2008 at the Movies: The Best and the Worst

Although it was remarkable in many other ways (elections, the economy), 2008 was a fairly typical year for movies: no indisputable masterpieces, but quite a few solid achievements (along with some ripe stinkers). And unlike 2007, when the heavily praised (and awarded) No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood seemed to me seriously flawed and a misuse of great talent, this year the most acclaimed movies are mostly pretty good.

There are a few that I think have been overrated: 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, Happy-Go-Lucky, and Waltz with Bashir, to name three, but those are still reasonably good movies, as is the likely Oscar-winner, Slumdog Millionaire. Slumdog is a fine evening’s entertainment, even though it’s a bit thin and superficial and predictable. But there are at least twenty movies I liked better in the past year. Here are some of them.

Best Features of 2008

1. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
2. Milk
3. Paranoid Park
4. WALL-E
5. Synecdoche, New York
6. Rachel Getting Married
7. The Edge of Heaven
8. The Dark Knight
9. In Bruges
10. Frozen River

Runners-up:

1. Wendy and Lucy
2. Gran Torino
   

Documentaries

1. Taxi to the Dark Side
2. Man on Wire
3. Moving Midway
4. Trouble the Water
   

Biggest Disappointments: Che; Revolutionary Road

The Worst (that I saw): Speed Racer; Sex and the City; Mamma Mia!

Twice in a row now, David Fincher has delivered the movie of the year. Zodiac and Benjamin Button couldn’t be more different – one a deliberately chilly and alienating thriller, the other a large-scale, smash-hit Hollywood romantic fantasy. What they share is Fincher’s mesmerizing sense of composition and rhythm. Button’s script is of variable quality – but Fincher ensures that the film is constantly gripping and profoundly moving. The central idea – what it really means to live and die – is powerfully rendered through masterful visual storytelling. Claudio Miranda, in his first major feature as cinematographer, delivers an extraordinary-looking film. And the score by Alexandre Desplat (The Golden Compass, The Queen) is beautifully effective.

Sharing honors with Fincher as director of the year is Gus Van Sant, with two fine and very different movies. Milk is a superior biopic, a superior political movie, and a superior period piece, and it has more first-rate performances than any other movie this year. It’s also an audience pleaser – you can feel the energy in the theater as you watch. Paranoid Park, in contrast, is one of Van Sant’s I-don’t-really-care-if-you-enjoy-this “experimental” movies, in the same vein as Elephant, Last Days, and Gerry. This one has a somewhat more conventional narrative than those three, but it's definitely an “art film” in the best sense. Van Sant is a poetic visual stylist and a brilliant editor of sound and image. Paranoid Park (a moody tale of violent death and teen anomie) and Milk (the story of a gay rights hero) demonstrate his gifts in pleasingly different ways.

Article Author: Randall A Byrn

Handyguy (aka Randall Byrn) is a marketing professional in New York. A transplanted Southerner, he has been a movie buff since birth. He's always secretly wanted to be Pauline Kael, and Blogcritics gives him an approximation of that, or so he likes to fantasize at least. …

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