Another year, another disclaimer: This list is subject to change. Another misgiving: Why only 10? Something longer - longer than the 15 unranked movies I eventually chose - would include "The Savages," Tamara Jenkins's piquant study of middle-class, middle-age-ish underachiever narcissism; and both Charles Ferguson's "No End in Sight" and Barbet Schroeder's "Terror's Advocate," two excellent documentary portraits of, respectively, the current Iraq war's moral monstrosity and a lawyer who has defended history's monsters.
It would also include "Enchanted," which for certain moviegoers must have been like rediscovering Julie Andrews. The movie is silly and messily sweet, but I fell in love with Amy Adams, and there may be no falling out.
This list, in its arbitrariness, does not contain the bananas first hour of Craig Brewer's sexual-racial exorcism "Black Snake Moan," with a half-nekkid Christina Ricci and a rarely better Samuel L. Jackson. Or the apocalyptic essence of "Southland Tales," Richard Kelly's brilliant disaster. Or "Linda Linda Linda," Nobuhiro Yamashita's shaken soda can of a movie about four high school girls learning to play a Japanese punk song for a rock show. It was bliss, and nobody saw it or the other two movies, even though both of those had Mr. Sexy Back, Justin Timberlake.
My list does contain the critical consensus pick, "No Country for Old Men." It's rigorously formal, but these days you need storytelling engineers to raise your pulse. The Coens' movie has wit, Roger Deakins's panoramas and portraits, Javier Bardem's Dutch-Boy boogeyman, and, in Tommy Lee Jones, a dismayed soul that's uncharacteristic of the filmmakers. The ending baffled some people. For me it was a clincher. The world, by 1980, has descended into inexorable chaos - over a pile of cash - and all the wizened lawman can do is shake his head and sip his Sanka. This also was one of the few bloodbaths that didn't make me feel like a corpse while I watched it.
Indeed, this is the year the horror film went from unwitting self-parody to ugly self-cannibalism. That seemed even more apparent after multiple viewings of David Fincher's epic "Zodiac," a patiently built correction of the flashy sadism that his own "Se7en" helped spawn. Driven by the suspense born of unparalleled craftsmanship and the cynical humor that comes from true world-weariness, "No Country," "Zodiac," and Tim Burton's slasher musical, "Sweeney Todd" shame the malevolent posturing of a "Hostel" or "Saw IV" or any other piece of hackwork (forgive me; I've already forgotten your names) that the studios abashedly keep away from critics.
But forget us pesky scribblers, more kids than last year nixed the gore parades and stayed home to fondle their Wiis instead. For testosterone junkies and junkie Classics dudes aroused by the steroidal bellicosity of crypto-gay smackdowns, "300" was the movie of the year. I have the unprintable e-mails telling me to eat my codpiece that prove it.
Whether or not you were partial to comedy about geeks who freaked, Judd Apatow was the man of the year, having put his barcode on "Superbad," co-written "Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story," and written and directed "Knocked Up."
That was the pregnancy movie everyone saw. Cristian Mungiu's "4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days" was the one fewer people will be able to bring themselves to see. Another staggering realist crest of the Romanian new wave, the film opens here next year and brings us the unhappy story of a woman who tries to arrange an illegal abortion for her roommate in 1987, toward the end of Nicolae Ceausescu's dictatorship. With chilling visual stillness, unstinting detail, and some wrenching performances, Mungiu's movie isn't about abortion per se. He's made a heartbreaking movie about how society and politics can strengthen the bond between marginal women, about how there are some things sisters shouldn't have to do for themselves.
Between the two, "Knocked Up" is the easier movie to talk about. It's been revisited, rehashed, and re-analyzed (by me, too) so often that its illusory depth acquired a fascinating realness. Questions of what was real and where to find reality were persistent this year. "Disturbia" was ersatz "Rear Window," and "Transformers" was ersatz "Trans- formers." Both starred Shia LaBeouf, who - don't tell Vanity Fair - feels to me like an ersatz star. (VF declared him the new - um, ersatz - Tom Hanks.) Yet both his movies made real money, so take that, me. Some adult frequenters of megaplexes and artplexes searching for something authen- tic thought they'd found it in "Atonement," phony art about phony art.
One satisfied customer left a sold-out show of "No Country for Old Men" certain that he'd seen a "real movie." He wasn't wrong. But I wonder whether he got to see Abderrahmane Sissako's "Bamako" during its brief run at the Museum of Fine Arts, in February. This is a courtroom drama of sorts set in a dusty Malian village courtyard. The African people have put the World Bank and International Monetary Fund on mock trial. Their crime is debt repayment. All the didactic finger-pointing you'd expect never quite occurs. Sissako extracts damning, ironic art from timeliness and topicality. His great weapon is the first-person voice - the Africans speak on their own behalf - and the movie discreetly asks a demoralizing question: Is anybody listening?
Sissako could eventually become heir to the mantle vacated by his fellow African folk lyricist, the great Ousmane Sembene, who died this year. We also lost Antonioni and Bergman within a day of each other, and their spirits live on, amazingly enough, in two dissimilar Asian directors: Thailand's Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Taiwan's Tsai Ming-liang, both of whom gain thrilling artistic momentum with each movie and, in a perfect world, should be gaining bigger, more besotted American audiences.
Apichatpong's fifth film, "Syndromes and a Century," is a tremendous philosophical entertainment, non-narrative in nature, and thus hard to explain. Reincarnation, pollution, urban sprawl, lustful marriage proposals, a singing dentist, a decaying environment: The movie quietly finds humor in future shock. And Apichatpong is so abundantly skilled at braiding romantic intoxication, metaphysical wonder, and ecological doom that all there is to say is "Mercy, Mercy Me."
Tsai's "I Don't Want to Sleep Alone" is an impeccably composed pop ballad about slumber and sex. A handful of lovelorn youngish adults in electric-dank Kuala Lumpur share an itinerant mattress. Eventually someone's feelings get hurt, that ballad simmers into opera, and what began as a cosmic sexual crossword puzzle becomes the second most emotionally all-consuming movie of the year.
The first for me is Emanuele Crialese's "Golden Door," which reached back 100 years to find an Italian family emigrating to the United States via Ellis Island. You come to understand that getting into this country legally has always been a surreal nightmare. The movie's power is strangely, almost exclusively cinematic. Crialese and cinematographer Agnes Godard oscillate between dreamy symbolism (milk and money) and physical harshness. Until I saw this movie, I'd somehow forgotten that imaginatively deployed gorgeousness can be enough to rip your heart out.
Julia Loktev gave us a modern horror movie that jumped from student-prank exploitation to Carl Dreyer existential with the press of a button. "Day Night Day Night" is about faith, conviction, doubt, and stellar camerawork. It's also about what happens when the bottom falls out on your plans and the gates of heaven never open up. Luisa Williams plays Loktev's ambiguous heroine. Allegedly, she's a nonprofessional, but she gives a performance of such gathering feeling that, come the pulled-rug of an ending, you feel hustled. Where did these two women come from? And why can't I stop thinking about their movie?
If you see only one more film about a toxic man-eating monster that scares the pants off an Asian country, make it "The Host." Bong Joon-ho's suspense comedy is Steven Spielberg doing a live-action anime version of a Buster Keaton picture, which is to say it's just as good with the sound off. The film works as an eco-allegory. It works as an absurdist family comedy. I laughed. I jumped. I wanted to go to Target and buy Oscars for Bong and all his lead actors.
Every couple of years brings a new
If we spent half as much time thinking about our guilty past as Germany does, we'd probably have a pretty good movie or two about, say, slavery or the Civil War. Of course, we'd be lucky if that film were half as good as "The Lives of Others," which won the foreign-language film Oscar in February. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck crafted a rousing, beautifully acted emotional thriller about the years just before and just after the Stasi's demise. The movie gave us the late Ulrich Mühe as a stooge of infinite sadness and Sebastian Koch as a sex-bomb playwright. And the unforeseen silver-lining epilogue was like winning the lottery without realizing you bought a ticket.
I actually did buy a ticket to "Eastern Promises." In fact, I bought two. And this sleazy yuletide exercise in whether good can come from evil delivers the goods. The Russian accents are barely authentic (especially yours, Vincent Cassel). But Viggo Mortensen is beguiling as a tattooed question mark, and the director, David Cronenberg, despite having nothing profound to say this time, still manages to achieve blistering profundity. I point you both to each of the conversations that Jerzy Skolimowski, Sinead Cusack, and the fierce Naomi Watts share and, of course, to the now-legendary tussle between Mortensen and two thugs in a bathhouse, which is so ingenious it could be taught both at boot camps and Juilliard.
One of the year's most unexpected bright spots was the reappearance of Charles Burnett's "Killer of Sheep" after 30 years of being the movie that wasn't there. Hauntingly made on a shoestring (it was Burnett's UCLA thesis film) and showcasing the livelong days of a make-do south Los Angeles family, Burnett's debut has astonishing images that suggest the literary power of pictures (droopy-dog masks, broke-down cars, a sad slow dance) to amplify life in black America. In the movie's telescope are post-Rodney King LA and post-Katrina New Orleans. This certainly is one of the greatest thesis movies ever. But I do have one burning question unanswered in the tons of adulatory press the film has received. Charles, did you get an A?
With American movies becoming increasingly indifferent to how they look, it was invigorating to get new movies from youngish directors who truly cared about framing and composition. While 81-year-old Sidney Lumet was off getting loose with hand-held digital cameras (for the steely "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead"), Paul Thomas Anderson was digging into a titanic 35-millimeter spectacle about an oilman building an empire across California.
Anchored by Daniel Day-Lewis's uncanny spiritual rapture (acting seems a woefully inadequate term), "There Will Be Blood" aspires to tell the story of American capitalism and American evangelism by wedding Erich von Stroheim's unforgettable recklessness and Stanley Kubrick's late interest in full-tilt human madness. As any couples counselor could tell you, the marriage, while weird and very funny, is dysfunctional. More than any American movie I saw this year, this "Blood" has guts.
"Grindhouse" has more actual blood and more actual guts. Who knows how many ketchup trees were cut down to make Robert Rodriguez's half of this mismarketed trashsterpiece. Rodriguez's "Planet Terror" is the intermittently terrific first course. And the ensuing three fake horror-flick trailers were hilarious palette cleansers for "Death Proof," Quentin Tarantino's vehicular dessert.
They've since parted ways, living on separate video-store shelves. (Presumably, they got joint custody of the trailers.). But once upon a time they were together, and this happy family gave me and my friends one of the best nights we've had in a movie theater. When "Death Proof" ended with its sped-up beat-down and girl-to-girl-to-girl high-five, I flew out of my seat. It was an involuntary response.
It's a lot to ask, but I'd like more movies to make me airborne in 2008.
Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com. For more on movies, go to boston.com/ae/ movies/blog.
