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First, a couple of notes:

• An abridged version of this list and commentary was published in three parts at Image earlier this year.
• This list will be revised. Keep checking back and you’re likely to see new additions to the list.

Okay, to borrow one of 2008’s most memorable big screen moments: “Here… we… go!”

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I became a list-o-phile at 13.

Every Saturday morning I recorded Rick Dees’ Weekly Top 40, fascinated with the way that songs moved up and down the pop charts. When a favorite made it to the top-Prince’s “When Doves Cry,” Til Tuesday’s “Voices Carry,” The Thompson Twins’ “Lay Your Hands on Me”-I cranked up the volume and celebrated. Other chart-conquering hits made me feel disappointed in America.

While my interests have changed dramatically since then, I keep on ranking my favorites. I’ve have notebooks full of lists-albums of 2001, films of 2002, concerts of 2008. Browsing through them, I’m reading a diary of my teens, 20s, and 30s. Each title is connected to memories and growth.

But in spite of the popularity of American Idol, I no longer care what “America has chosen.” By the time I was 17, I’d discovered Siskel and Ebert. Their enthusiastic debates convinced me that Americans were missing the most interesting movies. I learned that audiences prefer the flash and dazzle of disposable entertainment while shying away from resilient, resonant art. I’d be rich if I had a nickel for every time someone’s told me, “When I go to the movies, I just want to turn off my brain.” I’m often tempted to reply, “Isn’t that like going to a restaurant and turning off your stomach?”

Moreover, those two quarreling critics showed me that encounters with art are personal. Our responses reveal as much about us as they do about the art. I began to see the folly of declaring “The Best Movies.” What can such a declaration really mean? Who can really say, and how would they decide?

And yet I still love lists. I read them obsessively every December. I chuckle over some that say more about the critic’s politics than they do about the quality of the films. I take notes from others, thrilled to read about titles I’ve never noticed before. Some critics make popular choices, while others rate titles from international festivals, features that won’t hit Seattle for years. Some celebrate audacity, others tradition. Is the screenplay the thing? Or is it the imagery?

Me? I want a nourishing, enthralling experience of truth, beauty, and excellence-one that will draw me back again and again for greater revelations, whether they trouble or delight me.

Disclaimer: I’m not a full-time critic. Busyness has kept me from catching some of 2008’s most celebrated films, including The Wrestler, Wendy and Lucy, and Gran Torino. I have no doubt that I’ll revise my list soon. So check back.

But based on my 2008 moviegoing, these are twenty selections I recommend most highly. I’m not saying they’re “the best.” But they made the strongest impression on me. I’ll revisit them to dig deeper. I’ll share them with my close friends. If I can find a bargain, I’ll add them to my library.

You’ll have to imagine a drum roll…

*    *    *

Honorable Mention:  The Grocer’s Son

Antoine has run away from his family’s rural life in Provence, turning his back on the family business. But when his father falls ill, Antoine reluctantly returns and agrees to drive the family’s mobile grocery store from hamlet to hamlet, bringing necessities to the old-fashioned farmers. He finds that the work isn’t so bad-especially when he’s accompanied by Claire, a meddling beauty who has won his affections.

This delightful story of a prodigal son in a sensual world is likely to give rural France a new flood of tourists.

U2 3D

Okay, they’ve convinced me: 3-D can be a good thing. U2 3D immerses you in a Latin American crowd of 80,000 U2 fans. Even during my dream-come-true concert experience (front row at U2’s Elevation tour), I didn’t have the freedom to get up and walk around on the stage, study the drum kit, chase Bono around, or look over Adam Clayton’s shoulder into the surging waves of fans. Crowd noise never interferes with the music, and the band is in top form. Of course, you can’t really appreciate this groundbreaking achievement unless you see it on an IMAX screen six stories tall. But I suspect they’ll be bringing it back from time to time, so watch for your opportunity. It’s a powerfully persuasive testament to the inspiring, unifying power of live music. And in U2’s music, the streets are crowded with signposts pointing to the source of their inspiration.

In Bruges

Martin McDonagh’s film about two hit men hiding out in Belgium’s scenic city of Bruges is dark, violent, and drops more F-bombs per minute than most people can stand. But it has a big, beating heart under its coarse, crass exterior.

This is a tale about hard shells cracking, exposing conscience, sadness, and a yearning for grace. Colin Farrell is hilarious; Brendan Gleeson gives a warm and winning performance, his best since The General; and the film’s biggest surprise is a cracked, frightening turn by Ralph Fiennes.

Few filmmakers can juggle comedy, suspense, drama, bloody shootouts, attractive scenery, tender moments between tough guys, the profane, and the profound as deftly as McDonagh does here.

#20 The Band’s Visit

If you aren’t a fan of the Alexandria Ceremonial Police Orchestra, you will be. The Band’s Visit is a tender-hearted comedy, written and directed by Eran Kolirin, about an Egyptian band that becomes lost in the Israeli desert while heading to their gig at the Arab Cultural Center in Israel. Forced to depend upon the kindness of strangers, they encounter an independent woman named Dina who offers service with a smirk. While she catches the eye of the tall, dark, and handsome Haled, it’s Twefiq, the sad-eyed conductor, that she takes under her wing, and their histories of heartbreak are unveiled with grace and gentleness. And while their stories are particularly personal, they resonate with the age-old heartache of divided cultures and immeasurable loss. In spite of all of this, the film is very, very funny. A roller rink becomes the scene of one of this year’s finest bits of silent comedy, as a band member begrudgingly facilitates a match made in heaven. (I expect that an announcement about an American remake about a New Orleans jazz band, probably starring Tom Hanks, is imminent.)

#19   Encounters at the End of the World

Werner Herzog’s films-some fiction, some non-fiction, and some a blurring of the two-are almost always about living on the edge. Consider Aguirre’s mad quest for El Dorado in Aguirre, Wrath of God; Timothy Treadwell’s obsession in Grizzly Man; the ordeals of Rescue Dawn’s Dieter Dengler.

In Encounters, a documentary, Herzog takes us to McMurdo, a camp in Antarctica, where we meet some of the planet’s most eccentric residents, fraternize with crazy penguins, and swim beneath the ice to see creatures straight out of science fiction. It’s a wonder that our adventurous narrator hasn’t taken up permanent residence there.

While Herzog’s excursions always end up exposing his dire view of a God-less existence, what we see along the way may seem a compelling contradiction, inspiring awe, wonder, even worship.

#18   Ballast

Ballast takes place on today’s Mississippi Delta, where the crashing U.S. economy can hardly make things any worse. Lawrence is a 12-year-old boy trapped in a nightmare: His father has committed suicide. His mother is a recovering junkie who can’t protect her son because she had to go to work. His uncle is distraught to the point of paralysis over the suicide. The family business is closed. And Lawrence is more interested in messing around with drug dealers than school.

It’s a bleak but believable story, well-acted, and uncompromising. And it concludes with a tantalizing ray of hope.

You’ll probably see the influence of Bresson on Hammer’s style. And it’s easy to see why this movie is inspiring comparisons to the work of the Dardennes Brothers as well.

#17   Doubt

John Patrick Shanley’s play is written to be an even match between a priest who befriends a troubled boy, and imperious nun who ruthlessly investigates his suspicious behavior.

In my opinion, the lead actors are a bit mismatched. I found Meryl Streep’s performance to be a little too “arch,” with one foot firmly planted in comedy, making Sister Aloysius a presence as fearsome as a wicked witch. Philip Seymour Hoffman, on the other hand, gives one of his most nuanced performances as a man with painful memories and passionate conviction. Amy Adams plays the young nun caught between them, struggling with the thought of calling a man “guilty until proven innocent.” And Viola Davis… mercy! What actor this year made a stronger impression with just one scene?

In spite of its flaws, it’s a riveting film that will inspire meaningful discussions.

#16   Ostrov (The Island)

This two-year-old Russian import, now available on DVD through Film Movement, takes us to a monastery on the edge of the White Sea. There, the monks are troubled by the antics of one of their own—a prankster who speaks in riddles and tends to a fiery furnace. Anatoly was once a Russian naval officer whose behavior during a Nazi attack left him scarred for life. Now, penitent to a fault, he’s become either a madman or a puckish agent of revelation.

Pavel Lounguine finds striking imagery in the stark landscape, and his lead actor, former Russian rock star Pyotr Mamonov, has an extraordinary face.

The film won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 2007. Nora Fitzgerald notes in The Washington Post, “After it opened in Moscow, priests and bishops began to bless the film, often standing in prayer outside theaters.”

Read my full review at Christianity Today Movies.

#15   The Dark Knight

It’s remarkable how Christopher and Jonathan Nolan’s screenplay transcends all comic book conventions to frame timely questions about the problem of evil and the ethics of fighting it.

In the character of Harvey Dent, they show us that we need a hero who can remain good, uncompromising, and idealistic in the midst of harrowing evil, and yet they also acknowledge that we need agents like Batman who will get their hands dirty, compromise, and willingly shoulder the burden of condemnation.

The Joker, meanwhile, is as diabolical as any villain I’ve ever seen—orchestrating horrors in hopes of proving that fear will turn us all into monsters.

The film is wearying in its relentless violence, but it is remarkably efficient in its storytelling. Heath Ledger’s turn is every bit as good as you’ve heard, but where is the praise for Aaron Eckhart?

And there’s a high-speed chase scene that’s among the greatest action sequences ever devised.

#14   The Visitor

Richard Jenkins plays Walter Vale, an economics professor who returns to New York after a long absence only to find two illegal immigrants living in his apartment. Their relationships bloom into something beautiful as Vale—a stiff and lonely man—opens up to the joys and the pain of meaningful engagement.

The immigrants seem too clean, too virtuous to be believed, and Tom McCarthy’s film is weakened by too many obvious announcements of its own political relevance. Thus the film gets a bit heavy-handed and manipulative, where McCarthy’s previous film, The Station Agent, remains something of a miracle… a perfect example of graceful and poetic storytelling.

But the actors here are the real highlight. They make this intimate drama something memorable and special. And in a year when many of the great films were also dispiriting in their depictions of darkness, this is a film full of warmth and joy.

#13 Synecdoche, New York

Charlie Kaufman’s latest mind-bender is so full of questions and conundrums that it’s hard to know where to start. When a playwright wins a “genius grant,” he embarks on the production of a lifetime—an extravagantly complicated stage play about his life, his broken marriage, his affairs, and his existential crisis. The more he experiences, the more he revises the play. The more he writes, the more his characters influence his life. Soon, he’s falling for the actresses he’s cast to play his lovers, and he’s showing his actors in how to imitate his errors.

Kafka would have loved it.

But while Kaufman’s internal excavation is often horrifying, and he seeks hope only in human kindness, he inadvertently makes that case that without the grace of a Greater Author, we’re doomed, stuck in our own fractured understanding.

Read about my conversations with Charlie Kaufman here.

#12   A Christmas Tale

Arnaud Desplechin’s elaborate drama about a family reunion fraught with grudges, hatred, and bad behavior, should be intolerably depressing. But Desplechin treats his characters with such patience that you’re likely to end up caring about them. Catherine Deneuve is the hard-hearted matriarch who is seeking bone marrow from one of her children in order to fight liver cancer. Matthieu Alamaric plays Henry, the son who has been cast out for troublemaking, and lo… he’s a match. But so is Paul, the young nephew who has severe emotional struggles of his own. Is there any hope for a family in such dire straits? Perhaps, if anybody’s paying attending to the children and their longing for Jesus’ return.

JUST ADDED: #11 Let the Right One In

One of the most chilling, haunting vampire films I’ve ever seen. Filmed with a cold, bleak aesthetic that reminded me of the first episode of Kieslowski’s Decalogue, Let the Right One In is surprisingly inventive and unpredictable in its first hour. It’s rare, during a genre movie like this, that I have that exhilarating sense of having no idea where a story is going. The central characters are engaging — not just the vampire, but the boy who finds her as well. The setting is specific and convincing. The lo-fi style of the film sets us up for moments of shock and surprise when special effects kick into high gear. And the film is unsentimental about its vampire: We are caught in a sickening tension, caring about this creature while repulsed at the same time. (She reminded me of Gollum/Smeagol, in that sense.) But alas, during the second hour, the film settled into a rather predictable storyline that diminished what had come before, and the conclusion seemed trite and disappointing. Overall, though, this is a memorable horror movie that should inspire storytellers to get busy imagining new possibilities for a genre that has been sorely lacking in inspiration for a long, long time.

#10  Up the Yangtze

We’ve lamented the destruction of New Orleans, and our government’s failure to intervene appropriately. But what if the government had caused the destruction? In some parts of the world, that’s exactly what’s happening.

Available on DVD from Zeitgeist Films, Yung Chang’s documentary Up the Yangtze chronicles the devastation of the Yangtze river valleys, and its age-old fishing communities, brought on by the construction of the Three Gorges Dam. He follows a family of subsistence farmers, the ruination of their land, the cruelty of the government’s forced evacuations, and the struggles of a 16-year-old girl as she seeks to become part of this new China by working for Victoria Cruises on a ship bearing arrogant, ignorant Western tourists.

Here’s my full review, an online exclusive to Response magazine.

NEW: #9 Still Life

Winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 2006, Jia Zhangke’s Still Life didn’t become available to American moviegoers until January of 2008. And I didn’t see it until a DVD landed in my living room in February 2009.

The film left me in a very strange mood. I feel the same sense of sadness that I felt when I saw Up the Yangtze, probably because it’s set in the same context.

It’s a sadness that’s hard to describe. It’s heartbreaking enough when you see news of a child drowning in a lake. But in these films, you’re watching, in very very slow motion, an entire civilization drowning. And this isn’t a tsunami, a natural disaster where the people have nowhere to send their anger but upward. This is a government-sanctioned flooding of river valleys with histories that run back thousands of years.

Filming in Fengjie, Jia gives us images of a real place that has to be seen to be believed.

China is tearing down thousands of years of history, demolishing buildings, driving old farming communities to higher ground, and then flooding the entire Fengjie landscape through the installation of the enormous Three Gorges hydroelectric-dam project. Watching Up the Yangtze, I saw a present-day Atlantis formed, as villages were drowned by the rising waters, while the villagers stood on higher ground staring down in disbelief as their histories and their ancestors histories’ were submerged. To add insult to injury, they then had to go looking for work — new work, often in tourism, as Westerners come “flooding” in on cruise ships to tour the region.

How can any sense of sadness be an adequate response to this? Whole villages are being forced out of their families’ homes, livelihoods, and histories… and they were nearly starving to begin with. What will they do now? Most of them are already so far behind the modern world that they’ll have no hope of finding a place anywhere.

Both Up the Yangtze and Still Life are beautiful movies. Beautifully horrifying. They feel like the documentation of a turning point on Planet Earth.

In Still Life, we follow two people who are searching for loved ones. One is a rural coal miner (Han Sanming) looking for the wife and daughter he lost 16 years earlier. The world is crumbling around him as he travels back through lands he once knew. He hardly recognizes anything, and nobody lives where they once did. It’s as if he’s desperate to reconnect with the last strand of connection he has with the past, as if he fears his wife and daughter were swallowed up in the rising waters.

There’s also a woman (Zhao Tao, who was in Jia’s The World) looking for the husband she hasn’t seen in two years. She feels he has betrayed her, or at least been very dishonest. I’m not sure what to make of this simpler storyline, unless their relationship is meant to suggest the relationship of China’s people with their government.

The two stories never directly connect, save for their similar backgrounds, where cities have been hollowed out so that they look like massive wasp nests. If you pay attention you’ll occasionally see a skyscraper suddenly implode in the distance, erased from the skyline as if it was never there.

Cinematographer Yu Lik Wai has a slow, observant style, panning patiently from left to right and back again as if his attention is more on the context than the characters, and who can blame him when you have that context? These are some of the most disturbing, apocalytpic images I’ve seen in any movie… precisely because they are not digital inventions. I kept thinking of lines from Radiohead songs: “This is really happening, happening! Women and children first!” “It’s the devil’s way now… there’s no way out… you can scream and you can shout… it’s too late now… because you have not been paying attention.”

Two men sit drinking and reminiscing, and one tells the other that they are both unfit for this new world because they are “nostalgists.” It turns out that he’s quoting Chow Yun Fat from an old, favorite movie. Then they sit across the table from one another and, in one of the film’s most intimate exchanges, they call each other’s cell phones so that they can hear each other’s ringtones. One is an old, old song about China, and the other is a dreamy, romantic pop song about the flowing river of love. Meanwhile, a different kind of river swamps a civilization behind them.

But it gets stranger. Once in a while, you might see a U.F.O. Or notice a building in the background blasting off like a space shuttle.

As wacky as that sounds, it works. Because it gives us a strange sense that things are accelerating far too quickly, so that we don’t even know what’s happening, or understand the skylines that are materializing in this new world. Are they falling to pieces, or part of some new world for which we have no key, no language, no marketable skills?

On the wall of one of the crumbling buildings, a banner reads, “Give it all you’ve got!” Is it a command for the demolition workers? Or was it an instruction for the people who lived there, whose efforts are now being swept away, as if they never existed at all.

#8   Syndromes and a Century

Is it a drama? A series of dream sequences? Finally available in the U.S., this experimental film about time, science, superstition, and medicine is strangely hypnotic. I’m not sure how to summarize it. We spend a lot of time in a small, country hospital and a bright modern hospital. Old-world practices are clashing with the new. Some conversations are repeated in different contexts, accentuating differences in worldview. It feels like a long poem about fragile threads between eras, and about the tenuous connections between people of different traditions, beliefs, and genders. It’s fascinating and often confounding. And it contains three or four of the most breathtaking scenes I’ve ever experienced—including a celestial event as beautiful as it is unexpected.

#7   Silent Light

“All creation groans” in the unforgettable, long shots that open and close Reygadas’ remarkable film. It’s hard to believe this movie was released in 2008—it has a quality that will make it a major event for film students for many decades to come. It’s set in a Mexican community of Mennonites, where an unfaithful husband tries to rationalize his infidelity to devastating consequences. The movie’s a marriage of the religious exploration of Carl Dreyer’s Ordet and the metaphors of the natural world in Terrence Malick’s The New World. Personally, I find the film somewhat overbearing in its stiff formality, but I’m left breathless by the radiant cinematography and the film’s climactic affirmation of fidelity and faith.

#6   Man on Wire

Read my previous Good Letters meditation on Man on Wire.

#5   4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days

2008’s most memorable nightmare came from Romania. Christian Mungiu tells a terrifying tale of two young woman, Otilia and Gabriela, whose mistakes lead to excruciating consequences. Gabriela seeks an illegal abortion, and Otilia’s attempts to help her leave them at the mercy of a vicious criminal. Caught in his grip, Otilia makes a shocking decision to help her friend—shocking to me, anyway, living in a culture where such cruelty seems uncommon. But what kind of friendship is this, anyway? Is Otilia’s faithfulness really so honorable? Haunted and distraught about the film’s depiction of such a bleak existence, I shared my feelings with a Romanian exchange student. He answered with furious affirmation: “This film is the truth about Romania under Communism. Ask my mother. Ask my father. This film is the world where they lived. It’s a psychology that very familiar to them.” In the end, the film seems to question whether Communism or Capitalism can do much to restrain our sinful impulses.

JUST ADDED: #4  Rachel Getting Married

Many are complaining about the overly idealistic cultural mix of the wedding’s assembly. I don’t see the big deal. I live in Seattle, where there’s an idealistic cross-cultural gathering somewhere all the time. Many are complaining about the free-form style of the wedding. Hey, I find more meaning in traditional weddings too, but I’m not going to knock this family for taking baby steps toward healing, reconciliation, and understanding. I’m just astonished to see people affirming the importance of a Wedding, of vows to be faithful, of forgiveness and true love. Sure, their individualized vows are flimsy, their words like cotton candy compared to the seven course meal of a traditional wedding. But I believed in these people. I was encouraged by the story. The acting was sensational. The film made me a fan of Ann Hathaway (which I had thought impossible). And when the credits rolled, I nearly shouted to my friend Bryan, “WHO IS ROSEMARIE DEWITT, AND WHERE DID SHE COME FROM?!” She is incredible. Not to mention rather unnervingly gorgeous. To see her overlooked by the Academy in the Best Supporting Actress category is one of the most astonishing oversights of an Academy already famous for astonishing oversights. Not to mention the fine turn by Bill Irwin. This film sent me home with tears in my eyes, tears for joy, tears for sadness, tears for hope.

#3   Flight of the Red Balloon

Critic Michael Sicinski is right to say “…childhood is almost always narrativized in a linear fashion, either as the movement from innocence to experience, or as an epiphanic recapturing of the magic of youth. Needless to say, no one really lives like this, least of all kids.”

Hou Hsiao-Hsien has captured the way children do experience the world, and in doing so he has offered us a gift. And he’s done it in Paris, with French-speaking actors, far from home. Few films capture the tension between childhood and adulthood as poetically as Hou’s whimsical tribute to Albert Lamorisse’s The Red Balloon.

Juliette Binoche (gone blonde!) plays an actress lending her voice to a production of Japanese puppet theater. While a painful separation from her husband and daughter has left her stressed to the breaking point, she finds joy in her beautiful son, whose relationship with a wandering red balloon becomes an enchanting illustration of innocence lost. There is a beautiful spontaneity to Hou’s style.

The movie is a joy.

My full review is published at Christianity Today Movies.

#2   WALL-E

And speaking of childhood… Pixar has once again produced a treasure for moviegoers of all ages.

(Read my conversation with Andrew Stanton here.)

How many movies can you name that are as provocative for adults as they are entertaining for children? Perhaps a few—but are they also standard-setting achievements in animation? How many begin with twenty minutes of dialogue-free creativity, like the near-silent comedy at the beginning of this film? Andrew Stanton’s story is an imaginative fusion of Noah’s Ark and 2001: A Space Odyssey. It affirms that human beings are at their best when reaching for something contrary to their programming—love. And it gives us a sharp Swiftian satire of contemporary life, in which humanity has become enslaved to “mechanical” instincts, while an inspired robot inadvertently reminds us that we are designed to transcend those impulses, and reach for the sublime. How ironic, then, that this superb work of imagination, comedy, and heart was produced on computers!

#1   Shotgun Stories

Read my commentary at Image here.

Jeff Nichols’ meditation on an Arkansas family feud has the timeless quality of an Old Testament tale, captured in beautiful, naturalistic imagery, and understated performances by an impressive cast of unknowns.

And this is his directorial debut? It’s powerfully accomplished. I want to see more, Mr. Nichols.

In a year when news headlines were dominated by reminders of the things that divide us—culture, religion, politics—Shotgun Stories stands out as an uncompromising look at the human capacity for civil war, and a desperate appeal for us to shoulder the burden of reconciliation and peacemaking.

It could have been stifling in its seriousness, but it has an endearing sense of humor, a great performance by Michael Shannon, and a poetic sensibility that never feels forced. I’ve thought about this film every day since I saw it. It’s caused me to think about the Shia and the Sunnis, Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, Protestants and Catholics.

And it has provoked some of my most memorable discussions with other moviegoers.

I think it’s a film we need, right now.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 17th, 2009 at 2:54 pm and is filed under Film Reviews, Top 10 (or 20, or 100) lists. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.