Ten years ago, our cinematic conversations didn’t revolve around Marvel and Netflix. Now those two monoliths dominate the narrative, and blockbusters dominate the year, instead of just the summer. The movie landscape looks different, and you can trace it back to this year.
Obviously Iron Man was released, so the Marvel Cinematic Universe began its industry takeover. But 2008 was when Netflix solidified its commitment to streaming, changing the industry in so many ways. You can blame the expansion of the summer blockbuster season to the whole year on Netflix for forcing the studios’ hands. In order to compete with streaming, studios can only afford to invest their money in movies with the potential for big returns. They can no longer subsist on the mid-budget movies that used to fill the colder months.
It’s only fitting then that two of 2008’s three best movies were blockbusters: The Dark Knight and WALL-E. They’re exemplars for how to use broad cinematic language to tell universal truths. But then the rest of my top movies is filled out with indies. The second best movie of the year may be the least expensive on the list. Greatness comes in many forms.
Top Ten
10. The Class: I haven’t seen anything else that French director Laurent Cantet has made, but if his other movies are anything like The Class, I need to remedy that immediately. This movie follows a white English teacher (François Bégaudeau, who wrote the memoir the movie was based on) teaching in a racially-mixed, interurban school. This isn’t Dangerous Minds or Freedom Writers; François’s goal isn’t inspiration but engagement. The movie shows him walking the line between discipline and mutual respect. Having worked on his side of the racial divide in a school, I can tell you that the conflicts that arise are just as frustrating as real life.
9. Anvil: The Story of Anvil: The title to this movie could not be more appropriate; this movie is indeed about the story of Anvil. So many critics called this a real-life This Is Spinal Tap when it was released. While it’s hard to argue with that epithet, it’s still not really enough of a descriptor. Anvil was the most heart-breaking movie of 2008, and not because the band never really achieved fame or success. No, it’s heart-breaking because this band still wants fame and success after all their failure.
8. In Bruges: Not enough movies are able to hold both comedy and tragedy equal within their run-times. We either get lower stakes because the movie really just wants your laughs, or the jokes are just window dressing to lighten up the mood every once in a while. In Bruges somehow commits fully to both, eliciting uproarious laughter one second and tears the next, over and over again. Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson are superb as bumbling hitmen with feelings, and Ralph Fiennes is a sinister yet empathetic mob boss. The real star is the Belgian town it all takes place in (pronounced “broozh”), with its fog and its canals, though the town isn’t as funny as the people.
7. Let the Right One In: There are some movies that go places you never would have dreamed of. Let the Right One In is such a movie. On the one hand, it’s a vampire movie, filled with similar tropes to what you expect. On the other, it’s a movie about children and trauma, viewed through a supernatural lens. It’s horrifically disturbing at points, but never anything less than true.
6. Slumdog Millionaire: The Best Picture winner at the 2009’s Oscars was my favorite movie of 2008 (until I saw the top movie on this list). I understood that the story was contrived, but the fairy-tale nature of it hooked me and reeled me in. Looking back, it’s easy to see how the movie and the circumstances surrounding its making, including the well-being of the child actors pulled from the slums, are troubling. But director Danny Boyle gives the voices of the story to the Indian actors, telling the story through their eyes rather than a white man’s or woman’s. It’s fantastical, but never nonsensical, and it still works on me, even though I’m ten years more jaded than I was when I first saw it.
5. Tell No One: Great mystery movies are few and far between, because it is too easy to see plot points coming, or the plot is too convoluted or contrived to continue caring. Tell No One is a perfect puzzle of a mystery movie, and it comes out of France from director Guillaume Canet, who has directed nothing else of note. That may be appropriate, because it’s hard to imagine that all the ideas packed into Tell No One left anything in Canet’s brain. The plot of the movie plays like a film noir, but one set in a lush, colorful dream world. You may see the ending coming, but I did not, and the story was rich enough that it did not matter either way.
4. Milk: Director Gus Van Sant (Good Will Hunting, Drugstore Cowboys) has directed 17 movies to date, but it seems that he reserves one movie per decade to be the movie that he pours his heart into. The ’80s had My Own Private Idaho with River Phoenix, the ’90s had Good Will Hunting, and the ’00s got Milk. Much of Milk, which is a biopic about Harvey Milk’s political rise and assassination, stays true to the biopic formula. But there are several scenes in which Van Sant’s own staging and cinematic eye elevate what could have been just a hagiography into art, including a campaign party montage that gets sexual and the assassination scene itself. Sean Penn’s performance as the first openly gay man in public office in America grounds the movie in its themes: freedom needs to be fought for, and the fight isn’t over.
3. The Dark Knight: The best superhero movie of all time is still The Dark Knight and, up until this year, it wasn’t close. The Nolan Batman movies all did something a little bit more with the concept of the superhero than any other attempt has. All three movies, but especially The Dark Knight, subsist on more than just plot and action: they feast on the very idea of heroism itself. It would be easy to dismiss The Dark Knight as only a showcase for Heath Ledger’s brilliance. But the movie itself is meticulously constructed to turn heroism and our expectations of our heroes upside-down.
2. Chop Shop: With the advent of unlimited special effects possibilities and the potential for sequels, you’d be forgiven for thinking that big-budget movies should be bastions for imagination and creativity. You can truly tell any story when money is no object, you might say. But history has taught us that the more dollars involved, the more reasons to say no. For this reason, even with all its budgetary limitations, independent film is the unlimited industry. When making money isn’t the goal, people’s stories get told that you would have never looked twice at before.
Chop Shop, by Iranian-American indie auteur Ramin Bahrani, is what happens when you believe any story is possible. Two Latino children, Ale and Isamar (played by Alejandro Polanco and a luminous Isamar Gonzales), struggling to survive on the streets of New York, would never be the stars of a studio tentpole. Their story of the American dream, saving up to buy a taco truck, would never be the plot of a blockbuster. The imagery Bahrani’s cinematography uses, especially in the last shot of pigeons soaring into the sky from the ground, could never be matched by the highest-tech computer effects. Chop Shop isn’t just indie cinema at its best; it’s cinema at its best.
1. WALL-E: Once in 2011 when I told a friend that Rango was my favorite movie of the year, he gave me an incredulous look and said, “An animated movie?” I’m not sure if the stigma is that animated movies are for kids or just that they don’t tell the same kinds of stories as live-action movies, but I’m here to tell you that animated movies are often far more imaginative. There’s a sense with animation that anything is possible, and there are no limits.
This has never been truer than with WALL-E. It’s not hyperbole to say that WALL-E changed the industry and expanded the boundaries for the kinds of stories animation could tell. There is a rich history in 2-D animation of using the full expanse of the wide-screen, but CGI had barely scratched the surface up to this point. Attempts with the form were clunky (Treasure Planet) or under-realized (Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within). I guess when this is the perception of CGI movies going for something big, then I should expect surprise when I rate them highly.
Usually you either have to skimp on the visuals or sacrifice the story, but WALL-E is beautiful in its story and its images. Normally, a movie that deals with robot loneliness in its first act and environmentalism in its second would not be appealing, but director Andrew Stanton (Finding Nemo, Finding Dory) and his Pixar animators find the pathos in the titular character’s cogs and gears, and we feel both his loneliness at the beginning and his hope when he meets the newer robot, EVE. A marriage of classic cinematic influences with a forward-looking story helps elevate the second act into more than just a screed against toxic wastefulness. It’s a vision for a way forward; you almost forget it comes from a computer.
Another Fifteen (alphabetical)
Ballast: A beautiful indie about the violence of poverty and broken homes.
Bolt: I was skeptical of this non-Pixar Disney offering, but it’s surprisingly strong.
Cloverfield: Somehow this turned into a franchise, when it feels more like a great, stand-alone one-off.
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button: Overwrought and overlong, yes, but that’s kind of the point?
The Edge of Heaven: Turkish-German director Fatih Akin returned to acclaim last year with the Golden Globe-winning In the Fade, so it’s worth going back to watch this little gem, about how happenstance becomes significant in one’s life story.
Forgetting Sarah Marshall: It will forever be known as the movie in which Jason Segel goes full-frontal for laughs in the opening scene, but this is a smart, soulful comedy that deserves more attention.
Gomorrah: It’s been adapted into a relatively acclaimed TV show on SundanceTV, but the movie is an evocative exploration of the Italian mafia’s impact on ordinary people in Naples.
Happy-Go-Lucky: A wonderful showcase for one of The Shape of Water‘s Oscar nominees, Sally Hawkins, as a grade-school teacher who is…well, you know.
Iron Man: Where the franchise began, and where the franchise was less focused on being a franchise and more focused on telling a contained story well.
Revolutionary Road: If you don’t like being emotionally drained, steer clear of this drama, starring Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio as a self-destructive 1950s married couple.
Shotgun Stories: Director Jeff Nichols’s debut, and as insightful a look at life in rural Arkansas as the Jennifer Lawrence-starring Winter’s Bone two years later.
Tropic Thunder: Ben Stiller has been able to do pretty much anything he wants to do in his career up to this point, so I’m glad he decided to make a war-movie parody that actually works.
Trouble the Water: New Orleans native Kimberly Rivers Roberts filmed Katrina from within the Ninth Ward, and it became this extraordinary document of how the devastation was set up to happen before the storm ever arrived.
The Visitor: A little white-saviory, but star Richard Jenkins is too empathetic an audience proxy to dismiss the movie outright.
The Wrestler: Director Darren Aronofsky (Black Swan, mother!) is usually more adventurous than this simple story of a pro-wrestler (Mickey Rourke) down on his luck, but it’s very effective thanks to its great cast, which also includes Evan Rachel Wood as his daughter and Marisa Tomei as a stripper that loves him and all his scars.
Future Top Tens
The Social Network
Toy Story 3
Inception
127 Hours
Tangled
Winter’s Bone
Exit Through the Gift Shop
The Secret in Their Eyes
The Kids Are All Right
The King’s Speech
Rango
Take Shelter
Kinyarwanda
The Tree of Life
The Artist
A Separation
Warrior
Battle Royale
Drive
Super 8
Zero Dark Thirty
The Perks of Being a Wallflower
The Dark Knight Rises
Silver Linings Playbook
Amour
Chronicle
Django Unchained
Moonrise Kingdom
Holy Motors
Life of Pi
12 Years a Slave
Before Midnight
Her
Inside Llewyn Davis
Gravity
Captain Phillips
The World’s End
Short Term 12
American Hustle
The Past
Selma
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
Whiplash
Inherent Vice
Two Days, One Night
Boyhood
Guardians of the Galaxy
Ida
Snowpiercer
Blue Ruin
Coulda Been a Contender 