The Screengrab : screengrab top ten of 2008

Screengrab Presents: The Top Ten Movies Of 2008

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 18:00:00 GMT

The Screengrab has spoken...well, at least five of us (Phil Nugent, Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Leonard Pierce & Paul Clark, to be prezact) in a cluster of "Best Of" lists posted over the past few days...

...and now, using state-of-the-art bloggage technology, we have calculated the results of all those individual lists to bring you our official collective ranking of THE TOP TEN MOVIES OF 2008!

10. (TIE) HAPPY-GO-LUCKY/SILENT LIGHT/WENDY AND LUCY

9. MAN ON WIRE

8. YOUNG@HEART

7. A CHRISTMAS TALE

6. FROST/NIXON

5. MILK

4. THE DARK KNIGHT

3. WALL-E

2. RACHEL GETTING MARRIED

And, finally...

...drum roll...

1. SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK!!!!

The Individual Screengrab 2008 Top Ten Lists

Paul Clark
10.   Stuck
9.    Burn After Reading
8.    WALL-E
7.    The Dark Knight
6.    Man on Wire
4/5. A Christmas Tale and Rachel Getting Married
3.    The Duchess of Langeais
2.    Silent Light
1.    Synecdoche, New York

Leonard Pierce
10. MILK (Gus Van Sant, dir.)
9. BALLAST (Lance Hammer, dir.)
8. THE DARK KNIGHT (Christopher Nolan, dir.)
7. IL Y A LONGTEMPS QUE JE T'AIME (Phillipe Claudel, dir.)
6. MAN ON WIRE (James Marsh, dir.)
5. WALL*E (Andrew Stanton, dir.)
4. RACHEL GETTING MARRIED (Jonathan Demme, dir.)
3. CHE (Steven Soderbergh, dir.)
2. WENDY AND LUCY (Kelly Reichardt, dir.)
1. SYNECHDOCHE, NEW YORK (Charlie Kaufman, dir.)

Scott Von Doviak
10. NOT QUITE HOLLYWOOD
9. WELLNESS
8. IN SEARCH OF A MIDNIGHT KISS/NICK AND NORAH'S INFINITE PLAYLIST
7. FROST/NIXON
6. WALL-E
5. THE DARK KNIGHT
4. RACHEL GETTING MARRIED
3. ENCOUNTERS AT THE END OF THE WORLD
2. MILK
1. SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK

Andrew Osborne
1.   Young@Heart
2.   Happy-Go-Lucky
3.   Rachel Getting Married
4.   Frost/Nixon
5.   Milk
6.   The Wackness
7.   Full Battle Rattle
8.   Iron Man
9.   In Bruges
10. Vicky Cristina Barcelona

Phil Nugent
BEFORE I FORGET
CHOP SHOP
A CHRISTMAS TALE
THE CLASS
THE DARK KNIGHT
THE EDGE OF HEAVEN
THE ORDER OF MYTHS
THE SECRET OF THE GRAIN
SYNECDOCHE, NY
WALL-E

And now...onto Oscar predictions!

Paul Clark's Favorite Movies of 2008: Honorable Mentions

Paul Clark — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 18:00:00 GMT

In addition to my top 10, I’ve compiled a list of ten additional noteworthy films from this past year, which under other circumstances might have contended for the list proper. In alphabetical order (sort of):

A Girl Cut in Two/The Romance of Astrea and Celadon- like The Duchess of Langeais, two vital, albeit very different, new films from masters of the French New Wave. Wily Claude Chabrol’s Girl is a scathing comedy of manners that turns on a dime into a crime story, while Eric Rohmer’s Romance is an enchanting comedy/morality play. In both cases the filmmakers, both upwards of 75 years old, have made films that are more engaging and vibrant than most works by directors half their age.

Frozen River- a striking feature debut from Courtney Hunt, in which two hard-luck women seize upon an opportunity to make their lives better, even if it means stepping outside the law. Melissa Leo, always a dependable character actress, carries the story on her capable shoulders.

In Bruges- the trailer for Martin McDonough’s film advertised it as a laddish crime caper in the Guy Ritchie vein, but the film itself was much sadder and wiser, albeit with a lot of big laughs as well. Colin Farrell is looser and funnier than he’s ever been, and Brendan Gleeson will break your heart.

My Winnipeg- his frenzied imagination chock full of Oedipal traumas and classic movie ephemera, Guy Maddin makes some of the most infectious films around, and My Winnipeg is one of his best. Nice to see Ann Savage, immortal star of Detour, six decades down the line and deadlier than ever.

Note by Note: The Making of Steinway L1037- as a former piano student I’m admittedly biased, but no movie this year captivated me with its portrayal of pure process than Ben Niles’ documentary about the creation of a Steinway grand piano. This went largely unnoticed when it toured the country earlier this year, but hopefully it’ll find an audience on DVD.

Paranoid Park- 2008’s best Gus Van Sant movie wasn’t Milk but rather this film about a teenage skateboarder who accidentally kills a security guard. Assisted by an awkward yet completely convincing performance from newcomer Gabe Nevins, Van Sant conveys the alienation of teenage life far more successfully here than in 2003’s more-lauded Elephant.

Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind- John Gianvito’s film is the simplest film on this list, alternating shots of headstones of heroes of the American Left with shots of wind rustling through trees. Yet in many ways it’s also the most experimental, turning a memorial to activists past into an honest-to-goodness call to action, a rallying cry to those who wouldn’t have had them die in vain.

Speed Racer- the Wachowski Brothers’ irresistibly high-octane stab at a mega-budget kids’ movie is the candy-colored fever dream of a pair of guys reared on video games, comic books, Matchbox cars, Saturday morning cartoons, and the idea that ninjas make anything cooler. Is this why the vast majority of critics couldn’t quite get a handle on it? As Marty McFly once said, “I guess you guys aren’t ready for that yet. But your kids are gonna love it.”

Trouble the Water- for sheer scope, Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke was the defining cinematic statement on Hurricane Katrina, but for sheer you-are-there pull, this is an ideal companion piece. Tia Lessin and Carl Deal’s documentary is anchored by one of the year’s most compelling figures, an aspiring rapper named Kimberly Rivers Roberts, whose decision not only to weather the storm but to document it on video made this film, and all the understanding it provides, possible.

And finally, the year’s worst film…

Beverly Hills Chihuahua

My disdain for the Beverly Hills Chihuahua trailer has been well-documented here. Guess what? The movie’s even worse. What’s more, that damned trailer is an out-and-out lie, luring children to the theatre (dragging their parents kicking and screaming behind them) with the promise of full-scale CGI Chihuahua production numbers. Once they’ve bought the ticket, only then do they discover that there’s no singing and dancing to be found, replaced by the world’s laziest canine road movie, in which the spoiled princess Chihuahua voiced by Drew Barrymore gets lost in Mexico and has to find her way home, facing non-threatening yet nonetheless vague offensive stereotypes along the way. The worst part is that I actually found myself missing the scene from the trailer, and I wasn’t the only one, as evidenced by the seven-year-old who turned to me an hour in and asked me when the dogs were going to start singing. At least the trailer had some style to it, some desire to entertain, however misguided. How unfortunate that it all turned out to be a ploy designed to separate unsuspecting parents from their money while dumbing down their already undiscriminating children.

Paul Clark's Favorite Movies of 2008, Part 2

Paul Clark — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 17:30:00 GMT

And here’s my top five:

4/5. A Christmas Tale and Rachel Getting Married

I don’t normally “do” ties, but the latest films from Arnaud Desplechin and Jonathan Demme are so clearly spiritual cousins that I can’t bear to separate them here. The two films tell essentially the same story, in which a family’s festivities are beset by a ne’er-do-well relative who proceeds to stir up some long-percolating resentments in the process. Rachel Getting Married is the more emotionally accessible of the two, perhaps because of its wedding milieu- the arrangements are more or less set by the time Kym (a revelatory Anne Hathaway) arrives on the scene, and Kym needs her family too much to steamroll her sister’s marriage. And for all the trouble she causes, the final result is joyous, an infectious multi-cultural concoction of a wedding that has understandably created a longing in many marriage-minded audience members for a similar ceremony.

A Christmas Tale is a somewhat pricklier piece of work, in large part because it lacks the catharsis of Rachel. This is because Desplechin is far more interested in examining the conflicts between the family members (played by a stellar cast including Catherine Deneuve and Mathieu Amalric) than he is in resolving them. Desplechin realizes that family conflicts can rarely be pinned down to a single cause, and that years of letting these tensions simmer will only make them more pronounced, growing far out of proportion to whatever originally inspired them. But that doesn’t mean that the characters can’t try, and when one of the family members chooses to do the right thing for another, it doesn’t fix everything, but it’s a start.

3. The Duchess of Langeais

It’s gotten to the point where any new Jacques Rivette film is almost guaranteed a place on my yearly top 10 list. Yet even with my built-in love for Rivette’s work, The Duchess of Langeais stands taller than any film the master has made in over a decade. Working from a novel by Balzac (one of the novels that also inspired his mammoth Out 1), Rivette has fashioned an especially brittle tale of l’amour fou, one that’s all the more startling for being steeped in the mores of early 19th-century French society. Perhaps the most surprising thing about the doomed love affair between emotionally constipated general Guillaume Depardieu (another towering performance from an actor taken from us far too soon) and titular duchess Jeanne Balibar is that it’s all idealism, and that if not for the rigid rules of conduct that forbade impropriety, it might have been quickly resolved. Instead, the courtship spirals out of control until gamesmanship has given way to madness.

2. Silent Light

When I saw Carlos Reygadas’ debut feature Japon, I didn’t much care for the film itself, but I definitely recognized the filmmaker’s potential. Two films later, this potential has been fulfilled in Silent Light. Reining in his attention-grabbing tactics (unmotivated acts of violence, sex involving wrinkled and/or overweight people), he trains his visionary camera on a Mexican Mennonite community, and a betrayal that causes a rift in its natural order. From its glorious opening shot, Reygadas’ film contains one spellbinding sequence after another, and is almost certainly the year’s great directorial achievement- a film whose every frame attests to the protean gifts of the man whose vision made it possible.

1. Synecdoche, New York

Is Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut a film about a director who gets stuck up his own ass, or a film by a director stuck up his own ass? Audiences were sharply divided on the merits of Synecdoche, and indeed, it’s the sort of film that’s designed to provoke strong reactions in its viewers. But for me, no film of 2008 spoke more to the way we live now- not necessarily in the moment-to-moment telling of its story, but in the way it all plays out. In theatre director Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman), Kaufman has created a character who craves nothing less than to transcend his own existence by remaking the world in his image, and who among us hasn’t yearned to do the same? Yet for all his efforts, the scale of the project ends up swallowing him whole, and in the end reduces him to a bit player in his own creation.

Make no mistake, Synecdoche, New York is a movie that’s first and foremost about ideas. Yet for a film that stands so resolutely in opposition to traditional notions of entertainment, no movie this year has felt so alive to me, so full of possibility. Kaufman, already a masterful screenwriter, proves a skilled director as well, getting the most not only from his screenplay but from his cast as well. Hoffman’s better here than he’s been in ages, and he’s surrounded by a troupe of some of today’s most fascinating actresses, including Samantha Morton, Michelle Williams, Emily Watson, Dianne Wiest, and especially Catherine Keener as the anti-Caden, the wife who breaks free from Caden’s downward spiral by creating art that’s the exact opposite of her husband’s. Synecdoche certainly isn’t for everyone, but I expect that it’s a movie that we’ll still be passionately debating, arguing about, puzzling over, long after this year’s Oscar nominees have been relegated to the dustbin of movie history.

Paul Clark's Favorite Movies of 2008, Part 1

Paul Clark — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Having already put you folks through so many top 10 lists so far on this site, I’d say an introduction is pretty much unnecessary. So without further ado, let’s get started on my list of the best new films I saw from the year 2008, beginning with #10 and working our way up to #1:

10. Stuck

For all of my highfalutin’ airs, I’m still just as prone as anyone else to the charms of a good B-movie. And Stuart Gordon’s scruffy thriller- his best work in over two decades- definitely qualifies. Yet like so many of the best B-movie directors of the past, Gordon hides his social commentary in plain sight. Taking his cue from the curious case of Chante Mallard, Gordon has made a bleak, ground-level drama about the blinkered survival instinct that exists in our society, especially among the lower classes, and the ugliness that can result when our need to get ahead outweighs our tendencies toward empathy. Of course, such eggheaded concerns will have to wait until you’ve finished watching the film- you’ll be too busy wincing in almost unbearable sympathetic pain with Stephen Rea as he attempts to pry himself loose from the windshield, or cackling with glee at the priceless moment when our “heroine” (played by Mena Suvari) realizes she’s forgotten her cell phone in the car.

9. Burn After Reading

In the wake of the triumph of last year’s No Country for Old Men, any follow-up would be almost guaranteed to disappoint most viewers. But then, let’s not forget that a similar reaction faced the Coens’ follow up to Fargo. Time has of course been kind to The Big Lebowski, and I’m guessing that it’ll be just as kind to Burn, a movie that, for my money, takes just as pessimistic a view of human nature as No Country. That it manages to generate so much laughter- both in terms of quality and quantity- should count as some kind of miracle. Credit that famously caustic Coen humor, coupled with the game performances of a killer cast highlighted by the pompous boob John Malkovich, the vanity-free Frances McDormand, and especially Brad Pitt, the most lovable doofus to come along since, well, The Dude.

8. WALL*E

With their first five films, the geniuses at Pixar perfected the formula for top-notch family animation. But with The Incredibles, Ratatouille, and now their latest, they’ve exploded the formula and set out to create something altogether new. WALL*E is their boldest experiment yet, combining a sweet romance between two robots nine centuries into the future with a dystopian portrait of a human race that’s given itself over to its most gluttonous and pleasure-driven impulses, a more humanistic take on Idiocracy. That WALL*E never manages to find a way to satisfactorily merge these two halves is the only thing keeping the film from placing seven spots higher on the list. But as it stands, it’s a dazzling piece of work, the most thought-provoking movie yet from a studio that continues to reach for the stars.

7. The Dark Knight

Perhaps you’ve heard of this one? So much has been written about Christopher Nolan’s uber-blockbuster take on the Batman universe that it seems foolish to try to find a new angle on it. But while most reviews, essays, and think-pieces on the film have focused on how damn clever it is, the truth is that there’s no way The Dark Knight could’ve caught on like it did if there wasn’t a reason to care. For all of its politics, ruminations on evil, and injections of old-school game theory into the comic-book plot, The Dark Knight takes all of its characters and their problems seriously, so that when they’re forced to make decisions, they actually mean something rather than simply being a function of the plot. R.I.P. Heath Ledger, whose performance is so brilliant (and justly celebrated) that it’s all the more tragic to realize that he’ll never give another.

6. Man on Wire

Most Americans tend to think of the World Trade Center as the site of one of the most horrifying bits of public theatre ever witnessed by human eyes. But in 1974, the Twin Towers were the site of a spectacle that was no less breathtaking, and far more triumphant, than the events of 9/11. James Marsh’s documentary- the year’s best, to my eyes- re-creates Philippe Petit’s immortal tightrope walk between the towers as an elaborate heist, complete with months of planning and culminating in a literal high-wire act that resulted in the perpetrator’s arrest. Yet for all the uncomfortable associations that the WTC Towers conjure up in our minds, the primary emotion one takes from Man on Wire is awe, particularly awe at the breadth of human achievement, the idea that many men could get together and construct these monumental buildings, and that one crazed Frenchman could get the nutty idea that the space between them we meant to be crossed by him.

The Best of 2008: Leonard Pierce's Picks for the Best Movies of the Year, Part Two

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 19:45:00 GMT

5. WALL*E (Andrew Stanton, dir.)

Pixar has been on such a roll of late that if they were a single director, they’d be getting mention in the same breath as the golden age greats. But they’re not; they’re an aggregate of many clever, talented folks who make computer-generated cartoons that are at least partly intended for children. I’m not going to argue that this isn’t sometimes a weakness; in WALL*E, the environmental message only seems fitting and appropriate because I happen to agree with it, and the crypto-Objectivism in The Incredibles only bothered me because I don’t. But regardless of the heavy-handedness of the moral, it can’t be denied that WALL*E is flat out the most wonderful film of the year, hopeful and funny and romantic and bittersweet all at the same time, and wrapped up in a package so beautiful to look at you wonder why anyone ever questions the potential of CGI. And if this astounding motion picture spawned an obnoxious marketing empire, one can only shake one’s head and say “Damn kids don’t know how good they’ve got it.”

4. RACHEL GETTING MARRIED (Jonathan Demme, dir.)

If you ever want to flummox a music critic, ask him to describe one of his favorite new bands without comparing them to another band. Of course, Rachel Getting Married proves that the same can occasionally be said for movie critics: it seems impossible to talk about without referencing something else. It’s got the dysfunctional family dynamics of Il y a Longtemps Que Je T’aime; the comeback-kid story of The Wrestler; the hateful-misanthrope-as-vehicle-for-joyous-redemption jawn of a Wes Anderson film (only better) and the structure and form of the late Robert Altman’s best work (only different). With all of these elements at play, though, it never seems derivative of anything else, only reminiscent in the best possible way. In the end, Rachel Getting Married is its own film, familiar yet new and impressive, and carried along by some of the finest acting of the year, most especially from Anne Hathaway and Bill Irwin.

3. CHE (Steven Soderbergh, dir.)

Steven Soderbergh keeps on making great movies, and never the same one twice. His latest is getting lots of what child care experts call “good attention” and “bad attention”; it’s certain that Soderbergh intended it that way, with its rigid formal structure, back-spasm-inducing length, difficult tonal shifts, and…oh, yeah, it’s a biopic about one of the most controversial figures of the 20th century. It’s just as hard to figure out how much of the negative reception is due to political and moral judgment of the revolutionary Che Guevara as it is to figure out how much of the positive reception comes from those who valorize him, but taken purely as a movie, Che is hard to beat: it’s formally daring, adventurously directed, risk-taking, well-made, and held together by a powerful performance that shows its subject neither as a heroic rebel or a vicious murderer, but simply as a man so consumed by his cause that he didn’t know what else to do than keep fighting for it.

2. WENDY AND LUCY (Kelly Reichardt, dir.)

There have been a number of exceptionally well-done documentaries in recent years about ordinary people dangling from the precipice of financial ruin in economically uncertain times, but successful narrative films dealing with the same subject have been few and far between. That’s largely because it’s hard to approach the topic in fiction without becoming didactic, maudlin, or treacly – and those challenges are certainly, and perilously, evident in Kelly Reichardt’s story about a young woman in brutally limited circumstances who loses her beloved dog while pursuing a slender chance at a decent job. But the miraculous thing about Wendy and Lucy is that it toes that line from its first frame to its last without ever tumbling down and making a mess of itself. That’s a testament to the top-notch script, the surprisingly deep direction, and the beautiful performance by lead actress Michelle Williams. No one could ever have predicted that an heir to the Italian neo-realist tradition would emerge in 2008 from America’s Pacific Northwest; that it happened is one of the year’s greatest surprises.

1. SYNECHDOCHE, NEW YORK (Charlie Kaufman, dir.)

There are so many things that could have gone wrong with Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut. I first heard him talk about his desire to direct way back in 2004, when I interviewed him for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and when Synechdoche, New York was finally announced, I was full of dread. The video stores of America are choked with mediocre-to-bad movies by talented writers who decided what they really wanted to do was direct. I needn’t have worried: Synechdoche, New York is easily my favorite film of the year. Kaufman approached directing with the same meticulous, self-searching approach that he does writing, and the result is nothing short of astounding. The best movies, for me, are the ones that seem to completely rewire my head – that are so profound and well-crafted that they redefine my basic approach to their subject, form or content. Charlie Kaufman accomplishes that his first time out of the gate, and that’s the mark of a major talent.

ALMOST MADE IT: The Strangers, Doubt, Iron Man, The Wrestler, Bigger Stronger Faster*.

DIDN'T SEE THEM: Entre les Murs (The Class), Standard Operating Procedure, Lat den Ratte Komme In (Let the Right One In), Dear Zachary: A Letter To His Son About His Father, Trouble the Water, Full Battle Rattle, Le Voyage du Ballon Rouge (Flight of the Red Balloon).

PERFORMANCES OF THE YEAR: Mickey Rourke, The Wrestler; Bill Irwin, Rachel Getting Married; Kristin Scott Thomas, Il y a Longtemps Que Je T'aime; Viola Davis, Doubt.

MADE IN 2007, BUT GREAT IN 2008: 4 Luni 3 Saptamani si 2 Zile (4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days); Paranoid Park; My Winnipeg; Une Vielle Maitress (The Last Mistress); Auf der Anderen Seite (The Edge of Heaven); Encounters at the End of the World; Chop Shop.

OVERRATED: Waltz with Bashir; In Bruges; Happy-Go-Lucky; Slumdog Millionaire; Kung Fu Panda.

Click for Part One

The Best of 2008: Leonard Pierce's Picks for the Best Movies of the Year, Part One

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 19:00:00 GMT

2008 is already getting a rap as a bad year for filmmaking, which is entirely unfair -- it's merely a good year that has to contend with coming right after 2007, one of the greatest years in recent cinematic history. It's also the first year where I spent the entire year as a critic living in a city that seems allergic to art films; when it came time to compile my top tens, which no doubt reflect my current cultural circumstances, I found I had seen fewer of the most highly praised films of the year than in any recent memory. Putting this list together involved a lot of work on my part -- not the normal intellectual work of weighing the artistic merits of each movie and finding something to say about them, but the physical work of actually seeing the damn things, when a good half of them didn't play in my city. This is especially true of the 2008 end-of-year releases. But throught a combination of tactics, including but not limited to Netflix, filesharing, begging publicists for screeners, shuttling back and forth to Austin, and, in the case of my #1 pick, engaging in a quest that would, itself, make a pretty good movie, I managed to put together a list of my ten favorite films of the year. I don't know how you loyal readers will take it -- I know that I'm at odds with a few of my Screengrab colleagues on at least a couple of these -- but here I stand, in a year that ain't as bad as it seemed.

10. MILK (Gus Van Sant, dir.)

Three decades too late, but this is the year of Harvey Milk: the new album by an Athens-based band that bears the assassinated San Francisco supervisor’s name is one of the best of the year, as is Gus Van Sant’s biopic of the country’s first openly gay elected official. Noted by Van Sant as the first movie of his return to mainstream filmmaking, Milk has been criticized for taking a straightforward approach rather than showcasing the director’s more experimental side, but, like Spike Lee’s Malcolm X, it largely succeeds because it lets the flashy stylistic touches take a back seat to what is, after all, one of the most compelling political stories of the American century. Sean Penn is rightly getting props for his terrific performance as Harvey Milk; it’s a career-redeeming showing after nearly a decade of missteps. But no one should ignore the excellent supporting performance, especially those of James Franco as Milk’s partner Scott Smith and Josh Brolin as the tortured killer Dan White. Elegant, appealing, timely and persuasive without being preachy, Milk is one of the best biopics of recent vintage.

9. BALLAST (Lance Hammer, dir.)

Lance Hammer’s debut feature film Ballast is being widely proffered as proof that reports of independent film’s death have been greatly exaggerated. The indie scene was on the rocks this year, to be sure, but Ballast is a mighty convincing argument for its continued vitality. It deals quietly and hypnotically with the emotional paralysis into which a Mississippi family is thrown after one brother commits suicide, and its characters – played almost entirely by an amateur cast using improvised dialogue – are so real as to be astonishing. The performances by a batch of promising unknowns are halting, wandering, and unspectacular, because people rarely react to such an event in a spectacular way. Likewise, criticism of the film’s slow pace seem off the mark to me: the movie’s slow movement and stately grace (visually abetted by some incredible cinematography by Lol Crawley) recall Ozu, who was rarely subject to such carping. Ballast is a thing of dark, slow beauty.

8. THE DARK KNIGHT (Christopher Nolan, dir.)

The opinion of a million IMDB fanboys notwithstanding, The Dark Knight isn’t one of the greatest films ever made. Now that it’s available on DVD, its flaws are easy to catch on repeat viewings: too much of David S. Goyer’s heavy scriptwriting hand, a confused and uncentered role for Batman himself, and an ending that continues to make precious little sense. But, by the same token, its strengths are also mightily in evidence, ready for anyone to savor who thinks a big-screen action picture can’t also be a good movie: a number of near-perfect emotional moments, a riveting conjuration of a city caught in the grips of terror, and, of course, Heath Ledger’s absolutely electrifying performance as the Joker, one of the greatest screen villains in history. And, in the same way he used a pulp noir thriller as the framework for one of the most deeply philosophical mainstream movies ever in Memento, Nolan manages to take a superhero punch-‘em-up and turn it into one of the most profoundly political movies of the year.

7. IL Y A LONGTEMPS QUE JE T'AIME [I'VE LOVED YOU SO LONG] (Phillipe Claudel, dir.)

This French drama is, with Synechdoche, New York, one of two amazing films made this year by first-time directors who are better known for their writing. Phillipe Claudel, a well-respected screenwriter and novelist, has made a movie as small and controlled as Charlie Kaufman’s is ambitious and sprawling: it’s remarkably tight for a first effort, with none of the excess that often betrays a first effort. With not a single frame wasted, he brings us the story of Juliette Fontaine, a woman whose sister takes her into a distrusting – not to say dysfunctional – family after she has spent fifteen years in prison; Kristin Scott Thomas (who seems an entirely different actress, and a far superior one, in French than she is in English) plays her with an emotional and physical reticence that borders on exhaustion, and she’s perfectly complemented by Elsa Zylberstein as her loving, determined sister. It’s the best family drama in years, understated and nearly perfect at conveying its emotional complexities.

6. MAN ON WIRE (James Marsh, dir.)

The most compelling documentary of the year is based on an event so trivial it would be almost entirely forgotten if not for the existence of the movie: Phillipe Petit’s jaw-dropping, pointless, spectacular, and foolhardy tightrope walk between the two towers of the World Trade Center during its construction in 1974. Filmed by the director of Wisconsin Death Trip and using similar techniques (including some arbitrary, though skillful reenactments), Man On Wire brings us a movie about the WTC that has nothing to do with the terror attacks that brought it down – and yet which cannot escape comparison, with its images of bits of the towers in chaos (though from construction, not destruction), its central plot of a small group of schemers engaging in intricate planning to conquer them (though their motivation is art, not violence), and its unforgettable image of Petit suspended between the buildings, so eerily reminiscent of the shots of those who fell on September 11th. Petit did not fall; we know he did not, because we see and hear him from the movie’s first shots. The fact that it’s so fascinating to watch though we know he didn’t fall is a testament to its power as a film.

Click for Part Two

2008 Highlight Reel: The Top Twelve Screengrab Posts of the Year

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Compiling the weekly highlight reels here at the Screengrab is not such an arduous task, but putting together a year's worth of the finest in film bloggery was a considerably more formidable undertaking. Using a complicated points system akin to the BCS in college football, I have surveyed my fellow Screengrabbers, weighted the page views and reader comments, and come up with the following dirty dozen: the best of the year in Screengrab.

Top Ten Reasons The Dark Knight Isn't As Good As You Think It Is

Love it or hate, it's hard to deny The Dark Knight was the pop culture event of the year. Our man Osborne has some qualms.

Why So Serious? The Dark Knight in the Political World

Of course, as with any pop culture phenomenon in an election year, The Dark Knight was used to score political points, few of which made any sense to me.

Forgotten Films: The Oscar

Phil neatly dissects one of the all-time great so-bad-it’s-good movies, and apparently gets legendary author (and The Oscar screenwriter) Harlan Ellison to comment. (L.P.)

The Screengrab Presents: The Five Kinds of Twist Endings

Gwynne knows that, just as there are only seven kinds of stories, there are only five ways to make the endings of those stories totally blow your mind. (L.P.)

Classless Man in Voiceless Brawl

Leonard brings us the heartwarming tale of film critics engaging in a stimulating exchange of ideas.

When Good Directors Go Bad: The Dark Wind (1991, Errol Morris)

Paul focuses on the single fiction film made by one of the cinema’s all-time greatest documentarians – a movie so bad I wasn’t even aware that it existed. (L.P.)

The View through the View-Master: The Iron Giant

Hayden - or as we call him around Screengrab headquarters, "the breeder" - looks at the Brad Bird classic through the eyes of both child and Childs.

CGI Must Die: 5 Reasons Why

Andrew asks the musical question, "Why so much digital crap, Hollywood?"

Take Five: Crime and Pyunishment

Leonard evaluates the oeuvre of one of our most underrated schlockmeisters, Albert Pyun.

Five Reasons We Want Mad Max Back

Enough with Indy, Rocky and Rambo. It's time for our favorite road warrior to make a comeback.

Tom Cruise, at Midlife, with a Freaking Eyepatch

Phil prefers the later, loonier Cruise. Find out why.

Unwatchable: It's Pat

I had to include an Unwatchable on this list, and this one seemed to be a favorite.

(Special thanks to Leonard Pierce for an assist on the comments and to Phil Nugent for diligent research.)

2008 in Review: Scott Von Doviak's Top Ten (Part Two)

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 17:30:00 GMT

5. THE DARK KNIGHT

Yes, many of the things my esteemed colleague Andrew Osborne bitched about in his Dark Knight rant are true. I still stand by my original review: the first two-thirds of Christopher Nolan's bat-sequel is a sweeping, edge-of-your-seat superhero epic unlikely to be topped anytime soon, and if Heath Ledger's delirious Joker isn't the definitive take on the character, I still pity anyone who tries to follow it up.

4. RACHEL GETTING MARRIED

This one had a chance of ending up in my list of Top 10 Unwatchables of 2008. In the early going I found it disjointed and meandering, punctuated by bouts of shrillness. Something clicked about halfway through Jonathan Demme's naturalistic wedding ode, and suddenly it's as if I'm someone's date at Rachel's nuptials (if I get to pick, I'm there with the groom's sister). I may not know why Neil Young's "Unknown Legend" is the perfect song for Sidney to serenade his bride at the altar, but it really doesn't matter because it feels right - and while I'm vaguely aware that not everyone there is having a good time, I manage to enjoy myself immensely.

3. ENCOUNTERS AT THE END OF THE WORLD

Werner Herzog's latest documentary concerns the slightly off-kilter denizens of the McMurdo research station at the South Pole. The quirky real-life characters are worth knowing, but it's the underwater photography of Henry Kaiser that elevates the film into the realm of the otherworldly. The "deranged penguin" scene is perhaps the year's most haunting.

2. MILK

Complaining that Gus Van Sant has made a "conventional biopic" of openly gay San Francisco city supervisor Harvey Milk seems to be willfully missing the point. Sure, Van Sant could have filled the movie with endless tracking shots of Milk wandering the Castro (in the vein of Last Days) and we artsy-fartsy types might have eaten it up. Instead, the director did something far more subversive simply by slotting James Franco in the "conventional" role of the long-suffering wife. The picture couldn't be more timely, given California's latest exercise in anti-gay lawmaking, and Sean Penn hasn't seemed more human and endearing since...maybe ever.

1. SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK

Owen Gleiberman, kiss my ass.

THE NEXT TEN: Baghead, Burn After Reading, Chop Shop, Crawford, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, Full Battle Rattle, Let the Right One In, The Order of Myths, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, and the first hour of The Strangers.

NOT ON MY WATCH: Doubt, JCVD, Man on Wire, Slumdog Millionaire

Part One

2008 in Review: Scott Von Doviak's Top Ten (Part One)

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 17:00:00 GMT

This year I decided not to give any thought to putting together a perfectly balanced Top 10 list that would get me approving looks at cocktail parties I'll never be invited to anyway, and just sat down and banged out my list in ten minutes. And I proclaim myself satisfied with it, although as usual there are movies I never got to see before the deadline (I regret missing A Christmas Tale, Che, Revolutionary Road and Wendy and Lucy, and wonder why Shotgun Stories never arrived from Netflix, but I suspect that The Wrestler and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button had slim chances of making the final cut.) There's every chance that I'll look at this list a year from now and barely remember a few of the entries, but the fact that I was able to get not only a Top 10, but a perfectly respectable Next 10, speaks more highly of 2008 than I would have guessed.

10. NOT QUITE HOLLYWOOD

I'm sure I've banged the drum enough for this ridiculously entertaining documentary I caught at Fantastic Fest - it inspired the regular Ozsploitation feature, after all - but here's one more mention for the record. With any luck it will turn up in theaters or at least on IFC sometime in 2009.

9. WELLNESS

Another one I caught on the festival circuit, this time at SXSW. It remains to be seen whether Wellness will get any sort of theatrical release - in fact, it's a nominee for IFP Gotham's Best Undistributed Film award - so I'm not taking any chances. It's a 2008 movie as far as I'm concerned, and you can read my review here.

8. IN SEARCH OF A MIDNIGHT KISS/NICK AND NORAH'S INFINITE PLAYLIST

One of my favorite genres is the "up all night" movie, and here are two distinctive variations on that theme. Nick and Norah is the slick, mainstream version with recognizable stars and perhaps a shade too much self-regard for its own quirky New York hipness. But there's a sweet, funny movie lurking under the too-cool-for-you surface, with genuine comic chemistry between Michael Cera and find-of-the-year Kat Dennings and an able assist from secret weapon Ari Graynor as the adorable drunk blonde about town. Midnight Kiss is the lo-fi black-and-white L.A. version, and it accomplishes something I'd never have thought possible in transforming downtown Los Angeles into a lush, romantic dreamscape.

7. FROST/NIXON

Ron Howard does his best directing by simply getting out of the way and letting two seasoned pros do their thing with the material they've been doing it with (Peter Morgan's play) for years. I expound at greater length here.

6. WALL-E

When I saw WALL-E in the theater, I was surprised and pleased to find the younger kids in the audience entranced by the nearly-silent opening half-hour, a dreamy evocation of ultimate loneliness (admittedly one livened up by inventive slapstick). For some, what follows is something of a letdown, but in my world a fat cartoon Jeff Garlin tooling around a dazzling mall-in-space is never a disappointment.

Part Two

Andrew Osborne's Top Ten Movies of 2008 (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 22:46:00 GMT

6. THE WACKNESS

Thoughtful, well-made coming-of-age stories are usually popular, and weed has been making a cinematic comeback lately, so I’m not exactly sure why The Wackness in general and Josh Peck’s charming turn as wistful pot dealer Luke Shapiro didn’t make more of a splash in 2008. Writer/director Jonathan Levine’s evocation of Manhattan circa 1994 feels as specific and lived-in as Ben Braddock’s Pasadena or Lloyd Dobler’s Washington suburb, and it’s hard to think of a better first-love interest than Olivia Thirlby. I posted a full review of the movie back in June when it first charmed me at the Provincetown Film Festival, so rather than repeat all that praise, I’ll just paraphrase Thirlby’s character and say the film wound up on my Top Ten because, in a difficult year, it reminded me to look at the dopeness and not just the wackness.

7. FULL BATTLE RATTLE

Full Battle Rattle is a documentary by Jesse Moss and Tony Gerber about a simulated Iraqi province in California’s Mojave desert, populated by Iraqi-American citizens and U.S. Army “insurgents” in a full-immersion training scenario where soldiers practice both their combat and diplomacy skills before heading off to the real war in Iraq. At first, it’s funny to watch battles interrupted by visits from the ice cream man as the military combines role-playing and stagecraft to create what seems like a strange, gorey theme park or game show (complete with graphically wounded mannequin “casualties,” designed to prepare fledgling medics for the realities of war). But it’s those harsh realities waiting for the participants beyond all the play-acting that provide the film with its emotional core, as we come to know the various players, including an Iraqi immigrant terrified of being deported and an American combat vet who admits, tellingly, that after returning from a tour of duty, it takes him several days to start viewing his Iraqi colleagues as people again (as opposed to potential enemies). By the time the simulation ends and the soldiers we’ve come to know say goodbye to their families and ship out to an uncertain future, the lady next to me in the movie theater was openly weeping, and there seemed to be something in my eye as well.

8. IRON MAN

I’ve gone on record about my utter bafflement over the messianic fervor surrounding The Dark Knight, a good but occasionally clunky superhero movie featuring an entertaining performance by a talented actor who died far too young. But I still don’t see why Heath Ledger’s Brad Dourif-ian performance as The Joker is considered groundbreaking or revelatory: compare its evocation of evil to Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet and then get back to me. And I’m still not really sure why Batman’s deliberations over civil liberties vs. public safety are especially more profound than Iron Man’s growing awareness of the consequences of war profiteering, except that Jon Favreau’s comic book adaptation takes itself far less seriously while delivering its tightly paced (but not over-written) action payload. Robert Downey Jr.’s performance is nowhere near as flashy or iconic as Ledger’s, of course – a typical downside of playing the good guy – but it’s miles ahead of Christian Bale’s stiff-in-a-suit Caped Crusader. Downey is fun and fascinating to watch, infusing a potentially one-dimensional role with the gravity and humanity of hard-won experience, as well as the humility of a man all too aware he could very easily have shared Ledger’s fate.

9. IN BRUGES

Who is this incredibly engaging, charismatic actor named Colin Farrell, and why haven’t I seen him on the big screen before now? Oh, sure, I’m familiar with his doppelganger: that brooding, constipated Irish guy with the same name who kept threatening to be the next big thing for several years, but never quite arrived thanks to performances in a succession of mezzo-mezzo movies that never quite connected with audiences. But the Farrell who plays the guilt-ridden hit man Ray in Martin McDonagh’s funny, suspenseful crime drama In Bruges is a true movie star, well-paired with Brendan Gleeson as the soulful mentor waiting for the other shoe to drop in the titular Belgian town after a botched assignment brings down the wrath of crime boss Ralph Fiennes (who likewise has never been quite so compelling on screen). The beautiful but claustrophobic confines of the distinctive setting and the pervasive undertow of regret gives Bruges a richer flavor than, say, a fun but ultimately disposable Guy Ritchie offering like RockNRolla, even if McDonagh’s film isn’t ultimately all that much more than the sum of its high quality parts.

10. VICKY CRISTINA BARCELONA

Until three seconds ago, I was planning to include Slumdog Millionaire in the final slot of this list, if only for the energy and scope of Danny Boyle’s storytelling mojo. But as I started to think and write about it, I realized the film as a whole simply left me cold. On the other hand, there was no lack of heat in Woody Allen’s latest comeback film, which is possibly why I have warmer memories of it. Penelope Cruz's performance as the hot-blooded trois in the ménage between Scarlett Johansson’s feckless American tourist and Javier Bardem’s Spanish art stud is probably better than the movie itself, but Allen still has some interesting things to say about the chimerical nature of love, the conflicting desires of the brain, heart and libido and the way smart people consistently outsmart themselves by refusing to acknowledge what they really want, even when they somehow manage to find it. (And, of course, the fact the movie unfolds against a backdrop of gorgeous Spanish locations doesn’t hurt, either.)

Honorable Mention: Wellness, Goliath, Turn the River, American Teen, Pineapple Express, Tropic Thunder, Tell No One, Ghost Town, Burn After Reading, The Bank Job, RockNRolla, Role Models, Quantum of Solace, Slumdog Millionaire, Doubt

Worst Movies I Actually Saw:
Patti Smith: Dream of Life, Indiana Jones & The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, What Just Happened?

Worst Movie I Didn’t See:
An American Carol

Most Overrated:
The Dark Knight (see above)

Most Overcriticized:
The Happening

Respected More Than Liked:
Synechdoche

TOP TV:
The Wire
Mad Men
The Amazing Race
The Daily Show & The Colbert Report
Survivor: Micronesia & Gabon
Breaking Bad
The Soup
Everybody Hates Chris
Recount
Generation Kill
Project Runway
True Blood

2008 SOUNDTRACK
“No One” – Alicia Keyes
“Pretty Blue” – Moonflower
“Paper Planes” – M.I.A.
“Wichita Lineman” – Glen Campbell
“Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It)” – Beyonce
“Sex Changes” – The Dresden Dolls
“Shoot the Runner” – Kasabian
“Still Alive” – GLaDOS
“Sax Rohmer, Pt. 1” – The Mountain Goats
“M79” – Vampire Weekend
“I Am Commando” – The NorthAtom
“I’m Good. I’m Gone” – Lykke Li
“Belleville Rendezvous” – The Triplets of Belleville (Soundtrack)
“Happy Days Are Here Again” – Barbara Streisand

Click Here For Part One

Andrew Osborne's Top Ten Movies of 2008 (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 21:47:00 GMT

So, by the end of first quarter 2008, I’d seen exactly one memorably list-worthy movie (see #7) and figured it was just gonna be one of those low tide kinda years after a pretty strong 2007 (Knocked Up, Juno, The King of Kong, Gone Baby Gone, Hell On Wheels, Zodiac, 2 Days In Paris, etcetera). And yet, looking back over the past twelve months, I have to admit, to paraphrase Charlie Brown, it wasn’t such a bad little tree, with a lot of perfectly enjoyable (if not terribly memorable) films, as well as a number of...

WILDCARDS: (potentially list-worthy movies unseen by moi in 2008): Man On Wire, Encounters at the End of the World, Waltz with Bashir, Trouble the Water, Let the Right One In, Revolutionary Road, Gran Torino

And now, the Top 10 I did see...

1. YOUNG@HEART

Usually, the top of my Top Ten list is something I’d be happy to watch again at the drop of a hat, but I suspect I’ll never, ever sit through Young@Heart again: the first time was wrenching (and memorable) enough. My wife and I saw the film at the Harvard Square Loews with my Dad, who’s been in AARP territory for quite a while now, and a theater half full of strangers. For the first thirty minutes or so, Stephen Walker’s documentary about feisty senior citizens singing ironic hipster doofus perennials like “I Wanna Be Sedated” and “Staying Alive” was a hoot...and then the first lovable oldster died. And then another, and another, like some horror movie of age we’re all trapped in, and suddenly every single person in the theater was getting smacked right in the kisser with the harsh realities of mortality, and nearly all of us were openly sobbing. Yet for all that, the film is never mawkish: the chorus members are presented as a platoon of happy warriors, singing at the top of their lungs as they march into the shadow of the valley of death, fighting tooth and nail for every last drop of joy they can squeeze out of life, even as their comrades fall around them. As I said before in my 2008 half-time wrap-up, I try not to judge people based on their personal tastes when it comes to movies, but if you can sit through the Young@Heartster’s performance of Coldplay’s “Fix You” (punctuated by the rasp and click of the soloist’s respirator) without a lump in your throat, you may need to check your own pulse.

2. HAPPY-GO-LUCKY

While not as powerful or memorable as Young@Heart, Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky was an equally heartfelt (and far less harrowing) film-going experience, with a similar theme (not to mention a timely one, given the world’s collective George W. Bush hangover): get busy living or get busy dying. Yes, life can be tough and full of injustice and, yes, it’s easy to be aloof and snarky and negative about it, but whether or not that makes anything better (for yourself or anyone else) is the question Leigh tackles here. Underpaid elementary school teacher Poppy (the infectiously great Sally Hawkins) is a relentlessly cheery optimist, the sort of person easily dismissed as a shallow, annoying bubblehead...in fact, one guy I know found the character so irritating he ditched the film after fifteen minutes. But then Poppy encounters her polar opposite, a seething mass of bitterness (embodied in a visceral performance by Eddie Marsan) whose dismal, head-full-of-spiders malevolence provides the necessary contrast to show the true strength and value of Hawkins’ irrepressible sunbeam, raising questions (and suspense) about which of the two worldviews will ultimately triumph.

3. RACHEL GETTING MARRIED

Like my fellow Screengrabber Scott Von Doviak, I didn’t expect this Jonathan Demme curiosity to wind up on my Best of 2008 list. Watching it the first time, it seemed unfocused and self-indulgent with its meandering Altman-wannabe pace, its self-consciously eccentric diversity and its melodramatic Lifetime-esque family drama. Yet because of its unusual construction, Rachel Getting Married feels now like a memory of an actual wedding I attended rather than just a movie I watched, adding extra punch to my recollections of the infrequent but correspondingly vivid moments of drama like the blistering showdown between Anne Hathaway’s loose cannon recovering addict Kym (a.k.a. Shiva the Destroyer) and her mother (Debra Winger...damn!) –- though even if Demme hadn’t gotten all artsy with the structure, Hathaway’s mesmerizing performance alone would have been worth the price of admission.

4. FROST/NIXON

Ron Howard’s cinematic adaptation of the acclaimed Peter Morgan play is what I call a “guys-in-suits” movie (one of my favorite genres) where formidable, top-level professionals like Howard, Morgan, Frank Langella (recreating his Tony-winning stage performance as Nixon) and the reliably great Michael Sheen (as Frost) focus their collective talents on a film about formidable, top-level professionals (like the real Frost and Nixon), sparring and strategizing and walking quickly down hallways and corridors rattling off witty bon mots and dense bits of jargon in the midst of high-stakes negotiations and race-against-time showdowns. Some critics have noted the actual historic impact of the Frost/Nixon interviews wasn’t really all that monumental, but the film charts high on my list as an entertaining poker tournament between two fascinating characters (with extra points for Toby Jones’ hilarious cameo as super-agent Swifty Lazar).

5. MILK

Sometimes timing is everything. In twenty years, critics will still be praising Sean Penn’s amazing transformation from scowling, self-important killjoy movie star into sweet, gawky force-of-nature gay activist Harvey Milk, but hopefully by 2028 this film will seem like just another well-made but otherwise run-of-the-mill “issue” film about an issue that’s no longer really an issue. But here in 2008, in the wake of the Proposition 8 disgrace, Milk is still, sadly, very much of the moment, and even for some progressives, the casual man-on-man kissing and romance between Penn’s character and his lovers (James Franco and Diego Luna) is a rare enough sight to give pause. From a historical standpoint, I was horrified to learn that Dan White (well captured by Josh Brolin in a chilling “mundanity of evil” performance) could murder Harvey Milk and the freakin’ mayor of a major American city in cold blood and get just seven years in prison on a manslaughter rap...that fact, combined with the anti-gay slanders of the McCain/Palin campaign (and, really, every Republican campaign in recent memory), the controversy over Obama’s selection of Rick Warren to give the invocation at his inaugural and the sense of communion at the packed house screenings of Milk during its opening weekend are just some of the reasons Gus Van Sant’s good movie feels like such a great and important one now.

Click Here For Part Two

2008 in Review: Phil Nugent's Top Ten

Phil Nugent — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 16:00:00 GMT

BEFORE I FORGET: Writer-director-star's Jacques Nolot's measured, surprisingly affecting portrait of an aging gay hustler whose friends are dying off (as he himself enters his twenty-fourth year of being HIV-positive) and who lives in fear of losing the very memories that he's become mired in. A dry-eyed yet very moving experience, this French film arrived in theaters here in late summer and attracted about as much attention as most films do when they're not in English and include plenty of footage of men in their fifties and sixties with their clothes off.

CHOP SHOP Writer-director Rahmin Bahrani, who also made Man Push Cart and the forthcoming Goodbye Solo, makes movies about people different from those at the center of mainstream movie culture, hard-edged but sympathetic explorations of what it means to be economically shut out and culturally isolated. This is real Neo-Realism for our times, and it makes something like Wendy and Lucy look like the overpraised, pity-the-poor-waif hankie movie it is.

A CHRISTMAS TALE: Arnaud Desplechin's two-and-a-half-hour, bracingly grown-up domestic drama has all the things that make the holidays great: inherited terminal illness, drunken name-calling, childhood fantasies that would make Dr. Phil alert the FBI, adulterous yearnings, repressed family resentments, family resentments that couldn't be less repressed if they were spelled out on the side of the Goodyear blimp, and bitterly estranged siblings battling over which of them will get the bragging rights for the crucial donation to mom's bone marrow transplant. All that plus this classic Christmas Eve conversation between a drunken adult and a couple of kids: "Boys, you should go to bed." "We're waiting for Jesus." "But Jesus never existed." "We'll wait anyway. We want to see him"

THE CLASS: Laurent Cantet's improvisational take on the education system. See the Screengrab Q & A.

THE DARK KNIGHT: Because Heath Ledger's Joker convinced me that if I didn't include this one, he'd come back to talk to me about it. This one is also for the woman who was sitting behind me at the Empire 25 in Times Square, who, when Gary Oldman's Jim Gordon let his wife know that he hadn't really been killed by showing up on the doorstep in the middle of the night and the wife slapped him--Ka-POW!!-- across his sheepish face, said, "I know that's right!" and who, when the wife then grabbed him and kissed him while his cheek was still throbbing, whispered, "That's right, too."

THE EDGE OF HEAVEN: Fatih Akin's Head-On was one of my favorite movies of the decade. A pure charge of sadomasochistic romantic torment, it was by turns funny, angry, sexy, and heart-breaking, and it just seemed to flow as naturally as a spring brook. His newest multi-character drama isn't as ferociously inspired as that picture was; the plot is built on a string of coincidences, and Akin lets you hear the gears turning. But it's still one of the most remarkable dramas of the year, from a filmmaker who remains a man to watch.

THE ORDER OF MYTHS: Margaret Brown's jaw-dropping documentary about the parallel, racially segregated Mardi Gras cultures of Mobile, Alabama. Would make for the double feature of the year if paired with another remarkable documentary about race and Southern culture, Godfrey Cheshire's Moving Midway.

THE SECRET OF THE GRAIN: This entry is partly a mea culpa. I first saw Abdellatif Kechiche's Franco-Tunisian family drama, a sprawling film with a basically simple story about an aged immigrant trying to start up a restaurant, when it played last spring at the Tribeca Film Festival, and at the time, I wrote a review that emphasized my problems with it, especially my feeling that it sometimes left its performers stranded in needlessly meandering long takes that did not justify its running time of two and a half hours. I'm not quite ready to take all that back, but I have to admit that, in the six months since, parts of this movie have come back and played themselves over and over in my head when I was least expecting to think about them again, and that I can't say that about many other films I saw this year. It's just now opened commercially in select U.S. theaters, and damned if I don't feel like I ought to see it again now that I'm no longer suffering from festival fever. In the meantime, I sure wouldn't try to talk anyone else out of seeing it.

SYNECDOCHE, NY: The flaws of Charlie Kaufman's long, cluttered film don't look like much to me in comparison to its achievement: a comedy about all the ways that our obsessions with death and futility prevent us from getting anything done with the precious time we have here, which does full justice to this very depressing theme yet also manages to be very funny. People who fault Kaufman for excessive cleverness might as well be complaining that action movies promote antisocial behavior. Kaufman is clever; more than that, he's actually intelligent. And he's one of the few artists in movies actively grappling with what might just be one of the great concerns of the post-modern world: how do people smart enough to see all the reasons for believing that everything is hopeless stop using their intellligence to trip them themselves up?

WALL-E: The first quarter-hour or so of this Pixar haymaker constitute the most astonishing kind of triumph: a fully realized, scarily believable vision of Hell on Earth that I felt like I never wanted to leave, or at least never stop watching. If, once the plot kicks in, it settles down into a mere first-rate satirical animated love story with a kick, I'd hate for that to seem like a complaint.

HONORABLE MENTION: Dear Zachary: A Letter to His Son about His Father, Encounters at the End of the World, The Flight of the Red Balloon, Full Battle Rattle, The Go-Getter, In Search of a Midnight Kiss, Iron Man, Jellyfish, Kung Fu Panda, Let the Right One In, Man on Wire, Milk, My Winnipeg, Patti Smith: Dream of Life, Paranoid Park, Pray the Devil Back to Hell, Slumdog Millionaire, Summer Palace, Taxi to the Dark Side, Trouble the Water, The Unforseen, Up the Yangtze, The Visitor, Water Lilies, Waltz with Bashir, The Witnesses, The Wrestler

BEST MOVIE RELEASED IN THE U.S. IN 2008 WHICH, FOR SOME REASON, EVERY CRITIC IN THE U.S. PUT ON HIS OR HER TEN-BEST LIST FOR 2007: 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days

BEST RESTORATION/BEST RE-ISSUE: The Exiles, Kent MacKenzie's legendary 1961 documentary-style look at the Native American subculture of Los Angeles's Bunker Hill. Not as great as the first two Godfather films, which also got a handsome and timely restoration, but that was going to happen anyway. This was more of a happy surprise.

BEST FILMED THEATER: the "avant-garde" production of Hamlet in Jellyfish; the kids' play in A Christmas Tale

BEST SCENE OF A COUPLE OF GUYS BURIED IN PROSTHETIC MAKE-UP GETTING BOOZED UP AND SINGING ALONG WITH BARRY MANILOW: Hellboy II: The Golden Army

REALLY GOOD TV: The HBO film Longford, Generation Kill, Breaking Bad, the last season of The Wire, the last episode of The Shield, Sarah Palin on the interview circuit, and The Drinky Crow Show on Adult Swim

GREAT PERFORMANCES: Jeffrey Wright, Columbus Short, and Eamonn Walker in Cadillac Records, Catherine Deneuve, Mathieu Amalric, Jean-Paul Roussilllon, and Chiara Mastroianni in A Christmas Tale, Sean Penn and Emile Hirsch in Milk, Robert Downey, Jr. in Iron Man and Tropic Thunder, Danny McBride in The Foot Fist Way and Tropic Thunder, Jeff Bridges in Iron Man, Anil Kapoor and Irrfan Khan in Slumdog Millionaire, Juliette Binoche in The Flight of the Red Balloon, Viola Davis in Doubt, Heath Ledger and Aaron Eckhart in The Dark Knight, Mickey Rourke and Marisa Tomei in The Wrestler, Melissa Leo in Frozen River, Sally Hawkins and Eddie Marsen in Happy-Go-Lucky, Rebecca Hall, Javier Bardem, and Penelope Cruz in Vicki Christina Barcelona, Samantha Morton in Synecdoche, NY, Patricia Clarkson in Elegy and Married Life, Michelle Williams in Synecdoche, NY and Wendy and Lucy, Habib Boufares and Hafsia Herzi in The Secret of the Grain, James Franco in Pineapple Express, Richard Dreyfuss in W., Kristen Scott-Thomas in I've Loved You So Long, Kathryn Hahn in Step Brothers, Michael Shannon in Revolutionary Road, Tea Leone in Ghost Town, Russell Brand in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Jane Lynch in Role Models, Richard Jenkins, Danai Jekesai Gurira, and Hiam Abbass in The Visitor, Ludivine Sagnier in Love Songs and A Girl Cut in Two, Andrew Garfield in Boy A, Famke Janssen in Turn the River, Greta Gerwig in Baghead, Jeanne Balibar in The Duchess of Langeais

BEST USE OF ZOOEY DESCHANEL: The unofficial muse of the Screengrab got the royal treatment in The Go-Getter, a too-little-seen road comedy that marked the writer-director feature debut of Martin Hynes, previously best known as the star of the 1999 short George Lucas in Love. The movie, which also features terrific work by Jena Malone, Maura Tierney, Bill Duke, Judy Greer, Nick Offerman, and its young star, Lou Taylor Pucci, doesn't introduce Deschanel's character unscreen until midway through, though she keeps in touch via cell phone, so the audience gets to have its collective ear tickled by the entrancing sound her voice before being premitted to gaze upon her ethereal loveliness. Slow to turn up in theaters and too quick to vacate them, The Go-Getter was actually completed in 2007, the same year that Deschanel appeared on the small screen in a guest appearance on the increasingly rotten Weeds that came to exactly nothing and as Dorothy as the stinko Wizard of Oz-as-sci-fi-fantasy miniseries Tin Man. This year, she graduated to big-studio movies that sought to exploit her freshness and talent in the name of shoring of has-been directors (in M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening) and tired stars (in The Yes Man with Jim Carrey). No wonder the poor kid's looking to break into music.

SHE'S JUST A GIRL WHO CAN'T SAY NO: In Boarding Gate, Asia Argento ran drugs, escaped a hail of gunfire on a motorcycle, got drugged and raped (off-screen) by a bunch of Japanese businessmen, choked Michael Madsen with his own belt only to discover that he kind of enjoyed it, handcuffed Madsen and shot him in the head, and traveled to Hong Kong to find herself at the mercy of Kim Gordon, all nice work if you can get it. She also slipped into black underwear and matching fuck-me shoes to pose for the poster, holding a big-ass gun that she was going to have trouble concealing in that outfit. In The Last Mistress, she told dirty stories about herself and made eating ice cream look as if ought to count as a violation of the Patriot Act. In Mother of Tears, she swam through an underground sea of sewage and gore, got paralyzed, became psychic, witnessed the murders of her friends by ghouls who throttled women with their own intestines and shoved phallic pikes between their legs until the pointy ends came out their mouths, splattered a woman's head like a cantaloupe during a train ride, and hung out with Udo Kier. That last was one was directed by her father. I can't for the life of me decide what that makes it all better or even worse.

BEST INSIDE SNAPSHOT OF HOLLYWOOD: Nina Davenport's documentary Project Filmmaker began with the actor Liev Schreiber, who was planning to make his first film as a director, Everything Is Illluminated (2005), based on the Jonathan Safran Foer novel. Schreiber was watching MTV when he saw a report about the effects of the Iraq War and saw a 25-year-old Iraqi, Muthana Mohmed, explaining that he wanted to be a filmmaker but the Americans just blew up the country's film school. In a fit of liberal guilt, Schrieber magnanimously sent word that this lad was to be found and hired and brought to the Czech Republic to work on the set of his major studio production. And Schreiber was so impressed with his own gesture that he further instructed that a documentary would be made to record this inspiring episode in annals of the brotherhood of man. The next thing anyone knew, there was a sullen, pissed-off young Iraqi on the set, telling Davenport's camera how freaked out he was to be "working for a Jewish director of a Jewish movie defending the Jewish theory"--that would appear to be the "theory" that the Holocaust happened--and bitterly complaining that while the most important scenes were being filmed, he was made to remain in a trailer, "mixing the snacks." Davenport seems a little overly taken with the notion that Muthana's story parallels that of Iraq itself since 2003, and way too taken with the idea that there's some larger comment to mae about the culture at large that metasized in Baghdad: at one point, she cuts from actual footage of carnage in Iraq to gruseomely made-up extras lying in heaps on the set of Doom, a movie based on a video game, whose star, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, arranged to sent Muthana to film school in London after the little fella's love affair with Liev Schreiber went the way of all flesh. By the end, Davenport herself is trying to explain to Mohmed that she can't continue to shell out money whenever he says he needs it and complaining that he's gotten his hands on her footage and is "holding it hostage." Early on, Liev Schreiber's associates say that Mohmed simply didn't understand the mechanics of how a smart operator makes himself "indispensible" to a director and so uses his time on a film set as a career stepping stone. But they can't say he didn't learn as he went along.

MOST EFFECTIVE MINDLESS SCARE MACHINE: The Strangers

SHITTIEST-LOOKING MOVIE OF THE YEAR: It used to be that back when filmmaking on almost any scale was an incredibly expensive, physically demanding enterprise, low-budget indie filmmakers and proud amateurs who either couldn't afford or achieve decent lighting or camerawork could be counted on to point to the butt-ugliness of their work as proof of their artistic integrity. But recent technological advances have made films that can't meet a certain level of visual polish harder and harder to come by. JCVD is worth pointing to as a real match of form and content, yoking its single, solitary, half-bright idea--let's get all meta with Jean-Claude Van Damme!--not just to a slack and unimaginative execution but to a visual style that makes it look as if Dario Argento had rubbed entrails all over the camera lens, or that the entire country of Belgium had neglected to pay its light bill. Here's to director Mabrouk el Mechri for kickin' it old school.

NOT ALL THAT: Baghead, Ballast, Be Kind Rewind, Che, Doubt, Frozen River, George Romero's Diary of the Dead, A Girl Cut in Two, Heartbeat Detector, I Serve the King of England, Momma's Man, The Pool, Rachel Getting Married, Shotgun Stories, Standard Operating Procedure, Stuck, Tell No One, Trannsiberian, W., Wendy and Lucy