kung Fu Panda is the gulf between timeless art and pretty good entertainment.

Underrated

Be Kind Rewind

Audiences and critics alike found the irresistible fantasy at the core of Michel Gondry's Be Kind Rewind—what if you could skip directly from loving movies to making them, without hitting any stages in between?—pretty damned easy to resist. Gondry's whimsical comedy about video-store clerks (Jack Black and Mos Def) who decide to make their own versions of hit movies bombed at the box office and didn't do much better with critical types, even though it's a lovely, lyrical, funny, crazily inventive, and ultimately touching elegy for the brick-and-mortar video store and the sense of community it engenders.

Most pleasant surprise

Tropic Thunder

Good comedies tend to be like good point guards: scrappy, fast, low to the ground, and quick on their feet. Ben Stiller's elephantine blockbuster comedy Tropic Thunder, on the other hand, was more like a center. Yet instead of becoming our generation's 1941, Tropic Thunder eluded the Curse Of Bigness by epitomizing Hollywood excess while savagely spoofing it. An uncharacteristically funny Stiller, who also co-wrote and directed, led a star-studded cast in the ribald tale of Hollywood actors who mix it up with actual bad guys during a movie shoot gone horribly awry. Stiller is upstaged at every turn by Robert Downey Jr. as a Russell Crowe-like Method actor who takes his job way too seriously, Jack Black as a junkie laugh whore, and Tom Cruise in a career-revitalizing supporting role as a venal executive reportedly based on Cruise's arch-nemesis Sumner Redstone.

Guilty pleasure

OSS 117: Cairo, Nest Of Spies

This delightful, retro-stylized French romp sets itself apart from other campy spy spoofs by focusing its satire on the exquisitely condescending imperialist views of its hero, an obliviously racist French agent (Jean Dujardin) who bungles his way to glory in 1950s Egypt. The filmmakers have their cake and eat it too, offering spy movie aficionados the sexy girls, dashing guys, international mischief, and hilariously fake rear-projection shots they crave while simultaneously spoofing the boorishness and cultural paternalism of James Bond and his reactionary ilk.

Future Film That Time Forgot

Adam Resurrected

Like many Films That Time Forgot, Paul Schrader's singularly bizarre Adam Resurrected sounds like it couldn't possibly exist. After all, what market is there for a magical-realist comedy-drama with surrealistic trappings about a brilliant, psychically gifted Jewish clown (Jeff Goldblum) who survives the Holocaust by living as the pet dog of Nazi concentration-camp officer Willem Dafoe? Yet in spite of deafening echoes of Jerry Lewis' The Day The Clown Cried, Resurrected somehow succeeds through chutzpah, ambition, the purity of its vision, and Goldblum's hypnotic lead performance.

Individual Ballots

TASHA ROBINSON

Top 10The Fall
2. WALL-E
3. Man On Wire
4. Redbelt
5. Synecdoche, New York
6. Cloverfield
7. Surfwise
8. The Reader
9. The Edge Of Heaven
10. The Pool

The next five

Tony Gerber and Jesse Moss' good-humored Full Battle Rattle feels like the first Iraq doc that's more interested in what the Army is doing right than what it's doing wrong. It's compelling in its peek at a Mohave training center where Iraqi-Americans role-play as inhabitants of a troublesome Iraqi town, but it's just as compelling in its lack of political agenda or scolding messages. One of the year's biggest surprises came from In Bruges, a crime dramedy that looked like warmed-over Guy Ritchie, and turned out to be funnier, sharper, and better-acted on all counts, particularly in the tight script and the performances by Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson. Gus Van Sant's Milk was a high-profile return to prestige-pic form for a filmmaker who's been dallying in lo-fi land for close to a decade, but solid structure and winning performances make it more effective than the usual bland prestige fare. The complicated, savage French noir Tell No One toured film fests for two years before finally making a low-key arthouse splash in 2008; hopefully a 2009 DVD release will let more people in on its sharp turns and compelling secrets. And in another year of angry, frustrated political advocacy docs, Alex Gibney's slick Taxi To The Dark Side was perhaps the best-researched, most journalistic, and most ambitious in terms of contextualizing torture-as-standard-policy at Abu Ghraib and in Afghanistan; his meticulous document lays out a compelling case against the "few bad apples" defense.

Performance

Chiwetel Ejiofor, Redbelt

David Mamet's portrait of a small-time martial-arts instructor struggling to keep his pride, honor, and philosophy intact has a lot to recommend it, including a killer plot and some hilarious scenes. But it all rides on the capable shoulders of Chiwetel Ejiofor as that instructor, a deeply complicated, internal man who's so well portrayed that he doesn't have to keep explaining his feelings. Ejiofor struggles in the early going with Mamet's as-usual painfully idiosyncratic dialogue, but he never fails to bring across his besieged character as a nuanced, sensitive, noble man in a frustratingly ignoble world.

Overrated

The Dark Knight

Sure, fine, it's entertaining. But the number-four film of all time, according to IMDb voters? For a 152-minute action film that crams in subplots as if trying to bash viewers into dazed acceptance, goes over the top at almost every turn, and loses Batman's personality almost entirely under the weight of repeated "Maybe I should quit being Batman now! No? How about now, then?" subplots? Seriously, the number-four film of all time? At that rate, The Dark Knight could have gotten half the acclaim, and it'd still be overrated.

Underrated

Mister Lonely

Harmony Korine's return to filmmaking after an eight-year absence rightly took a lot of critical flak for being more imagistic than thoughtful, but writing it off for that reason means ignoring how lyrical and lovely it actually is. Given Korine's previous obsession with profound visual and personal ugliness (in Gummo and Julien Donkey-Boy), Mister Lonely was a surprise: a sometimes sweet, sometimes sorrowful dream of strange, fragile outcasts and weird juxtapositions. Fans of David Lynch's brand of surrealism should be tuning in by the score.

Most pleasant surprise

Seven Pounds

While it takes a distinct second place to Hancock in the realm of 2008 Will Smith vehicles that looked pretty bad and exceeded expectations on all counts, Seven Pounds still holds its own reasonably well: It's a dread-filled drama that plays like a mystery, but still holds rewards for audience members who figure out the whole plot early on. Smith plays a man on a mission to judge, then potentially help a group of strangers, for reasons alluded to but not spelled out until the end; it's hard to say more without robbing the film of its stately momentum, as Smith's behavior becomes increasingly erratic in ways that play with the conventions of romantic comedies. It isn't a list contender, but it's far better than it has any right to be, largely because it so carefully navigates between clichés and cheap gimmicks in pursuit of doing a respectable job with its larger gimmick.

Guilty pleasure

Death Race

Jason Statham has rapidly become the new Vin Diesel: a mookish slab of meat who rarely cracks anything but the wryest of smiles, and who all but ensures a guilty-pleasure good time. The 2008 remake of 1975's Death Race 2000 (itself a campy, cheesy pleasure at best) is pure high-octane cinematic trash, yet another hypocritical Internet-age film that lectures viewers about the terrible outgrowths of their cheap, seedy voyeurism, while simultaneously pandering to their basest natures. Oh, it's also a rip-roarin' good time, thanks to Statham's play-it-straight performance, some wink-wink references to the original film, and especially Joan Allen's splendidly self-aware performance as the foul-mouthed, ball-busting prison warden who makes her inmates race to the death as pay-per-view entertainment. She's having so much fun that viewers almost have to, too.

Future Film That Time Forgot

War, Inc.

2008's answer to Southland Tales was War, Inc., an equally messy, thematically chaotic would-be satirical take on American consumerism and the country's for-profit adventures abroad. It has all the stuff of a good FTTF: a bafflingly high-powered cast (John and Joan Cusack, Ben Kingsley, Marisa Tomei, Dan Aykroyd, and Hilary Duff as the sluttiest of pop-tarts), a number of insane setpieces that sound unbelievable when described (a kickline of amputees, showing off their American-made prosthetics for the benefit of cynical trade-show shoppers?), and a muddled attempt to be au courant by tackling issues that were dated before the film hit theaters. It's trying to be funny, cutting, and angry, but it mostly comes across as sulky and obscenely pleased with itself.

Individual Ballots

SCOTT TOBIAS

Top 10

1. Rachel Getting Married
2. WALL-E
3. 4 Months, 3 Weeks And 2 Days
4. Standard Operating Procedure
5. Paranoid Park
6. Man On Wire
7. Funny Games
8. Wendy And Lucy
9. The Dark Knight
10. Stuck

The next five

Charlie Kaufman's first foray into directing, Synecdoche, New York, gets lost inside the catacombs of his head, but it's a strange and often wondrous place to explore. By hiring offbeat indie filmmaker David Gordon Green to make the stoner action-comedy Pineapple Express, the Judd Apatow comedy machine finally imported some visual panache and the right shaggy-dog vibe. The underrated home-invasion thriller The Strangers gets the horror fundamentals right, with some masterful framing and atmosphere-building, especially in the first half. Lance Hammer's Ballast was far and away the most promising debut feature of 2008, a precise, quietly optimistic look at a reconstituted family on the Mississippi Delta. Family ties also play a major role in Fatih Akin's The Edge Of Heaven, an "everything is connected" drama to put the likes of Paul Haggis and Alejandro González Iñárritu to shame.

Performance

Anamaria Marinca, 4 Months, 3 Weeks And 2 Days

Playing a young woman who seeks an illegal abortion on her roommate's behalf in Communist Romania, Marinca lets her face reflect the high-stakes urgency of an ordeal that's as harrowing as the back-room procedure itself. As her character scrapes the money together, makes arrangements with the suspicious staff at a hotel, and negotiates with a shady abortionist, Marinca suggests several conflicting emotions: Stolid courage and resourcefulness, gnawing tension and paranoia, and a blinding fear that threatens to shatter her resolve. The suspense of 4 Months, 3 Weeks And 2 Days is wholly reliant on Marinca's ability to be the audience's surrogate in that situation, and she carries us through it with heart-stopping guile.

Overrated

Waltz With Bashir

The concept of an animated documentary—much less one as serious as an inquiry into mass murder in the 1982 Lebanon War—was enough to win Israeli director Ari Folman a competition slot at Cannes and plenty of raves for its audacity and originality. But were the film not (blandly) animated, would anyone really care about it? Folman's driving conceit smacks of contrivance, following a filmmaker who tries to fill in a gap in his memory about a traumatic incident during the war, where he served as an Israeli soldier. The succession of interviews that follow calls to mind the musings of Richard Linklater's Waking Life, but without the flights of whimsy, philosophy, and academic wit. Only a dream sequence and a brief-but-startling cut to live-action resuscitate Folman's dreary slog.

Underrated

Standard Operating Procedure

For whatever reason, critics decided to gang up on Errol Morris' Abu Ghraib inquiry, and often for the very same cinematic techniques they praised him for innovating on films like The Thin Blue Line and Fast, Cheap & Out Of Control. Unlike the overpraised Taxi To The Dark Side, which fanned out from a prison death at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan into a broad overview of American torture, Standard Operating Procedure stays close to the rank-and-file grunts responsible for the infamous photos at Abu Ghraib. The tight focus, along with Morris' bag of visual tricks, brings the horrific conditions of the place to vivid life: the torment of being shelled by mortars night and day, the foul stench of decaying bodies and excrement, and the hauntings of atrocities past and present. And beyond all that, the film has volumes to say about photographs—what they hide, what they reveal, and how their true significance can be obscured.

Most pleasant surprise

The Last Mistress

It's not necessarily a surprise that Catherine Breillat made a good movie: Though the feminist provocateur has a spotty record—Romance and Anatomy Of Hell, to name two, don't live up to their shock value—she's made several probing and challenging films, including the cruel coming-of-age efforts 36 Fillette and Fat Girl, and the self-deprecating movie-movie Sex Is Comedy. No, what makes The Last Mistress such a surprise is that Breillat has departed from contemporary sexual mores for the first time and adapted a scandalous 19th-century novel about a virginal aristocrat, a notorious libertine, and the strong-willed woman who stands in the way of their union. All the Breillat power games are in play—and in Asia Argento, she's found the perfect muse—but they're swathed in impeccable costume and décor.

Guilty pleasure

Pathology

MGM barely released this outrageous medical thriller, but writers Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor—the team responsible for the adrenaline-fueled mayhem of the past guilty pleasure Crank—have again pulled out all the stops. Here's the irresistible premise: A team of hotshot medical student pathologists have an after-hours club that could be called Dead People's Society. They each take turns killing a random person in an elaborate fashion, bringing the body back to an abandoned hospital wing, and challenging the others to figure out the correct cause of death. It's like medical school with the freshest possible cadavers. Too bad somebody has to have a conscience, and that someone has to be played by the ultra-boring Milo Ventimiglia.

Future Film That Time Forgot

Over Her Dead Body

Decades from now—okay, maybe as soon as a few years—the Eva Longoria Parker story will be of interest only to pop-cultural archivists, who will wonder how a freakishly bronzed actress of limited ability managed to take the tabloids by storm. Sure, TV's Desperate Housewives was a hit, but outside of Wisteria Lane, Parker looks conspicuously like a fish out of water. Take Over Her Dead Body, the latest hunk of flotsam from her movie career: She plays a woman due to marry Paul Rudd, but the two couldn't be more mismatched, with Parker's henpecking Bridezilla a far cry from Rudd's usual don't-give-a-shit slacker. The bizarre pairing ends when she's crushed to death by an ice sculpture, but the supernatural comedy that follows is no more dignifying; in one scene, her ghost tries to turn Rudd's love interest off by making it sound like he's farting.