Michael Dance’s Top 10 Movies of 2008

2008 presented my first real test of top-ten-list-making abilities as a critic. Last year I was all about Into the Wild for #1, while I loved Juno enough to make it a solid #2. I was reasonably certain about my rankings. Sure, some movies gain stature with time — I think today I’d put Zodiac above Eastern Promises, although I still love both — but it was a solid list.

This year I didn’t like nearly as many movies. It’s a cliché to say it was “a bad year for movies” — lots of critics say that every year, no matter what — but it seems like a lot of the stuff other people were raving about left me flat. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, while watchable, was a major disappointment. Milk was good, not great. Even Slumdog Millionaire, which made it on my list, didn’t have me quite as transfixed as it seemed to have other reviewers.

That’s the problem with the list I’ve ended up with: I have caveats about nearly every movie. Loved Wall-E, but the second half didn’t live up to the first. Loved The Dark Knight, but its handling of Rachel bugged me and it was too long. Loved The Wrestler, but did the love interest really need to be yet another stripper with a heart of gold?

So here’s a final piece of advice before I get to the list: re-arrange the top five movies however you want. After way-too-long deliberation on my part, I’m relatively certain I got #10 through #6 right, and I’m relatively certain the top five are my favorite five movies of the year. But out of those, which was the best? I’m still not sure. Feel free to let me know what you think.

10. Tropic Thunder

2007 was all about Judd Apatow with Superbad and Knocked Up. But in 2008, the Frat Pack came back — with some help from Robert Downey Jr. and Tom Cruise of all people — in a big way. The funniest movie of the year also has some great action scenes and a few very clever conceits, including opening the movie with fake trailers starring the fake actors in the film. And not only does Downey play a great (fake) black guy, he also does a devastating impression of Russell Crowe. (Read my Tropic Thunder review)

9. Mister Foe

This little-seen U.K. indie owes a lot to both Holden Caulfield and Oedipus: a teenage voyeur (Jamie Bell) leaves home for the big city of Edinburgh, where he meets — and falls in love with — a woman (Sophia Myles) who looks exactly like his dead mother. Bell and Myles are both flat-out terrific and

the story is funny and moving. A buried treasure you and your friends need to discover. (Read my Mister Foe review)

8. The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian

Yeah, remember this movie? It disappointed at the box office because (a) it opened in May, before kids were out of school, and (b) the producers didn’t realize the source material wasn’t nearly as popular as The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. But I loved it: pure epic fantasy done exceedingly well. It gets your blood pumping and your imagination running, which is exactly what movies are supposed to do. (Read my Prince Caspian review)

7. Frost/Nixon

A historical lesson that works as exciting entertainment whether or not you’ve ever heard of David Frost or the Frost/Nixon interviews. Slightly revisionist, but the performances are terrific, especially from the people whose character names weren’t in the title: Sam Rockwell’s jittery, self-righteous liberal researcher and Kevin Bacon’s devoutly loyal Nixon military aide are opposite ends of the political spectrum brought to life with humanity. (Read my Frost/Nixon review)

6. Slumdog Millionaire

The story is a chore to explain, which makes it all the more surprising that it turns out to be so darned conventional — but in an “everyone will like it” kind of way. It’s crowd-pleasing heartstring-tugging done right, but the real focus is the setting: India — Mumbai in particular — brought to splendid, kinetic life. Director Danny Boyle infuses his inherent enthusiasm for filmmaking into all of his movies, but rarely has a setting and screenplay complimented that passion so well.

5. Wall-E

Pixar has set the animation bar so high that sometimes even they don’t live up to it (Cars). With Wall-E, they definitely did: animation has never been better (Wall-E himself seems photo-realistic at some points), and the story is a compelling, imaginative sci-fi tale in its own right. I mentioned earlier that I didn’t like the second half as much as the first — the “bad A.I.” subplot that provides the movie’s climax feels very unoriginal next to everything else — but the strength of the first half alone, plus the insanely romantic and beautiful scene in which Wall-E and Eve fly through outer space with the help of a fire extinguisher, should make this a timeless classic.

4. The Wrestler

Darren Aronofsky returned to low-budget, in-the-center-of-the-action filmmaking after his foray into sci-fi with 2006′s aloof The Fountain, and the results were extraordinary. I’ve never in my life voluntarily watched pro-wrestling, but this story of washed-up wrestler Randy “The Ram” Robinson (Mickey Rourke) is fascinating and heartbreaking, with perhaps the best ending of the year. I promise you: you will not see a more affecting performance this year than Rourke’s.

3. Doubt

This is the only movie on my list that I consider flawless, in

that it is exactly what it wants to be and achieves exactly what it wants to achieve. The conversations post-viewing are fascinated, because people interpret the film in such different ways: is it obvious that Philip Seymour Hoffman’s priest is innocent, or guilty? Do you love Meryl Streep, or is she a villain? And in a role less than twenty minutes long, Viola Davis makes a bigger impression than even her heavyweight co-stars.

2. In Bruges

I keep coming back to this one. Released way back in February, this story of two London-based hitmen (Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson) who are sent to Bruges, Belgium for “Christmas vacation” by their maniacal boss (Ralph Fiennes) after botching a job is both funny and sad, tender and brutal. Occasional eager-to-offend dialogue can feel derivative of Tarantino, and a romantic subplot seems at first by-the-numbers, but then the movie stuns you as the hitmen contemplate their morality, or engage in a truly hilarious bit of physical comedy, or ultimately discover themselves in the town — “the most well-preserved medieval city in the whole of Belgium.” (You’ll want to visit it immediately.) Fiennes entertainingly overacts, Gleeson is terrific as always, and Farrell turns in his best performance to date. Written and directed by playwright Martin McDonagh. (Read my In Bruges review)

1. The Dark Knight

I said before you can re-arrange my top five however you see fit, because I couldn’t for the life of me rank them. So what made me ultimately decide to put The Dark Knight at #1? Because it’s the biggest cinematic achievement of the year. It did for superhero movies what Unforgiven did for Westerns: immediately date all those which preceded it, and forever change all those to come in the future. This wasn’t Batman vs. a bad guy, with a love interest included. This was Batman as one cog in the massive machine that is Gotham City, teaming with Aaron Eckhart’s crusading district attorney and Gary Oldman’s straight-arrow cop to finally clean up Gotham, only to come up against a villain — Heath Ledger’s Joker — who can’t be fought against because he doesn’t follow any rules. If Mickey Rourke from The Wrestler gave the most affecting performance of the year, Ledger gave the most fascinating, even if you don’t take his tragic death into consideration (although, let’s face it, that’s impossible). The Dark Knight creates a universe, is a fascinating morality play, contains uniformly excellent performances, and is a pretty awesome action movie, too. (Read my Dark Knight review)

Honorable Mentions:

Slots #11 through #15 would probably go to Iron Man, The Class, Rachel Getting Married, Defiance, and The Duchess. Ralph Fiennes in The Duchess and Josh Brolin in Milk both haunted me long after those movies

were over. And finally, Street Kings gets major points for pure dumb entertainment.

The Worst:

I gave three films a D+ (Synecdoche, New York, Step Brothers, and Australia) and two a D (Transporter 3 and 88 Minutes). I only gave one film an F: Untraceable.

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Top 10 Movies of 2008: Andrea Tuccillo
Top 10 Movies of 2008: Dan Deevy