NATHAN RABIN
Top 10
1. Once
2. There Will Be Blood
3. Zodiac
4. No Country For Old Men
5. Ratatouille
6. Sweeney Todd
7. Atonement
8. The Savages
9. An Unreasonable Man
10. The TV Set
The Next Five
As seen in their ideal form, Grindhouse and Brand Upon The Brain weren't just films, they were rich, ambitious, deliriously fun experiences worth savoring. Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez's marathon homage to '70s exploitation cheapies—complete with scratched-up prints, missing reels, and hilarious fake trailers—disappeared when the Weinstein Brothers nervously split their respective entries into two separate DVDs. Guy Maddin turned his perverse silent comedy Brand Upon The Brain into a multimedia extravaganza with celebrity narrators, an orchestra, and live sound effects. Shaun of The Dead funsters Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg delivered another loving genre homage/spoof in the hilarious popcorn delight Hot Fuzz, while King Of Kong delved deep into the bizarre world of hardcore competitive video-game players for a crowd-pleaser with heart. That description also applies to Knocked Up, Judd Apatow's lovingly profane exploration of unplanned pregnancy and the tricky business of growing up.
Performance
Daniel Day Lewis, There Will Be Blood
"Larger than life" doesn't begin to do justice to Day Lewis' performance in There Will Be Blood. As in Gangs Of New York, Lewis plays a man so forceful and towering that he could probably wrestle a full-grown grizzly bear onscreen and have audiences worried primarily about the bear's safety. Playing a singularly nasty oilman who allows absolute power to corrupt absolutely, Lewis creates a devastating, unforgettable portrait of capitalism at its most transcendently evil.
Overrated
Transformers
Nobody expects great art from Michael Bay (Michael Bay included), but with $150 million to play with, Steven Spielberg as executive producer, and a premise involving an epic war between shape-shifting robots from outer space, it didn't seem irrational to expect his big-screen adaptation of Transformers to be, at the very least, dumb fun. Alas, the film is plenty dumb, but not much fun. True to form, Bay delivers another headache-inducing two-and-a-half hour contraption that artlessly fuses incoherent, frenetically edited action setpieces with humor that aims for the lowest common denominator. Yet audiences flocked to it, critics inexplicably gave it a pass, and after bombing big-time with The Island, cinematic antichrist Bay was frustratingly back on top again, proving that Hollywood is largely a reverse-meritocracy.
Underrated
The TV Set
What if red-hot success-magnet Judd Apatow (executive-) produced a great movie no one saw? Such was the case with Jake Kasdan's modest, pleasing satire of the groupthink and homogenization that makes television such a vast wasteland. A wry David Duchovny channels Apatow's slouchy smartass persona as a struggling television producer who watches his smart, heartfelt labor of love devolve into a shrill, impersonal schlockfest. What follows is a scathing take on the poisonous necessity of compromise, with a bitterly ironic ending that illustrates how sometimes a television show's pick-up can double as a profound spiritual and creative defeat for its creator.
Most Pleasant Surprise
The Year Of The Dog
There's a fine line separating "quirky" from "insufferable," and writer-director and character actor Mike White regularly transgressed it in his scripts for The Good Girl and Nacho Libre. The casting of Molly Shannon, the woman behind some of the most grating and obnoxious characters in Saturday Night Live history, in a rare lead role did little to raise expectations for his directorial debut. Yet The Year Of The Dog is a real sleeper, a minor-key character study that oozes sympathy for its misfit characters and imbues Shannon's quest for companionship, canine and otherwise, with humor and pathos. Peter Sarsgaard and John C. Reilly lend expert support as an androgynous animal lover and oblivious hunter respectively, but the film belongs to Shannon, who uncovers the melancholy heart of a character that easily could have come off as a human version of comic-strip fixture Cathy.
Guilty Pleasure
Bratz: The Movie
An infamous line of skanky dolls makes the jump to the big screen in a delirious camp oddity that already feels like a dated relic of a ridiculous bygone era. From producer/world-class schlockmeister Steven Paul, the man who behind such apexes of the cinematic art as Slapstick and Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2 comes the most unintentionally hilarious empowerment-through-slutty-clothing epic since Coyote Ugly, complete with shopping scenes up the ying-yang and an act-long plug for MTV's My Super Sweet Sixteen.
Future Film That Time Forgot
I Know Who Killed Me
Lindsay Lohan slalomed headlong into irrelevance this year with the one-two punch of Georgia Rule and this sordid little potboiler, which miscasts her as both a true-blue good girl and her sinister doppelgänger, a hard-luck stripper with a raging libido and a mouth like a sailor with Tourette's. The result plays like a lost Roger Corman cheapie from the late '60s, from its wooden dialogue and bare-bones production values to a loopy closing twist. Wrestling with clumsy prosthetics and a floridly melodramatic script, the once-respected Lohan sinks to the level of her material. Can a VH1 Celebreality show be far behind?
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