After much fuss, debate and negotiation, here are
Facets Features picks for 2008's best!
The Films:Happy-Go-Lucky (Mike Leigh)
The usually dour Leigh made a surprising about-face with his charming, “anti-miserablist” portrait of a perpetually optimistic thirty-year-old London grade school teacher. Impeccable performances are Leigh's signature and lead Sally Hawkins delivers this year’s most perfect, transforming a potentially grating character into one that you want to put in your pocket to take home for encouragement on life’s down days.
Vicky Cristina Barcelona (Woody Allen)
Allen’s European sabbatical has served him well. His latest rejuvenation finds him in Spain following the life-changing romances two American women experience during one whirlwind summer. Leads Scarlett Johansson and Rebecca Hall are fine, but the film belongs to Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz as the tempestuous artist couple who ensnare the pair.
Anvil! The Story of Anvil (Sacha Gervasi)
The heavy metal gods are alive and well and living in…Canada? Yes! This Sundance-winning doc tracks-down the wild ’80s band Anvil and finds them back in their snowy northern home, older and greyer but no less hyper in pursuit of rock ‘n’ roll glory. The quest takes them from arenas to gutter bars and back again, taking turns hilarious, touching and ultimately inspirational.
Shotgun Stories (Jeff Nichols)
Director David Gordon Green (George Washington, All the Real Girls) produced this intimate study of feuding half-brothers in an impoverished Arkansas backwater and it shows—the small-town details are expert, the cinematography lush and hazy and the performances breathe tragedy with documentary-like believability.
In Bruges (Martin McDonagh)
Playwright Martin McDonagh’s directorial debut is an expert blend of travelogue, gangster thriller, dark comedy and existential guilt. Colin Ferrell delivers a career-defining performance of great depth, shifting with ease from downright hilarious to believably pained.
Slumdog Millionaire (Danny Boyle)
Boyle’s latest is a flashy Bollywood film with all of the Bollywood stylizations and trappings minus the trademark musical numbers (save the rousing end credits routine). Taut, game show suspense anchors this action perfectly, adding a touch of reality to the pizzazz.
Terribly Happy (Henrik Ruben Genz)
The creep factor and a litany of bizarre characters roll out wonderfully in this very dark Danish comedy about a Copenhagen cop assigned to sheriff a sleepy rural burg hiding dark secrets. David Lynch and the Coen Brothers would be proud.
Katyn (Andrzej Wajda)
Polish master Andrzej Wajda’s Oscar-nominated recount of the brutal, cold 1940 execution of thousands of Polish civilians and servicemen by Soviet soldiers in Poland’s Katyn Forest and the massacre’s effects on the victims’ families is epic, but also essential filmmaking, bringing due light to an oft overlooked, but never forgotten WWII horror.
The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan)
Nolan’s 2nd installment in the resurrected Batman franchise is a juggernaut of beautiful excesses, from the expansive cinematography and not-so-subtle moral ambiguities to the over-the-top players, in particular Heath Ledger’s Joker—a performance exhilarating to watch for both Ledger’s complete immersion and the tragedy it forebodes.
Cloverfield (Matt Reeves)/Diary of the Dead (George A. Romero)
First person horror cinema is nothing new, but two films made interesting marks in the subgenre this year. Whether detailing the bombastic destructions left by a giant alien loose in NYC (Cloverfield) or the claustrophobic intimacies of a zombie uprising (Diary of the Dead), both successfully transported viewers into the mayhem while also delivering interesting, though broad, jabs at contemporary media obsession.
Honorable Mentions: Don’t Look Down (Eliseo Subiela), The Song of Sparrows (Majid Majidi), Burn After Reading (Coen Brothers), Iron Man (Jon Favreau), Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story (Stefan Forbes), Hellboy II (Guillermo Del Toro) and La Zona (Rodrigo Plá).
Retrospectives: I enjoyed more retrospectives this year than any, including awe-inspiring theatrical screenings of Last Year at Marienbad and Pierrot le Fou at Facets, Metropolis presented by The Silent Film Society of Chicago at the Portage Theater, and M at the Gene Siskel Center. These institutions deserve much praise for keeping these classics alive.
The DVDs:
My DVD picks for 2008 can be found over at
Cincinnati CityBeat’s website, but I must add Facets’ releases of
Bela Tarr's epic
Satantango and the
Lawrence Jordan Album to the list. Essentials both.
- Phil Morehart
The U.S. Premiere
The Geometry of Oppression: Four Films by Miklos Jancso
