The Big Picture's Top Ten Films of 2008

Today, we begin our week-long look back at 2008 at the movies. Every day, between now and Christmas, we'll go over some of the best and worst of the year. Today is our top ten films of 2008, tomorrow the ten worst. On Sunday the 21st, we'll rank our top performances, which leads into Monday's list of the ten best directors of the year. Tuesday, we'll chart the best posters and trailers, and Wednesday we'll name our winners and losers, a general list that needs no explanation. And finally, on December 25th, The Big Picture Awards, our annual, totally non-influential honors. And now, our feature presentation... My immediate impression of the year in movies is not an overly good one. That isn't meant as a backhanded compliment; we were spoiled by 2007, a year in which my top ten list ballooned to 17 movies before I whittled it down. But this year, the tough choices were what to include rather than what to exclude. Some of these movies didn't leave a bookmark in my mind when I saw them that they could be among the very best of the year. That's the way it turned out, though, and here they are. We won't give you full reviews here, because the reviews are already cataloged here. This is more of a recap of why each movie stands out and why I feel it deserves the ranking it received. 1 - Slumdog Millionaire I came away from Slumdog Millionaire thinking it was among the two best films I'd seen in 2008. That's a good feeling, especially since it had been almost nine months since the last time I had felt as strongly. Then I saw it again a couple of weeks later, and felt a little more strongly about it. I became more familiar with Danny Boyle's storytelling, and started watching the performances more carefully. As luck would have it, I hosted a screening of the film five days later, so I had a chance to watch it a third time. That didn't necessarily give it an advantage; I always watch as many films in or near my top ten multiple times before I make the list. So, it was going to happen anyway. But as I watched the film again, I noticed the things you don't notice the first time in, especially with a movie so rich in texture, culture, and color. I paid attention to the sound. The music is part of that, but there are great punctuations in every scene that keep them moving and give the film a very distinct rhythm. I was more impressed than ever. The story is undoubtedly strong, the message and its impact unavoidable. The performances, all by actors I'd never seen (with the exception of Ifran Khan), were beautifully in step with their surroundings. And then, finally, the film can viewed separately from the emotional journey it is, and be appreciated for the technical artistry at work in so many departments, from cinematography and editing, to the music and sound, to the costumes and background casting. Slumdog Millionaire is as close to perfect as we saw in 2008. 2 - Frost/Nixon Is it vindication I felt after watching Frost/Nixon? A little justice for a man corrupted by his absolute power? No, although I wasn't so much aware of Watergate when it happened. Babies tended not to follow politics as closely as they should back then. In fairness, we had no 24-hour news channels. Instead of a kind of glee that comes from sticking it to someone who stuck it to us (something the country might want again in 2009), I felt charged and a little awakened by the influence film can have. Who can really say what the "purpose" of film or television is. But this is an illustration of what it can be. Though fictionalized - author Peter Morgan doesn't even say it's 100% accurate, giving himself a middle of the road B in that department - Frost/Nixon is as good a movie about the highest rungs of power we have in the United States: The presidency and the boob tube. There are upsides and downsides to both, especially when they intermingle and blur the lines between them. It plays out like a heavyweight fight between the old politics that didn't need to be media savvy and the new media that doesn't need to be politically savvy, with Frank Langella's captivating Nixon squaring off against Michael Sheen's teflon talking head. In literature, the easiest way to establish a hero and a villain is to have them despise one another. Clearly, that creates the most conflict. But Morgan and director Ron Howard complicate their own jobs and their two primary characters by making hero and villain a lot more alike than you'd think. For the record, it's the communication between Clarice Starling and Hannibal Lecter that makes Silence of the Lambs one of the great films of the last 25 years; imagine it if they hated each other. How boring. So while you want to root for Frost, you find empathy for Nixon. And while you feel that Nixon should get what he deserves, you start to wonder if you really like David Frost enough to pull for him. It's not a knockout, but rather a split decision. 3 - In Bruges For much of the year, In Bruges was alone on my list of the best films of 2008. That's not meant in the strictest sense; in June, I compiled a working order of the best movies to that point of the year. But In Bruges was the only film that was released before the end of June that I was absolutely sure would still be around. I just loved too many things about it. A lot of movies with a simple concept die as soon as the description is over. In Bruges is structurally about as plain Jane as you can get: Two hitmen botch a job and are sent by their boss to cool their heels in the smallish Belgian city of Bruges to await further instructions. Writer-director Martin McDonagh uses that simple framework to let his characters do wonders. And here's a tip for young screenwriters: Nobody's going to care about the story you want to tell unless they care about the characters in it. That's why Rocky is a better sports movie than Varsity Blues. Let your characters tell the story, don't let them walk into one you've already mapped out. In McDonagh's case, that means two wildly different men - the reserved, aloof Brendan Gleeson and the troubled powderkeg Colin Farrell - who react differently to Bruges. For Gleeson, it's idyllic. For Farrell, it's worse than death. McDonagh has made a timeless crime comedy, one with dialogue that moves faster than you can think, and takes the time to give us a hell of a cameo and entrance and a good third act. 4 - Man on Wire Documentaries don't have to be entertaining, or at least that's one school of thought. Michael Moore kind of changed that way of thinking, and in some cases, documentaries don't even have to really be documentaries anymore, just first person non-fiction films about something the figurehead does or does not like. Michael Moore kind of changed that way of thinking, too, for better and worse. Man on Wire, like last year's King of Kong, is a movie first. It's telling a story that we should see on a screen and not just overhear somewhere or read about online. It's cinematic. It's informed by non-fiction storytellers in the genre but it also has a great mainstream plot and approach. The story is one of those you might have heard about or watched on the news. Like so many of them, you probably forgot about Philippe Petit a short time after he walked between the twin towers of the World Trade Center back in 1974. That incident alone does not warrant a documentary. It warrants news coverage. But what director James Marsh does that's so fascinating is builds up to that point in time through interviews, recreations, and archival footage, crafting a suspenseful caper that surpasses any of the bank robbery movies of the last ten years or so. There's also a real melancholic sense to it all, the words that fall under the breaths of those telling the story, remembering how big a role this walk among the clouds played in shaping and shifting their lives. That's good drama, and that's what the movies are all about. 5 - Let the Right One In No, not that teenage vampire movie... Sweden's Let the Right One In struck me initially because it's not just about kids, one of them a vampire, trying to cope with their own lives in the dark corners somewhere. It actually takes place in the lives of these two 12-year-olds. We don't see their actions from the adult perspective, as we would a lesser film that just presents them as characters serving the final act. We go to school with one of them, we watch the frustration over being stuck in a shell generations younger than her years with the other. We're in their bedrooms when we should not be there. We don't look down at them, through the eyes of our greater experience. It's a tremendous way to tell the story, and especially because it's a new approach to the vampire movie, it really works. The blood is not for show, even though there's plenty of it. The violence, though limited, is rather savage, animalistic. And it's in these scenes where director Tomas Alfredson pulls us back from the action and forces us to watch more as spectators, almost daring us to judge this character we've come to know and feel for. Let the Right One In is definitely moody, and sometimes quiet films can be too stuffed with atmosphere. It pays off  here, filling the silences with a true character study and a simple reinvention of one of our older and most overworked genres. 6 - Mongol I have the greatest respect for filmmakers who come from outside the Hollywood system, find a story that deserves to be told, and scratch and claw to get that film made. And when it happens to be a great picture, one that a $200 million budget would probably screw up, it's even more impressive. That's the reason I support an award for the best international film instead of a best foreign language film. Honestly, who cares if it's in Italian or in English? What matters is creating the film in an environment that is a little more hostile to filmmakers on a financial level. They may not have a pool of cinematographers to choose from, and the actors definitely don't have A-list movies on their résumés. What we're celebrating is that the movie got made at all, not that it has subtitles. The Russian/Kazakh production Mongol falls into that category. Even though it had a large budget as these things go ($20 million), it proves that an action picture or a historical epic doesn't need a lot of modern trappings to succeed. The first film in a proposed trilogy of the life of Genghis Khan, Mongol has no splashy effects, barely has sets, and incorporates a cast from varied Asian backgrounds to capture the early life of one the world's most important figures. I also love finding a towering performance in foreign language films, because it shows you how much of the craft is nonverbal. Without the words on the screen, I can't tell you what Tadanobu Asano or Honglei Sun are saying, but I can see their conviction as actors and the emotion of the characters. Sun's work, in particular, is spellbinding and unexpected. 7 - Wall-E For about the first hour or so, Wall-E is perfect. It's better than any animated film I've ever seen, as good as nearly any film I've ever seen. It's beautiful. It's daring. It's touching. It's funny. It's smart. It's original. It has the best animation you're likely to find. Then Wall-E goes to space, and it becomes a different kind of movie. It becomes a more typical Pixar film, using the time-honored fish-out-of-water approach. The animation is more derivative (ask yourself why the robots look so real but the humans more resemble cartoon characters), and there's a sense that something needs to happen just so that something happens. But the pull of that first hour is so magnetic that Wall-E is impossible to ignore. Its achievements are both great and many. Do I think it would've been better had it stayed earthbound? Completely. But there's so much imagination filling the scenes, even the ones I didn't like as well as the ones in the beginning, that Wall-E only drops to our seventh-best motion picture of the year. 8 - Changeling Clint Eastwood's film about a mother's search for her missing son in Los Angeles during the 1920s and 30s left a lot of critics and audience members cold. Of course, Eastwood is concerned, and rightly so, with his story, not the critics, and it's hard to fault the telling of his tale. You can't present this another way and make it successful. As a proponent of the two-hour rule, which means to me that the audience only trusts you up to two hours, and if you take them past that, you better have a damn good reason, Changeling needs justification. It's closer to two-and-a-half hours. Fair enough.The justification is that Eastwood has developed J. Michael Straczynski's script into chapters that have their own three-act structure. There's the search by Christine Collins (Angelina Jolie) for her son and there's the story of the Wineville Chicken Coop Murders. They're connected, separate but equal. You could tell the Chicken Coop Murders story independent of Christine Collins' story, though there would always be some crossover, but you can't tell her story without developing the other one. That's the greater calling of Eastwood's movie, so giving it short shrift is a recipe for disaster. I loved that Eastwood and Straczynski didn't stray from the available facts of the 80-year-old case. Only one plot point doesn't match Collins' own journey, according to what is known, but it's not an unforgivable offense. There aren't a lot of procedural crime dramas that are this effective or troubling emotionally, and Eastwood never flinches. He also mines the best performance of her career out of Angelina Jolie. Even though she has a large contingent of detractors for some reason, this is actually the second year in a row you can say Jolie has never been better. That counts for something. 9 - The Curious Case of Benjamin Button In 2007, this wouldn't have made my list of the best films. It's a better technical dance than it is a prime example of marvelous storytelling. There is fat that could be trimmed, beginning with the contemporary bookends around this strange fable about a man who ages backwards. We don't need a modern perspective, a summary of Button's life. We're watching Button's life. If that's not enough to convince us, the last thing we need is more of it. But as a production, as a collection of craftsmen coming together as a group to write one signature, yes, this is one of the best films of the year. David Fincher, for the first time, has created something that doesn't resemble a David Fincher movie. It takes some directors a lifetime to put themselves in the background, but Fincher has done it here, and though it's not his best film, it will probably help lead us to that best film in the next few years. His crew, from cinematographer Claudio Miranda to production designer Donald Graham Burt to composer Alexandre Desplat to the visual effects team led by Dan Abrams, have made a rich, beautiful palette for any story, but particularly one like this, one that requires massive changes of scenery, time, and expression while maintaining an almost dreamlike undercurrent of fantasy. I didn't take much from Benjamin Button as far as performances are concerned; I certainly didn't feel that they were the best of the year. But in a way, that didn't bother me, either, because I was - and we are - always aware that it's not just a story we're watching, but a story being told by someone else. We're complete outsiders, hearing it thirdhand. The characters aren't the director's invention for our amusement, but those of another character in the film, who is using them for her own purposes. Even when she's not there, the story is told from her perspective. And the more I thought about that element, the more successful all of this became. 10 - Tropic Thunder If this seems like a strange pick, consider for a moment how hard this film is to get right. Comedy, by definition, is harder to execute because it has one objective: Make the audience laugh when you want them to. Dramas are not restrained by that, but if you've ever wondered why more comedies aren't mentioned for Oscars, it's because they're harder to do well, not because they're perceived as being inferior. Many of them are inferior to the dramas in a given year, that's true, but primarily because they fail at hitting their one objective. Add to the initial steep hill of just making a comedy Ben Stiller's challenge of making it a spoof of war movies and a satire of Hollywood, two things we've seen before but not together, and making his spoof play by the rules of a war movie instead of breaking them and creating a show business satire that is both incisive and inclusive, and you begin to see that while Tropic Thunder also gives you the biggest, most consistent laughs of 2008, it's also an incredibly accomplished motion picture, almost deceptively so. The capstone in all of this is the performance of Robert Downey, Jr. as Kirk Lazarus. He's an Australian chameleon, a winner of five Academy Awards. For his role in the war movie gone sour, Lazarus has his skin color changed so he can play the black sergeant Lincoln Osiris. See if you can spot where Downey ends and where Lazarus begins and then where Lazarus leaves off and Osiris takes over. It's a death-defying feat on several levels, but it works, holding the year's most audacious comedy together and making you laugh when the movie wants you to, over and over again. The year is not limited to ten films, and even though we don't think history will be as kind to 2008 as it will the crop from 2007, there are other movies over the past twelve months that deserve mention, ones that just missed the cut. Honorable Mention The Dark Knight
The Visitor
The Wrestler
The Reader
Vicky Cristina Barcelona
Doubt
Happy-Go-Lucky
Body of Lies
Burn After Reading
Roman de Gare

Comments

[abower]

i know you may not have wanted to look like you were "jumping on the bandwagon", but there is no justifiable reason that the dark knight shouldnt have been in the top 10. the film was groundbreaking in so many ways. not just because of the money it made and not just because of heath.

[Rick]

Let the flood of arguements for The Dark Knight stream in...

[Rick]

I look at it this way, though I can not speak for Colin, I think he is much more cerebral than many other critics, who are just fans of movies, which of course Colin is very much. I appreciate his often different take on movies and am often inspired to see films I would not have been at first sight. Thanks for the hard work again this year, Colin.

But like I mentioned above, let the complaints come in regarding The Dark Knight. As te joker said it best, "And here we go"...

[Get The Big Picture]

What can I say? I've seen The Dark Knight three times and found new problems with it each time. The script is in dire need of editing, entire characters are wasted (Lucius Fox), while others are used for stunt sympathy (Gordon), and there are a bunch of new characters we simply don't need, like the Chinese accountant, at least half the gangsters, and the rogue Wayne Enterprises employee.

For the second straight movie, Nolan failed to give Rachel Dawes a reason to exist. She's simply bait, again. Bruce Wayne mourned for about 90 seconds. The Two-Face arc came and went way too fast, feeling squeezed in to give the movie extra boom that it didn't need.

And all of that took away from Batman v. Joker, which is the only reason we're interested.

To me, the bottom line is this: Bale wasn't as good in this as he was in the first one, the film wasn't as singularly focused as the first one, and if not for Heath Ledger, it would be another above-average comic book movie. It's great because Ledger's great. But it's far from perfect, and since people want to believe it's one of the greatest films ever made, that's the measuring stick. It doesn't hold up to the arguments against it.

How was it groundbreaking? It used IMAX cameras? OK, well done. Next?

[SEAN]

Wait hold on dude your picks are pretty spot on for me I tended to agree with many but a couple I was kinda weary about it

But I rather not discuss why but rather ask why you left out 1 BIGGIE I know shouldve made the list somewhere and that film is .......REVOLUTIONARY ROAD!!!!!!

What Happen? Kate Winslet leading Globe nod's with Meryl Streep I believe, THAT IS A BIG ACCOMPLISHMENT!!!!

Also LEONARDO I'm hearing it is his best role to date EVER! Can you please respond I really like your opinions and thoughts and website and like to know your justification.......

THANKS

[Carv]

I actually agree with Colin that The Dark Knight doesn't belong in the top ten films of 2008. I, for one, liked Indiana Jones Blah Blah Blah more than Colin or most critics, but I wouldn't argue that my sentimental fondness counts as cinematic greatness. I would argue that Iron Man was tremendously successful, has none of The Dark Knight's plotting issues, and capitalized on a great year in the life of Robert Downey, Jr. In Bruges was damn good. I'm seeing Man on Wire tonight, and I look forward to seeing Slumdog Millionaire this week.

[Evan. G.]

Colin, this list and your response as to why you didn't include The Dark Knight is exactly why I continue to read you website nearly everyday. I agree almost completely with your top ten list and I give you a lot of respect for not putting the dark knight on there. You said what I've always though, without Ledger's performance this would just be another superhero film but since Heath died and his performance just happens to be great the dark knight is said to be " one of the greatest in the last decade" and I know people who've seen it nine times! Absolutely no comment on that.
You let people know that there were movies like In Bruges, Mongol, and Man on Wire out there this year and those films definitely deserve recognition that I don't feel they've gotten from movie going audiences, I'm not talking about critics here.
Overall wonderful article and list and keep doing what you're doing.

[Julian Francis]

I HATE YOU YOUR TERRIBLE YOU SHOULD BURN FOR NOT INCLUDING THE DARK NIGHT WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU!!! Yeah I'm just kidding. On that subject, I couldn't stand Batman Begins, but I did enjoy The Dark Night. For me that's an accomplishment, but it doesn't give it all the credit in the world.
I agree with your critique pretty much everywhere. I commend you for including Tropic Thunder. I thought it was so well put together for a film that could've been another brainless two hours.
The two hour rule on The Changeling was extremely well put. I loved that movie but Clint bit off more than he could chew and going on for that long didn't make it better. I'm pulling for Angelina in any award.
Your critique of Wall-E opened my eyes a bit bigger at it.
I know I hold my own on this one, but I think Cloverfield deserves recognition right now. It's definitely in my 10 ten and has been a great favorite of mine throughout the year. It amazed me in so many ways.