Every year I hear friends bemoan the state of the film industry and lament that there were so few good movies to see. And each year I look at them, mouth slightly agape, and wonder what planet they’re from.

Granted, my situation is somewhat unique. I will probably end 2008 having seen roughly 130 films — that’s approximately 260 hours spent in the dark, with at least that much time spent spinning my thoughts and impressions into words for publication. That adds up to 22 straight days of cinematic immersion. Tack on transit time to and from the theater and whatever other miscellaneous incidentals might arise, and I spend a full, sleepless month of my life steeped in the movies. So, admittedly, my perspective is a bit skewed.

Don’t get me wrong, I know better than most that there is a lot of dreck out there. I know because I am constantly sifting though it to find the gems. I am reminded of the old photographer’s maxim that if you get even one terrific image a roll (kids, ask your folks what a roll of film is), then it was a successful shoot. Likewise, I expect to come away at the end of the year with far more films I disliked than ones I liked, and of those, only a prize few that utterly moved me. This year, however, I had more than my fair share. This was the year in which even the blockbusters, from WALL∙E to The Dark Knight aspired to something more than just mindless popcorn entertainment.

2008 was a great year for movies, though many didn’t receive wide distribution and you may not have had a chance to see them. I encourage you to rent the ones you may not have heard of and find out what you’ve been missing. As always, this is a fluid list, representing my thoughts the particular day I sat down to compose it. It may have been ordered differently yesterday and will just as likely be ordered differently tomorrow. Such is the subjective, ephemeral nature of art. What is certain, however, is that the following list represents some of the boldest, most moving, funniest and most unforgettable films of the year.*

1. Slumdog Millionaire: Slumdog Millionaire is a fable, and if you try to apply the strict rules of reality, you will come away disappointed. It is stitched together with unabashed, unrepentant, irrepressible idealism; there’s not a hint of cynicism in it. The film pulsates with life and should be celebrated loudly and lustfully. Although there is sadness and tragedy in a story that examines poverty with a Dickensian forensic lens, there is also something greater — a humanity and humor, a dignity and majesty that never ceases to shine through. Slumdog Millionaire is pure, unadulterated magic.

2. The Dark Knight: To call The Dark Knight the greatest superhero movie ever made is an understatement of titanic proportions. And yet, conversely, the film is so devoid of camp and superhero tropes, and is presented with such assured realism, that it hardly feels like a superhero movie at all. The year’s biggest blockbuster is, in fact, one of the greatest crime epics ever made.

3. The Fall: Weird and wonderful, The Fall is nothing short of a contemporary The Wizard of Oz, a hypnotic and intoxicating tale of ravishing beauty and spellbinding imagination. Director Tarsem makes films from alternate dimensions. His hypnotic visual stylings are second to none. He captures images on film that Salvador Dali only managed to coax with paint. Tarsem’s phosphorescent imagination has one foot in realism and another in the land of operatic dreams. The Fall is wholly beguiling, an utterly transportive piece of filmmaking as dazzling in its visual audacity as it is in its spartan simplicity. It stole the breath from my lungs and coaxed tears from my eyes.

4. Milk: Milk is magnificent. It is a phenomenal triumph in every conceivable way. Intellectually compelling and emotionally heartrending, the film is one of the most profound and inspiring presentations of an American political leader I have ever seen. It is not the tale of a life, but rather a calling. Director Van Sant’s jubilant, tragic remembrance is a profoundly moving, at times even epic, experience. Harvey Milk’s triumph was not simply a victory for gay rights. He fundamentally altered the very nature of what it means to joust for basic human rights.

5. In Bruges: Against all established, conventional wisdom, In Bruges manages to be a blast of cinematic fresh air, a marriage of shocking violence and hilarious, dark comedy that takes the traditional British gangster movie and refashions it into something outrageously original. If Monty Python made a black, shoot-‘em-up satire, this is what it would look and sound like.

6. Let the Right One In: The Nordic import Let the Right One In is the best kind of horror film — one that reinvigorates a tired genre with a bright bolt of originality. It grants scares where they are necessary, but never makes the mistake of believing that its purpose is to scare us. You would be forgiven for not believing that a movie about vampires can blend authentic chills with genuine feeling, unadulterated ugliness with breathtaking beauty. But Let the Right One In, at its most basic distillation, is nothing more complicated than a coming of age love story. Let the Right One In is so fresh and original that it utterly exposes how stale and formulaic what passes for horror in most cineplexes has truly become.

7. Man on Wire: James Marsh’s dazzling documentary Man on Wire plays more like a caper/heist film than a standard litany of events. If you didn’t know that Philippe Petit and his crew planned only to traverse the space between New York City’s tallest buildings via a minute steel cable, you could easily mistake the film’s set-up as the plotting of errant bank robbers or depraved terrorists. Man on Wire is supercharged with life, peppered with elements so whimsical (and true) as to be beyond belief. The final result is absolutely breathtaking, a documentary as life-affirming as it is artistically intoxicating. For several captivating minutes we see what it is like to walk on air, bound not by gravity but by sheer, relentless determination and majesty.

8. Rachel Getting Married: The line between harmony and heartbreak becomes profoundly blurred in the achingly beautiful Rachel Getting Married, a film that is certainly not always enjoyable, but does always ring powerfully true. Wrenching and uncompromising, it is wise enough to know that no family is wholly dysfunctional. Rachel Getting Married is one of the most alive things you’ll see all year. It positively pulsates with energy, vibrates with life — a reverie of passion, a messy, heartfelt, uninhibited ode to living.

9. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is an epic, not of scale, but of time. It is the story of an infant born suffering the infirmities of old age who lives his life in reverse, growing younger with each passing year until he dies in infancy. The film is a thick, tangled, lush narrative dense enough to lose yourself in. It is a charmed, enchanted fable steeped in melancholy and wistful serenity. And it is an artistic and narrative triumph, which, while colder and more emotionally remote than necessary, embodies one of the most beautiful love stories set to screen in a very long time.

10. WALL∙E: You have heard it said that there are but two constants in the universe: death and taxes. It’s time a third constant was added to the list: Pixar can do no wrong. Pixar’s films have always been fueled by an expansive, unrestrained, berserker imagination. With WALL∙E, they’ve taken yet another giant leap, adding scalding wonder and awe. WALL∙E was obviously made by a team of animators who thought that R2-D2 was the hero of the Star Wars films, not Luke Skywalker or Han Solo. For much of its running time, WALL∙E is essentially a silent film — the movie’s genius is not in its words, but in its visuals. Outer space is not shown as a place of icy cold menace, but a dimension of radiant color, incandescent light and breathtaking beauty. One cannot respond to the film with anything other than brazen awe.

* In the interest of full disclosure, I was unable to see the following critically-acclaimed films before forming my list: My Winnipeg, Happy-Go-Lucky, Encounters at the End of the World, Waltz With Bashir, Frozen River, A Christmas Tale, The Class, Frozen River, Gomorrah, Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, Trouble the Waters, Alexandra, Flight of the Red Balloon, Silent Light, Paranoid Park, Wendy and Lucy and Synecdoche, New York.

Just Missed the Cut:
1. Doubt
2. Frost/Nixon
3. The Visitor
4. Hunger
5. Tropic Thunder
6. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
7. Che
8. The Wrestler
9. Gran Torino
10. Valkyrie

Honorable Mentions:
1. Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day
2. Burn After Reading
3. Funny Games
4. The Signal
5. Kung Fu Panda

Worst Films of the Year: I have a very understanding editor who sympathizes with me when I decide to pass on films from time to time. After all, I am the newspaper’s only film critic and there are simply too many movies for one man to see. Why waste time with ones almost guaranteed to be rotten? For example, I have not seen The Hottie and the Nottie, Superhero Movie, 88 Minutes, Meet the Spartans, Witless Protection, Prom Night, Babylon A.D., The Eye, Disaster Movie and others generally regarded as the most vapid and offensive things committed to celluloid this year. Therefore, my “worst of” list is actually a compilation of those films I found truly abhorrent and those films that had so much potential but left me profoundly disappointed (especially since several of this year’s list come from directors I truly admire). Without further ado, they are:

1. The Happening
2. Blindness
3. Australia
4. Righteous Kill
5. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
6. 10,000 B.C.
7. Jumper
8. Street Kings
9. The X-Files: I Want to Believe
10. You Don’t Mess with the Zohan

Dishonorable Mentions:
1. The Life Before Her Eyes
2. Semi Pro
3. Untraceable
4. The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor
5. Vantage Point

This is an abridged version of a review I wrote for Christianity Today Movies. To read the rest of this review, click here.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is an epic, not of scale, but of time. It is the story of an infant born suffering the infirmities of old age who lives his life in reverse, growing younger with each passing year until he dies in infancy. The film is a thick, tangled, lush narrative dense enough to lose yourself in. It is a charmed, enchanted fable steeped in melancholy and wistful serenity. And it is an artistic and narrative triumph, which, while colder and more emotionally remote than necessary, embodies one of the most beautiful love stories set to screen in a very long time. Benjamin Button is not the finest film of the year, but it gets awfully close. [read more]

There exists within science fiction a popular sub-genre that manipulates history to create alternate timelines. What would America look like today if the South had won the Civil War? What would be the contemporary repercussions had Napoleon managed to conquer England? You can’t help but imagine such scenarios while watching the film Valkyrie, which is based on a true story and takes remarkably few liberties with history. From the first frame, you know the operation to assassinate Hitler will fail and most likely every protagonist will be killed, but the film is so persuasive and so tautly crafted that for a split second you actually find yourself thinking the assassins will succeed and the Second World War will end very differently. [read more]

“After two years of working on the special effects in The Fountain, I realized I wanted to get back to the set, get back to people. For me, it’s all about the actors,” director Darren Aronofsky (Pi, Requiem for a Dream) told me over drinks in a Washington, D.C., hotel recently, elucidating why his latest work, The Wrestler, is so unlike anything he has done before. “Repeating yourself almost never works. I wanted to reinvent myself and do something completely different.” And so he has. [read more]

Gran Torino was the biggest and most pleasant surprise of 2008, a film which, based on the trailer, I was not expecting to like at all. Believe it or not, despite a plot that touches on everything from racism to gang warfare, Gran Torino is that rarest of Clint Eastwood films — a comedy. “I’ve been called a lot of things,” Eastwood’s character says in the movie, “but never funny.” Well, he better get used to it because Gran Torino was one of the most enjoyable, laugh-out-loud films I saw all year. [read more]

The somber The Reader is about chance encounters and fateful decisions, promiscuous hearts and even more promiscuous bodies, living with past sin and loving present sinners. Based on a novel by German author Bernard Schlink, The Reader is a thoughtful and solitary (if glaringly imperfect) meditation on national guilt as seen through the eyes of an individual, and the manner in which one generation comes to terms with the crimes of another. [read more]

Have you ever been so cold that the pain you experienced actually felt like heat? Or touched something so hot, for a split second it felt freezing cold? Scientists call this phenomenon paradoxical warmth/cold. The human body often cannot distinguish between extreme hot and extreme cold, at least initially. The signals get mixed, and the sensory receptors in our skin, particularly our hands, misinterpret the sensation. The phenomenon is not exclusive to our physical bodies. I experienced it recently while watching Revolutionary Road, a film which no one in their right mind would dub a comedy. However, at times Revolutionary Road so pushed the boundaries of tragedy that I almost wondered if I should be laughing. [read more]

I remember getting my cat some years ago and realizing that she would be with me into my 40s. The thought, transient and unsolicited as it was, was nonetheless profound because it revealed how rapidly my life was passing and how soon events that I once thought impossibly distant would be upon me. In the same way, Marley, the dog at the center of the sweet and winning Marley and Me, is the furry chronometer by which the Grogan family gauges the progression and richness of their own lives. [read more]

Following the press screening for Seven Pounds, several critics, some of whom you might recognize were I to name them, exited the theater grumbling about schmaltzy sentimentality and overwrought manipulation of audience emotions. While my fellow critics are certainly entitled to their opinions and represent a separate but no less informed diagnosis of the film, I cannot accept their premise. Certainly there are films that aim for our tear ducts regardless of whether or not their story has actually earned our emotional investment. But just because a film moves you does not, necessarily, invalidate it as melodramatic. All art exists to move our emotions, and all films manipulate — some just do it more overtly than others. The day I stop being emotionally affected by films or become so cynical that I find displays of emotion something to sneer at, is the day I stop doing this job. I say all that to say this — do not go to Seven Pounds without a heaping pocket full of Kleenex. [read more]

Jim Carrey has been taking it slow lately. In the last five years, the funny man has made only a half dozen films, several of which he spent trying his dramatic wings and another hidden behind animation. It was probably a good thing. If you’re anything like me, you can only handle Carrey in small doses. Yes Man is a pleasant, albeit minor, surprise that actually harkens back to Carrey’s glory days with a solid, satisfying comedy that aims to please and mostly hits its mark. [read more]