The year's best shook our complacency

On screen over the past 12 months the most exciting leading man was a robot, presidential politics offered a yawn and a whimper, and entertainment was serious business

''THE EDGE OF HEAVEN''

It would have been tough for the movies to top reality in 2008. Where this year was actually momentous, exciting, and strange, the movies often settled for being merely solemn - which was neither enlightening nor entertaining. The super-successful "The Dark Knight" was solemn, but it was also fun, something increasingly, distressingly absent from the year-end movie-going season. If a film thrills or makes us laugh, how will the Academy notice it?

The last weeks of the year have become as much a dumping ground as the early ones. The difference, of course, is that in January the studios know they're dropping manure. In December, they hope Oscar voters will kindly hold their noses.

This year was memorable for taking Paul Newman, Charlton Heston, and Heath Ledger and giving us back Mickey Rourke, in "The Wrestler," and Robert Downey Jr., who twice in one season (as Iron Man and in "Tropic Thunder") reminded us that frivolity will get you everywhere. But only if you mean it - are you listening Coen brothers? (They burned while filming.)

The year also gave us more movies about the Holocaust and Nazis than any movie theater should have to handle. Good (Claude Miller's "A Secret"), bad ("The Boy in the Striped Pajamas"), and testosterone-soaked ("Defiance," which opens here in January). In "Valkyrie," Tom Cruise fights the Nazis; in "The Reader," Kate Winslet is a Nazi.

But the biggest problem with the movies in 2008 is that you wouldn't know that's where we lived. Thank God for independent filmmaking, which as matters of artistic principle and budgetary constraint, have tethered us to here and now. (This is a bad time to be distributing independent movies, with several important studios shuttering their doors, but a terrific cultural time to be making them.)

Oddly, we got two relatively nice movies about presidents not conventionally considered deserving of kindness: "Frost/Nixon" and "W." That the former came from Ron Howard isn't much of a shock, but that the latter was Oliver Stone's is flabbergasting - until you think about the idea that six years of documentary takedowns left Stone with empathy and compassion as the only remaining radical angles. Arguably, only Adam Sandler's hilarious Israeli salon stylist and spy, Zohan, lobbed any kind of shoe at the authorities, and even he missed.

This year's presidential election, meanwhile, either upstaged the movies or enriched them. When the plot twist arrives in "Hancock," you realize the election had done both. Who else were Will Smith and Charlize Theron playing, while they punched each other into asphalt and tussled in midair, but Barack and Hillary?

Not many films in 2008 strove for the grand highs of 2006's "Children of Men" or last year's "There Will Be Blood" or even the underrated, discombobulated future-shock of Richard Kelly's "Southland Tales" (released in the US in 2007), which would round out a great apocalyptic triple-feature alongside "The Dark Knight " and "WALL-E." A notable exception was Steven Soderbergh's "Che," which is far more intelligent than the four-and-a-half-hour T-shirt it's being dismissed as. (It opens here next month.)

The best movies this year managed not simply to look at the world and assess it. They dared to plant us amid their turmoil and trouble and shake us from our complacency, and there weren't nearly enough of them.

What follows is a list of nine movies and one filmmaking style I loved. When you're done reading, track them down - or return to the cinematic holiday parade floats that await you at the megaplex.

1. WALL-E Many filmmakers claim to see the future; Andrew Stanton made a prophesy of what he saw. This is the best Steven Spielberg movie Stanley Kubrick never made, at once a tragedy and a snobby satire of things to come. But it could be only so funny since this vision - an Earth populated by trash and its robotic keeper; a human race evolved into dumplings - seems so very possible. So beautiful, too: those skyscrapers of garbage; junk that, when viewed from a distance, looks like a sequined pi??ata. In 2008 Hollywood tried to personify an imperiled planet ("The Happening," "The Day the Earth Stood Still") but harassed us instead. Stanton didn't raise his voice, just the level of his imagination. The politics are arresting, but more radical is the idea that a love between two devices could be more sensual than whatever Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman thought they were doing in "Australia." Emotionally, WALL-E and EVE aren't future lovers. They glide along the line between how we live now and "The Way We Were."

2. The Edge of Heaven It would have been natural for Fatih Akin to follow 2005's "Head-On" with another erupting volcano, but this time he's made a moving work of restraint. Akin gives us a handful of interconnected Germans, Turks, and German-Turks (which Akin is) and sends them across familial and national borders. The trips aren't always happy but they're powerful. Akin knows his German kings of melodrama. He has the tragic romanticism of Douglas Sirk and the unstinting social brutality of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. But here Akin manages to overcome sinking sorrows and show us a deeply conflicted Europe that's not completely hopeless. This is a trick of transformation. He can turn a bunch of hanging lights into a luminous constellation.

3. Ballast Halfway through watching Lance Hammer's first film, my sobbing wouldn't stop. Was it me or the movie - a simple story about a mother (Tarra Riggs), her wayward son (Jim Myron Ross), and his suicidal uncle (Michael J. Smith Sr.)? The distinction stopped mattering after a while. This was the rare occasion that a movie fully merged with me. An underwhelmed friend suggested I'd had a personal reaction to the film's black characters and their stark Mississippi Delta town. But all reactions are personal. My tears testified to how heavy life feels in this movie as much as they did to the filmmaking's heartbreaking immediacy. Here was an American director capable of showing a black underclass without bravado or artificial sweetener but with art.

4. Be Kind Rewind Nobody saw Michel Gondry's Mos Def-Jack Black fantasia when it came out this winter. Was it too silly? Too slight? The idea of Mos, Black, and the sweet Melonie Diaz remaking the titles in their New Jersey video store (from "2001" to "Ghostbusters" to "Driving Miss Daisy") might sound too Children's Television Workshop to be advisable. But "Sesame Street" has got nothing on Gondry, who transforms a do-it-yourself lark into a requiem for vanishing civic pride and an outrageous, adventurous feat of movie love: remakes as besotted acts of film criticism.

5. The Dark Knight It wasn't the movie the Joker ate, after all. Director Christopher Nolan balanced Ledger's genius with a brilliance of his own. Nolan has retrofitted the series to look like an actual American city that pulses with a city's problems and politics: issues of class, nihilism, bureaucracy, crime, security. Despite some confusing narrative lapses, the film takes astounding dramatic risks for such a nakedly commercial enterprise. Alas, this is not The Best Movie Ever. But it is a peerlessly honest commercial achievement. Its unhappiness spills out of the movie theater and into the life outside it. In June, this movie looked all too chillingly like the world. Six months later, the world looks a lot like this movie.

6. Gomorra One wonders what the Dark Knight would make of Italy's Campania region. If he can't fix Gotham City, there's nothing he'd be able to do about this concrete slum, whose corruption emanates from drug-dealing gangstas and extends all the way out to rock quarries and the garment industry. Matteo Garrone's adaptation of Robert Saviano's book creates the artistic illusion of transparency. Garrone frees his saga of the unclean slickness that made "City of God" such a glamorous hell. Here Brutalism isn't merely a depressing style of architecture. It's an ugly way of life. Not only can you almost smell the death and decay, you fear for the filmmakers lives - and this is a work of fiction! (It opens in Boston Feb. 27.)

7. Milk I had planned to put "Paranoid Park," Gus Van Sant's inspired stint inside the life of a Portland skate punk, on my list. Then along came his film about Harvey Milk. The skate movie is a quiet achievement unto itself, but this other film is something more. Van Sant has spent most of his career as a film artist on the political sidelines, alluding to homosexuality, using it to tease or confound. But Milk appears to have had the same galvanizing effect on him that the late politician had on his constituents: Van Sant has gotten involved. This is not simply a movie about the life of a gay politician, but a portrait of a pivotal moment in the life of this country that, through deceptively audacious filmmaking, feels incalculably alert and alive.

8. Synecdoche, New York Man loves woman. Woman dumps man. Man spends rest of movie (and life) trying to build a theatrical spectacle big enough to contain the pieces of his broken heart. The spectacle is a life-size replica of New York, and the tragedy of Charlie Kaufman's directing debut, a kind of French existentialist version of Fellini's "8 1/2," is that the undertaking has both Sisyphean futility and cancerous side effects. The movie, with its philosophical curlicues and surrealist digressions, doesn't completely satisfy until it's over and you realize that Kaufman has given us a secular Purgatorio.

9. The Order of Myths Margaret Brown's great, barely distributed documentary about racially segregated Mardi Gras in Mobile, Ala., seizes on powerful symbols of Southern tradition (tree roots shattering pavement, say) and creates the illusion of transparency. We are here to watch a black organization and a white one select, coronate, and celebrate a separate king and queen. The monarchs, all young and a little uncomfortable with aspects of the ritual, do manage a last-minute surprise. And yet almost everything Brown finds in her own hometown (from the institutional disinterest in integration to the biracial obsession with old royalist rituals) and, to some extent, her family, amounts to a portrait of America I didn't think I could find in 2008.

10. Realism Immersive, immediate filmmaking annually finds its way into movie theaters. But this was a watershed year, particularly for American directors, who are now flourishing with jump cuts and hand-held photography that create astounding vistas from which to see lives, people, and places we haven't often encountered at the movies. (With mixed results, Jonathan Demme even got in on the act with "Rachel Getting Married.") "Ballast" was but one of a tremendous group of movies that included, from this country, Ramin Bahrani's "Chop Shop" and Kelly Reichardt's "Wendy and Lucy," which opens locally in January; and Laurent Cantet's "The Class" and Abdel Kechiche's "The Secret of the Grain," both from France, both opening here in the new year. And, from China, the steadily great Jia Zhang-ke whose "Still Life," if I'm being honest, is to realism what cubism is to portraiture: a dismantling.