Here is a brief review (and some key information on what other people thought) of every movie released in the U.S. in 2008 that I’ve seen as of the eve of the Oscar telecast.

I’ll count down from the film I liked least to the one I liked most. While this bears some relationship to a ranking by “best” (I’m quite sure that my favorite film was the best film, too, for instance), any critic who thinks they can really rank films by objective quality is kidding themselves. (In fact, once you separate masterpieces from the rest, any notion that there’s any kind of objective “better than” is a mistake. But that’s a screed for another time.)

For each film, I’ve named the writer(s) and director and given three other pieces of information:

• “IMDB” is its user rating on IMDB.com. For those of you who aren’t users, 6.7 is average, 7.5 is a very solid score, 7.8 downright impressive, and 8.0 or better is Magic.
• “Crit” is its ranking among critics based on mentions in Top 10 lists. The raw data is from MCN (Movie City News), but I’ve massaged and corrected it. NR means not in the top 100. (During the year, I use Metacritic to get a sense of the degree of critical enthusiasm, but once you get the Top 10 lists that information becomes largely redundant.)
• “RT” is its Rotten Tomato score (the percentage of critics who liked it). Comparing this to the Top 10 ranking can be very informative.

Why do I bother with all that? Because I have tried to explain my reaction to each movie relative to everyone else’s. In fact, I’m not sure that an individual reaction to a film, without such context, has much meaning at all, since it basically assumes that the reaction of the critic is universal. Ha!

So here are 36 movies I’ve seen this year (most in the theater, and a few – numbers 1, 2, 3, 6, 8, and 14—more than once). I liked and would recommend them all. This is not so strange: I just don’t bother seeing movies that aren’t well received by either critics or viewers, I like every kind of movie, and I have the neurological gift of enjoying what’s good about a movie without letting its flaws spoil the overall experience (I can effectively “firewall” the parts that didn’t work for me and enjoy the parts that do). I’m proud to say that I merely liked only one movie that everyone loved; I wish you all similar success.

There are no spoilers here at all, I think.

(Some movies I haven’t seen yet, ranked by combination IMDB and Critics Top 10: Waltz With Bashir, The Edge of Heaven, My Winnipeg, Hunger, Encounters at the End of the World, Wendy and Lucy, The Class, Boy A, Frozen River, Young@Heart, Tropic Thunder, Tell No One, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, Kung Fu Panda, Funny Games, Still Life, Burn After Reading, Bigger Stronger Faster, Pineapple Express, Secret Life of the Grain, JCVD, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Reprise, Standard Operating Procedure, Paranoid Park.)

36. Miss Pettigrew Lives For a Day (David Magee and Simon Beaufoy adapting Winifred Watson / Bharat Nalluri). IMDB: 7.2. Crit: NR. RT: 77. A thoroughly entertaining trifle that really doesn’t succeed in making any of its plot points truly credible.

35. Body of Lies (William Monahan adapting David Ignatius / Ridley Scott). IMDB: 7.4. Crit: NR. RT: 51. I don’t regret seeing this on the big screen, as it’s a solid thriller. It has a very unusual structure which I appreciate intellectually, but I’m not sure they made it quite work emotionally; hence it’s a classic “whole is less than sum of the parts” movie.

34. Quantum of Solace (Paul Haggis, Neal Purvis, and Robert Wade based on Ian Fleming / Marc Forster). IMDB: 7.0. Crit: NR. RT: 65. Picks up exactly where Casino Royale ends, so watch or re-watch that first. Another solid movie with some terrific set pieces; my main problem was that the plot seemed way too complicated for the payoff it provided. A plot this twisty should have some “oh my God, that’s what’s going on!” moments, rather than settling for “OK, I get it” (or worse, “I think I get it—who was he again?”).

33. Happy-Go-Lucky (Mike Leigh). IMDB: 7.2. Crit: #9. RT: 92. This was the movie that critics loved more than audiences, and I’m with the audiences. The scenes with Sally Hawkins and Eddie Marsan as her driving instructor are absolutely brilliant, but the rest ranges from the merely solid to the unconvincing (her first date with her new beau, although I know there were critics who loved that).

32. 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days (Cristian Mungiu). IMDB: 8.0. Crit: #7. RT: 97. Incredibly powerful stuff, but I think that the director’s choice to use long shots with a stationary camera is demonstrably wrong and turned a potential masterpiece into something much less engaging. A neutral directorial style would allow the camera to follow the action exactly the way the human eye does; locking it down is as artificial as showing off fancy camera moves. So we’re always reminded that we’re watching a movie, which is exactly what he says he wanted to avoid by choosing that style. I know that both critics and audiences disagree with me, so this reaction of mine may well be a quirk of my admittedly wacky visual processing. See for yourself.

31. Dreams With Sharp Teeth (Erik Nelson). IMDB: 8.2 (on 50 votes!) Crit: NR. RT: 94. Excellent documentary on writer Harlan Ellison whose only shortcoming is a failure to convey to the naïve exactly why he’s so great. Ten minutes of talking head time with some perceptive literary critics would have helped a lot. But Ellison’s an unforgettable character, and if you’ve ever liked his fiction, rent this.

30. The Spiderwick Chronicles (Karey Kirkpatrick, David Berenbaum, and John Sayles adapting Tony DiTerlizzi and Holly Black / Mark Waters) . IMDB: 6.9. Crit: NR. RT: 79. A young adult fantasy that comes damn close to completely transcending the inevitable familiarity of its material. I actually liked it better than the last Harry Potter movie, thanks in large part to one of the most satisfying eucatastrophes in recent cinema.

29. Rachel Getting Married (Jenny Lumet / Jonathan Demme). IMDB: 7.4. Crit: #11. RT: 87. A lot like Happy-Go-Lucky in its reception. It’s 50% a terrific movie with tremendous performances, and 50% nothing more than a really great wedding video, which is to say that acres of screen time are devoted to seeing people toast the couple, sing, and dance. I found myself much more engaged by the former than the latter (except, of course, for Anne Hatheway’s wedding toast from hell), but your mileage may vary.

28. Vicky Christina Barcelona (Woody Allen). IMDB: 7.5. Crit: #20. RT: 82. So thoroughly entertaining that I have nothing negative to say about the execution; I just didn’t think it was that deep or thought-provoking. Some critics did, obviously.

27. The Band’s Visit (Eran Kolirin). IMDB: 7.7. Crit: #55. RT: 98. Wonderful understated character drama. Avoid only if you frequently complain a movie is “slow.”

26. The Bank Job (Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais / Roger Donaldson). IMDB: 7.5. Crit: #72. RT: 78. I have to start making contemporaneous notes on the good-not-great films I see early in the year! I recall that there were lots of non-routine aspects to this very solid thriller; I’d see it again in a minute (in part because I’ve managed to forget what they were).

25. The Visitor (Thomas McCarthy). IMDB: 7.9. Crit: #13. RT: 91. If I’d been 100% sold on the transformation of Richard Jenkins’ character, this would have ranked much higher, but a little part of me was always stepping outside the story and wondering if it were really possible (and not because of any weakness in the script or acting, I think; I just know too much, or think I know too much, about the fundamental unmalleability of character). That’s my only quibble with a movie that was otherwise justly acclaimed.

24. The Reader (David Hare adapting Bernhard Schlink / Stephen Daldry). IMDB: 7.8. Crit: #35. RT: 60. I’ve blogged a lot defending this movie from those who hated it for not doing what it wasn’t trying to do. It’s still not Oscar-worthy, though; it’s actually not about the Big Issues of the Holocaust but about our tendency to not know or even not address them. I may have liked this much more if the trailer hadn’t given away every plot point of the movie’s first half.

23. Timecrimes (Nacho Vigalondo). IMDB: 7.3. Crit: NR. RT: 85. No emotional weight at all to this Spanish science fiction mind-scrambler, but otherwise a dark delight and the best adaptation of a Philip K. Dick 1950’s short story that he never wrote. Can’t wait for the remake by fellow Dickhead David Cronenberg (whose Videodrome, of course, is the best adaptation of a 60’s PKD novel that Dick never wrote).

21. Defiance (Clayton Frohman and Edward Zwick adapting Nechama Tec / Zwick). IMDB: 7.4. Crit: #93. RT: 54. Sometimes a movie makes the middle of a list like this not because it mixes great strengths with clear weaknesses, but because it’s just pretty darn good across the board, but not great. (In other words, as John Stewart would say, I got nothing. Except to mention, also Stewart-like, that I’m Jewish—and seeing Jews kick ass is probably helping my rating here.)

21. Iron Man (Mark Fergus, Hawk Ostby, Art Marcum, and Matt Holloway based on Stan Lee, Don Heck, Larry Lieber, and Jack Kirby / Jon Favreau). IMDB: 8.0. Crit: #17. RT: 93. It speaks to the strength of the year that a movie I liked this much can’t crack the top 20. The opening is a little too grim and the climactic battle with the bad guy a big letdown, but in between it’s just terrific.

20. Changeling (J. Michael Straczynski / Clint Eastwood). IMDB: 8.1 (#232 in Top 250). Crit: #43. RT: 61. I think critics thought that Angelina Jolie’s character was too contemporized, but that bothered me only a little and most audiences even less. It has an unconventional structure that works perfectly and one of the creepiest and psychologically interesting villains in recent cinema. JMS was robbed of a screenplay nomination; he did original research into the true story and apparently hewed much closer to the real story than most such adaptations.

19. Frost/Nixon (Peter Morgan adapting self / Ron Howard). IMDB: 8.1 (#245 in Top 250). Crit: #12. RT: 92. It’s absolutely thrilling when it’s faithful to the actual broadcast (Michael Sheen as Frost); I was disappointed when it strays. For all the brilliance of Frank Langella’s Nixon, it’s not the Nixon who was on TV, whose admissions of guilt had a certain perverse self-lacerating spirit (bordering at times on glee) that’s wholly absent in this re-imagining. I have mixed feelings about the invention of the late-night phone call, but I was very much let down when it was referenced again at the end.

18. Cloverfield (Drew Goddard / Matt Reaves). IMDB: 7.5. Crit: #49. RT: 76. Either the hand-held camera gimmick works for you, or it doesn’t. I simply thought it was the best monster movie I’d seen in forever. Unlike some, I thought the amount of time spent establishing the characters was just right, and I thought they were just likeable enough to root for without being so likeable that their occasional stupidity would be unbelievable.

17. Hellboy II: The Golden Army (Guillermo del Toro and Mike Mignola adapting Mignola / del Toro). IMDB: 7.4. Crit #83. RT: 88. Why is it that every comic-book movie sequel is better than the first installment? (Because they’ve dispensed with the origin story, that’s why.) Hellboy rivals Spiderman as the franchise that was most improved the second time out. This has the engaging character work of Iron Man and adds a hefty dose of stunning visual imagination. Can’t wait for The Hobbit!

16. Gran Torino (Nick Schenk and Dave Johansson / Clint Eastwood). IMDB: 8.4 (#83 in Top 250). Crit: #30. RT: 79. It’s not exactly nuanced, it’s in some ways formulaic and predictable, and the supporting performances are inconsistent. Given those caveats, it’s pretty damn terrific. When a movie makes you laugh and makes you cry, I don’t feel a need to try to explain away its excellence. (If you are taken out a story by lack of nuance, by apparent formula, and by off moments in acting, then this isn’t going to work for you. That’s why there’s no objective sense of the quality of movies that are less than perfect, because different people react differently to different flaws. If historical inaccuracy doesn’t bother you the way it bothers me, then Frost/Nixon is higher on your list. Valid!)

15. Doubt (John Patrick Shanley adapting self). IMDB: 7.9. Crit: #22. RT: 77. I’ve had spirited discussions about the unknown truths behind the story here, which is something you can say about only a tiny fraction of movies. And is Merryl Streep ever less than terrific? Her character here, by the way, is far more complex and sympathetic than the trailer would lead you to believe.

14. The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, David S. Goyer, and Jonathan Nolan based on Bob Kane / C. Nolan). IMDB: 9.0 (#6 in Top 250). Crit: #2. RT: 94. Strange that someone who regards Nolan as the best director in the world and who bought Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns when it came out should have this ranked so low, eh? It’s incredibly powerful entertainment but I’m not sure it actually says anything about terrorism and vigilantism other than that they’re fraught with questions that are tough to answer. And I’m bothered by a few plot elisions. But, yeah, wow.

13. I’ve Loved You So Long (Philippe Claudel). IMDB: 7.8. Crit: #26. RT: 90. Incredibly powerful and deeply moving French drama, best appreciated if you know nothing of the story. Only a few first-time-director missteps kept this out of my top 10. Kristin Scott Thomas was robbed of an Oscar nomination for a performance I thought was bested only by Winslet (see below) and Streep.

12. Synechdoche, New York (Charlie Kaufman). IMDB: 8.0. Crit: #15. RT: 62. What’s remarkable about this is that its brand of arealism (to coin a term) seems to be its own. It’s not surrealism, which involves a rejection or denial of rationality and an embrace of the irrational. SNY’s roots are not in the irrational but the hyper-rational, the subjective mind that makes more sense of the world than the world actually has; the entire film seems to be one concretized metaphor after another. Surrealism in its pure form is not “about” anything other than a challenge to the notion of “aboutness, ” but SNY has enough “aboutness” for a dozen ordinary movies; while surrealism has as much or more anti-text as sub-text, this is nothing but sub-text. Surrealism is deeply disturbing when done right, but SNY is heartbreaking and wildly entertaining and not all that disturbing (unless you are disturbed by being saddened enormously). This was originally rated much higher, and I could see it going as high as #7 on a reviewing. Right now, it’s suffering a bit from the very uniqueness of its approach, which is so persuasive when encountered but seems harder to relate to with the distance of memory.

11. The Wrestler (Robert D. Siegel / Darren Aronofsky). IMDB: 8.5 (#59 in Top 250). Crit: #5. RT: 98. At no point does anything happen in this story that’s at all surprising. I happen to value story surprise highly (and I’m easily surprised, too), which is why I think I love it less than most others. But everything else you’ve heard about this is true. For instance, you could extract the two scenes of Mickey Rourke behind the deli counter as an absolute textbook of brilliant screenwriting, directing, and acting.

10. Revolutionary Road (Justin Haythe adapting Richard Yates / Sam Mendes). IMDB: 7.8. Crit: #19. RT: 71. The standard negative minority report on this is “Oh my God, affluent suburban couples in the 50’s were actually sometimes profoundly unhappy? I had no idea! And, besides, the only reason the now-dated novel is still a masterpiece is the prose, which of course doesn’t translate.” Well, first of all, this is not just a portrait of an unhappy couple, it’s the story of a couple that recognizes that unhappiness and tries to take radical action to fix it. And that is not a cliché. The occasional critic or viewer who misses that is just turning their brain off because they’ve decided they know what the movie is about after the first twenty minutes. And secondly, there are ways to translate exquisite prose. In this case, we have the best cinematography in a mainstream movie this year, my favorite score since LOTR (Thomas Newman channeling his inner Philip Glass), and terrific performances including the now-underrated Leonardo DiCaprio (robbed of an Oscar nom) and Kate Winslet in the best turn by an actress since Charlize Theron in Monster. I was profoundly moved and could imagine seeing this many times.

9. Man on Wire (James Marsh). IMDB: 8.1. Crit: #8. RT: 100. Not much to add to the universal praise from critics and audiences. I know a few people who aren’t smitten with the subject (tightrope walker Philippe Petit), but if that’s your problem I may not like you, either.

8. Wall-E (Andrew Stanton, Pete Docter, and Jim Reardon / Stanton). IMDB: 8.6 (#40 in Top 250). Crit: #1. RT: 96. I’m in the camp that thinks it gets a bit less brilliant once they get aboard the cruise ship. And am I the only one that realizes they stole borrowed the couch-potatoes-in-chairs riff from a fifty-year-old Mad magazine parody? If that had struck me as wildly original and up-to-date instead (as I’m sure it did many), would this have ranked higher? Of course it would have, which is why the notion of objective rankings is so much hooey. A movie doesn’t exist on a strip of film or on a screen, it exists in your brain, which is already full of other stuff.

7. Slumdog Millionaire (Simon Beaufoy adapting Vikas Swarup / Danny Boyle). IMDB: 8.7 (#34 in Top 250). Crit: #4. RT: 94. The rare folks complaining that the story is preposterous are of course missing the point: it’s a fairy tale, and supposed to be incredible. Note: every single review of this, even the briefest capsule, reveals a major structural plot point. If you haven’t seen it, try to stay naïve.

6. In Bruges (Martin McDonagh). IMDB: 8.1 (#204 in Top 250). Crit: #25. RT: 81. This was the first movie I absolutely fell in love with this year, and the last I wrote up for this blog post. It’s violent, profane, gorgeous to look at, wildly comic, and includes a remarkably funny and at times deeply moving performance by Colin Farrell. The ending stretches credulity in its ironic neatness, but (like with Slumdog) it’s supposed to: the movie achieves the sort of “undue coherence” of story that science fiction critic John Clute has noted as a classic marker of tales of the fantastic and which he tellingly finds in other stories that have no overt fantastic element. Did McDonagh intend all that? Well, given that we’re told again and again that “being in Bruges is like being in a fairy tale,” damn straight he did. What’s astonishing and a little scary is that my favorite written-by-director movie of the year was also a debut in both categories; while that sometimes marks the start of a tremendous career, it can also be the sign of an artist who has already said everything he has to say (it took Neil Labute less then a decade to go from In the Company of Men to the Wicker Man remake). Cross your fingers and hope for the best.

5. A Christmas Tale (Arnaud Desplechin and Emmanuel Bourdieu / Desplechin). IMDB: 7.5. Crit: #14. RT: 86. The truth is that we almost never go to the movies to see a mimesis of real life; it’s hard enough to capture the depth and complexity of real people and their relationships in a novel, let alone a film. Well, this French black-comic masterpiece about a paradoxically sunny dysfunctional family feels more like real life than anything else I saw this year, and no other movie comes even remotely close (probably because no one else was actually trying. Let’s hear it for ambition!). For example: there’s a “subplot” involving a love triangle that I almost never think about when describing the movie to others, and when I did recall it recently, for a tiny moment I couldn’t place what movie I was thinking of because my brain was searching for a movie that was all about that rather than having it in the corners and empty spaces of another story altogether.
This has the lowest IMDB rating of any movie in my top 16; I’m not sure whether that’s because the average viewer doesn’t want a movie to be this overstuffed, or because they didn’t like some of the unconventional storytelling techniques, or (most likely) because they found the characters a bit off-putting, which is to say that they were bothered by seeing such completely fucked-up people refuse to be miserable. I guess it helps if you know some problematical personalities, and actually like them. You do, don’t you?

4. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (Eric Roth and Robin Swicord adapting F. Scott Fitzgerald / David Fincher). IMDB: 8.3 (#126 in Top 250). Crit: #6. RT: 71. Love at first sight, with enormous obstacles to overcome before it’s consummated, and clearly no hope for ultimate happiness; yet for a time, a sweet spot of bliss that is all the more precious for the knowledge of its transience. That’s one of the most powerful story arcs around (and you should know right away whether it speaks to you). What Benjamin Button does is invent an incredibly powerful fantastic metaphor for that, one which strikes me as ineffably right (the exact opposite reaction that Ebert had, curiously). Technically brilliant, of course.

3. Let the Right One In (John Ajvide Lindqvist adapting self / Tomas Alfredson). IMDB: 8.2 (#191 in top 250). Crit: #10. RT: 97. Any time you combine disparate genres, you run the risk of only pleasing the small set of viewers (or readers) who are fans of both. Combine classic genre horror with a beautifully sensitive and acutely observed character tale of adolescence, and the likeliest outcome is that the horror-heads will be bored by the sensitive beauty and the fans of acutely observed character will just go “ick!” at the horror. What’s happened with this Swedish import (as you can tell by the critical and IMDB ratings) is that anyone who is a fan of either genre horror or beautifully observed adolescence tales seems to love it—and that’s just about everybody. The result is a movie that doesn’t just challenge the definition of horror as a genre but comes nigh to dismantling it altogether. Which is to say that you could construct a perfectly reasonable and critically useful definition of horror which would place Let the Right One In close to the center of the genre, and another equally useful definition which would obviously and incontrovertibly exclude it.
And that’s maybe one of three or four completely different angles I could have addressed in a review this short. See this movie.

2. Milk (Dustin Lance Black / Gus Van Sant). IMDB: 8.1. Crit: #3. RT: 93. Apparently almost nothing in this movie has been altered , invented, or re-arranged to “make the story better,” and only Milk’s polyamory has been left out to make him more accessible. Every other film “based on a true story” should take notes. Sean Penn is just jaw-droppingly phenomenal, the supporting cast is terrific, and the numerous critics who point to Van Sant’s direction as the key to the movie’s greatness rather than Black’s script are so obviously full of shit that I’m embarrassed for them (the reason why we had to wait so long for a Milk biopic was that many screenwriters tried their hand and failed, while only Black had the insight to start the story later and end it earlier than any traditional biopic would). The true story is of course as inspiring and heart-wrenching as anything in recent American history, and the movie does it absolutely full justice.

1. The Fall (Dan Gilroy, Nico Soutanakis, and Tarsem Singh adapting Valeri Petrov / Singh). IMDB: 8.0. Crit: #44. RT: 61. Everyone agrees that this tale of an injured silent-movie stuntman improvising a fantasy story for a Romanian immigrant girl is one of the most visually stunning movies of all time. The disagreement is over how well the tale-within-a-tale works. Based on IMDB user ratings, it appears as if a majority of viewers (at least 55%) fully understand that the fantasy tale is intentionally incoherent and remarkably reflects its teller’s troubled state of mind and the imagination (and limited understanding of English) of his listener. This continual interplay between frame and story is bursting with wit and humor and deep feeling, and shows a masterful understanding of the way that Story works as a collaboration between teller and listener and how its power to affect us emotionally derives from that relationship.
Another 35% or so don’t quite get all of this, but would still recommend the movie because the visuals are stunning and they get enough of the frame / fantasy relationship to make the embedded tale interesting enough. And about 10% give it thumbs down because they so completely miss the point, so expect the fantasy tale to be The Princess Bride without any real reference to or interaction with its frame, that they find it unengaging and boring.
What’s remarkable is that the critics seem to break down almost backwards: 10 / 50 / 40 instead of 55 / 35 / 10. I can think of only one explanation for this disturbing fact: the vast majority of critics can only deal with the challenge of seeing and passing judgment on so many movies by deciding beforehand what each movie must be about and relentlessly seeing them only in those terms. And, yeah, as an attempt to do The Princess Bride with better scenery, it does kind of suck. Kinbote’s notes to “Pale Fire” are lousy criticism, too.
There are lots of movies (and books) that get me choked up. There are some that make me cry. There are a very few whose emotional payoff is so powerful that I start to whimper several lines of dialogue beforehand, in anticipation of the tears I’m about to shed. These are the same movies and books that can move me to tears just thinking or talking about their emotional climaxes (“hey, Boo”; “I’m going to save you.” “You already have.”). This is one of those tales. See it on the biggest screen (and in the highest resolution) you can wangle.