HOME * REVIEWS * MIDTOWN * TOP 10 PROJECT ESSAYS & ARTICLES * ODDS & ENDS * LINKS * CONTACT

THE BEST OF 2008

#1 Synecdoche, New York Directed by Charlie Kaufman Watching this brilliantly inflammatory directorial debut of mad monkey man Charlie Kaufman, this make-believe futurespeak play-within-a-play within-a-play within-a-play social satire-cum-epic introspection-cum-amorphous belly monster-cum-tawdry self-centered watusi-spiraling Whirling Dervish, replete with some of the craziest, pompously disturbing and oddly satisfying images in recent cinema, all of which dances across the screen like a batshitcrazy sublime grand guignol hopped up on peyote buttons and methamphetamines, just goes to prove what the screenplays for Being John Malkovich, Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind already gave us suspect of - that Charlie Kaufman is a mad hookah-smoking double-talk Lewis Carrol-meets-David Lynch hallucinatory genius. Maddening and frustrating at times, the impossibly named Synecdoche, New York (it's a literary term by the way) is a triumph in sheer bravura and a thesis (or should I say antithesis) in self awareness, replete with the ever-looping elliptical orbits that make up all of Kaufman's script-written world(s) and a bevy of brilliant performances, from sysiphisian lead Philip Seymour Hoffman to all those who make up his grandly downtrodden life. As much Freud as it is Kierkegaard, as much Kubrick as it is Renoir, as much Dostoyevsky as it is Proust, Kaufman's infant film is both a jaw-dropping display of how not to make a movie and a breathtaking Ophulian smorgasbord on how to make a movie work on so many different levels.

#2 Silent Light Directed by Carlos Reygadas The Mexican New Wave's very own l'enfant terribles, Carlos Reygadas, gives us a sublimely tragic film about love, betrayal, death and rebirth. As the film begins, we watch as the sun rises and day breaks on a lonely farm somewhere in what we assume is Mexico. As the morning slowly blacks out the nocturnal strains, we hear the ever-growing roar of mysterious beasts. What is this place we have come to? This alien place? A tranquil scene is soon invaded by the loud aching moans of unknown beasts. Where has Reygadas taken us this time? What strange naked wilderness is this? Aching and forlorn while simultaneously acting as the auteur's most joyous film to date (not that that is too difficult a thing to accomplish) Silent Light, the tale of one man's dual fight with freedom of will and duty to family and faith in the Mexican Mennonite community, is not only the most ethereal work of cinema in several years - feeling almost Tarkovskyian in its anguished, silently-lighted camera work and despairing religiosity - but also a lovingly referential homage to Carl Dreyer. The filmmaker's best film, Silent Light manages to capture that split second between thought and deed where man and woman - Adam and Eve as it were - can either make or break their paradise to pieces. Reygadas' film takes place inside that one desperate, lonely, possibly world-shattering split second, slowed down to a speed that we can watch it unfold. It is the fall of Eden itself.

#3 Let The Right One In Directed by Thomas Alfredson

#4 Wendy and Lucy Directed by Kelly Reichardt Kelly Reichardt's latest ode to the Pacific northwest, Wendy and Lucy, much like the filmmaker's previous work, Old Joy, is a veritable paean to the disenfranchised of America. To all those who are eaten up by the system and who never, for whatever reason (and none is ever given here) become what society expects them to be. To those on the fringe of America. Outcasts and throw-aways. Not bad people. Not lesser people. Simply people who do not know where they belong, where they fit in. This film, like Old Joy is a sad love song of sorts, sung to those for whom the idea of the American dream simply does not exist. And though filmed with the sublime picturesque, and quite auteuristic eye of Ms. Reichardt (no one in American cinema today does better the haunting melancholy of the disembodied outdoors than Kelly Reichardt), this film is tripled, quadrupled, quintupled even, in blatant puissance by the subtly explosion-precipiced performance of the Oscar nominated former Dawson's Creek star, Michelle Williams. It is Williams' ascendancy to the preeminence of American independent darling, her Vormachtstellung if you will, that takes an already exceptional film and with the most heart-wrenching performance by any actor, male or female, this year, raises it to a whole other realm completely.

#5 The Dark Knight Directed by Christopher Nolan To say The Dark Knight is the best comic book movie ever made is selling this remarkable film well short of what it truly is. Inspired thematically from the western genre, and especially John Ford's The Searchers with Christian Bale's titular Batman in the Ethan Edwards role, Christopher Nolan's epic-scaled sinister blockbuster mega movie (second only to the titanic Titanic in all-time B.O. take), the very epitome of summer popcorn entertainment extraordinaire and far from what one might expect from such a moniker, is more than just the best comic book movie ever made, which it incidentally is, but a genre-exploding, bone-crunching, eye gouging, expectation-fucking feast of harrowingly resplendent audacity in the sneaky guise of mere summer fluff - a mainstream arthouse extravaganza. Add this growling western motiffed chutzpah with the final complete performance of Heath Ledger as the maniacal Joker, and you have much much much more than just the best comic book movie ever made - you have, dare I say, genius.

#6 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days Directed by Cristian Mungiu A few years ago, what many people called the Romanian or "Black" New Wave began hitting the world's film festivals like a surprise attack of new miserablist cinema. Bleak, desperate looks at Romania under iron-fisted communist rule (Romania's Ceauşescu has often been considered the worst of the iron curtain dictators) have been the norm in these films - and that includes the few comedies that are made as well. Cristian Mungiu's 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days is the latest, and probably greatest, of this so-called new wave (the filmmakers themselves refute the moniker of new wave). Despondent and often wretched in mood, this story of two women, one of them pregnant, trying to procure an abortion in 1980's Romania (when and where such a crime came with a penalty of death) may be quite depressing in its aforementioned wretchedness and one may not come out of this film the same as when they went in, but it is told in such an august, almost transcendental way as to leave it nearly impossible to react without some sense of awe at its sublime intensity.

#7 A Christmas Tale Directed by Arnaud Desplechin Playing out as some sort of hybrid love/hate relationship Christmas homecoming comedy-cum-tragedy, as much in love with the idea of family and the holiday as it is dead set against it, hosed down as it were with the giddy visual bravura of the Nouvelle Vague that is coursing like damnation through the very blood of the filmmaker, and replete with the deepest array of French cinema royalty swerving like a Renoir-inspired group hallucinatory drunken snake through the secret cavernous catacombs of hilariously battered psychosis, repressed childhoods and dark familial achings, and riffing on Shakespeare as if the deep luscious crimsons and golds that penetrate every nook and cranny and kith and kin of this provincially ornamental grotesquery of dysfunctional and deteriorated genealogy were decorating the actual Globe Theatre itself by way of Roubaix - not to mention Desplechin's wholly saturated homage to Hitchcock and Vertigo (so far as to even have a ghost named Madeleine haunting the proceedings) - nouveau Nouvelle auteur Arnaud Desplechin's A Christmas Tale is easily one of the most purely entertaining films of 2008 and very possibly the best French film in nearly a decade.

#8 Che Directed by Steven Soderbergh Soderbergh's career has been one of the most eclectic since the days that Howard Hawks lept from genre to genre to style to style. After year's of Hawksian genre and style hopping, yet keeping the strongest of auteuristic signatures, Soderbergh has made what is most definitely his boldest and most audacious film to date and most likely his best film as well. Che, released a la Kill Bill, in two parts (though I was one of the lucky ones to see it in its one-sitting entirety), is the story of iconic revolutionary Ernesto 'Che' Guevara. Ripping apart the idea of the biopic (much in the same way Todd Haynes did last year with I'm Not There) and deconstructing it, Soderbergh has created the most uniquely fascinating motion picture portrait of a real person ever put onto the screen. Shot in methodical, almost how-to style of guerrilla warfare, Che is fascinating both in its portrayal of Guevara (played beautifully by Benicio Del Toro) and its way of covering the story as almost documentary. Subtitled and four hours long, the public did not exactly pack the moviehouses with this one and that is surely a shame, since they missed out on one of the best cinematic experiences of the year.

#9 Rachel Getting Married Directed by Jonathan Demme With allusions to Dogme filmmaking (if the dialogue were in Danish, one would swear this was a film by von Trier or Vinterberg) and brimming with the most Altmanesque of mechanizations, Jonathan Demme has taken a script idea that could have so easily fallen into an oversentimentalized vortex of banality and mediocre obviousness, and handed us something not unlike a cinematic punch in the gut, but with beauty, sublimity and a certain realistic dream quality, all stuffed to the veritable rafters with an unquestioned multi-cultural melange of just about everything from whitebread Connecticut sterility to afro-carib-centric chest-thumping to repressed unanswered anger to far eastern new age lama chanting to cold hearted rehab mantras to erupting unbridled sadness to Robyn Hitchcock and Fab Five Freddy, all of which is as much Jonathan Demme as Italian family squabbles and bloody mob beatdowns are Martin Scorsese or creepy pseudo-suburban underground netherworlds are David Lynch.

#10 The Wrestler Directed by Darren Aronofsky

#11 My Blueberry Nights Directed by Wong Kar-wai Hong Kong fabulist auteur Wong Kar-wai's first attempt at English-language cinema, this somewhat aimless, almost art-for-art's-sake American road movie, with its accidental(?) allusions to Antonioni's own fortitudinous US road picture Zabriski Point (or PointLESS as some have called it) may have been an almost unanimous flop with US critics at Cannes this past spring (European critics were more apt to laud its credits) and may have left me a bit lukewarm as I disembarked from the screening as well, yet, the more I thought about it the more I realized that, though perhaps nowhere near his greatest work (In the Mood For Love may well be one of the greatest films ever made), the rather kitschy sounding My Blueberry Nights, with its debut heroine, singer/songwriter Norah Jones and her stable of Oscar winning and nominated stars, is nothing shy of a mesmerizing expressionistic work of cinematic art. Luscious and delirious at times, Wong has proven to at least this critic, that he can, without any real knowledge of Americana, create a loving ode to the tenacity of the (idealized) American way of life.

#12 Gran Torino Directed by Clint Eastwood

SPECIAL MENTION Go-Go Tales Directed by Abel Ferrara I first saw this homage to Cassavetes' Killing of a Chinese Bookie at the 2007 New York Film Festival and was sure it would never find a US distributor. A year and a half later and I suppose I was right. Sadly so. Supposedly IFC Films did buy its US rights, but even that seems to have fallen through now. So, after finally giving up on its eventual US release and therefore giving up on ever putting it on my annual top ten lists, I herald the film here as a sort of special edition bonus track. Giddy and glossy, grimy and gooey (yea, I said gooey), Ferrara's latest fuck-you to Hollywood (made in Italy, Ferrara runs even farther away from the staid studio ethos that have so often scoffed at the filmmaker's ballsy independence - another link to Cassavetes) is a strip-tease brouhaha of decadence and a middle-finger ode to the American way and its traditional repressive bedmates all rolled into a cocksure ejaculation of oxymoronic self-referential anti-cinema filmmaking. Perhaps one day, Americans can at least see this wonderfully filthy film on DVD.

HOME * REVIEWS * MIDTOWN * FESTIVALS * TOP 10 PROJECT * ESSAYS & ARTICLES * ODDS & ENDS * LINKS * CONTACT