In 2008, WALL-E became the first animated film since 1995’s Toy Story to garner the coveted number one spot. WALL-E, along with the number two film (The Dark Knight), both were refused a Best Picture nomination, allowing Slumdog Millionaire (#3) to take the top prize.
Approximately 560 lists were compiled in 2008, and the top 40 films are below:
40. Ballast (35 lists, 1 top spot)
A deep silence has fallen upon a Mississippi Delta family after the death of a husband and brother. Old wounds remain unhealed. The man’s son shuttles uneasily between two homes, trying to open communication by the wrong means. The debut cast is deeply convincing, and writer-director Lance Hammer observes them with intense empathy. No, it’s not a film about poor folks on the Delta; they own a nice little business, but are paralyzed by loneliness. At the end, we think, yes, that is what would happen, and it would happen exactly like that. — Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
39. Tell No One (38 lists, 2 top spots)
A French thriller so jammed with twists it would be a crime to reveal them. Let’s just say that this tale of a man who learns that his murdered wife may still be alive is as artfully dense as The Big Sleep, as painfully romantic as Vertigo, and so gripping it just about resynchronizes your pulse. — Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly
38. The Reader (40 lists, 3 top spots)
A drama taking place mostly within the mind of a postwar German who has an affair at 14 with a woman he later discovers is a war criminal. Her own secret is so shameful, she would rather face any sentence than reveal it. The film addresses the moral confusion felt in those who came after the Holocaust but whose lives were painfully twisted by it. Directed by Stephen Daldry, with David Kross as the younger protagonist, and Kate Winslet and Ralph Fiennes as the older ones. — Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
37. Silent Light (41 lists, 6 top spots)
Reygadas takes inspiration from Carl Th. Dreyer and brings it to a Mennonite community in Mexico to create a simple film about relationships and faith. I don’t know what I can say about Silent Light other than to try your best to see it in a movie theater – you won’t see human faces or landscapes as beautiful and clear anywhere else. — Gina Telaroli, takepart.com
36. Che (42 lists, 8 top spot)
The epic journey of a 20th century icon, the Argentinian physician who became a comrade of Fidel Castro in the Cuban Revolu- tion and then moved to South America to support revolution there. Benicio del Toro is persuasive as the fiercely ethical firebrand, in a film that includes unusual and unfamiliar chapters in Che’s life. Steven Soderbergh’s film is 257 minutes long, but far from boring. — Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
35. The Class (43 lists, 2 top spots)
Laurent Cantet vaults to the top ranks of modern filmmakers with this scrupulously observed, cinema-verite take on a year in the life of a French high school class headed up by a tough-minded teacher played by co-writer François Bégaudeau (an actual teacher). Refusing to fall into the clichés of either heartwarming success stories or hopeless nightmare — the two ways in which multiethnic urban classrooms are usually depicted — Cantet just sets up a series of short-fuse explosions between the teacher and his rambunctious kids and watches the struggle for power play itself out, with fascinating results. — Chris Barsanti, filmcritic.com
34. Encounters at the End of the World (43 lists, 3 top spots)
Werner Herzog moseys around to see who he will meet and what he will see at the South Pole. The population here seems made of travelers beyond our realm, all with amazing personal histories. In a spellbinding film, Herzog finds a great deal of humor, astonishing underwater creatures, permanent occupants such as seals and penguins and the possibility of a bleak global future. — Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
33. I’ve Loved You So Long (44 lists)
I had heard plenty about I’ve Loved You So Long before I finally saw it, but most of what I heard pertained to the performance of Kristin Scott Thomas. While Thomas is fantastic in this film Elsa Zylberstein proves to be the true surprise thanks to her not being a household name for most people to sell. She’s the secret ingredient. It’s a shame so many critics tend to stick with what they know, unwilling to try and sell the lesser known, but Zylberstein’s performance speaks for itself and without it this film would truly suffer. The other reason to love this flick is the way director Philippe Claudel gives the audience just enough of the story to move you from scene to scene, slowly revealing Juliette’s (Scott Thomas) life as we head toward the emotional climax which hits you like a ton of bricks. — Brad Brevet, Rope of Silicon
32. Hunger (46 lists, 5 top spots)
The stunning debut of video installation artist Steve McQueen tells the story of IRA soldier Bobby Sands as he stages a successful (?) hunger strike protesting his, and his co-inmates’, treatment at the hands of the British in the notorious Maze Prison. Scenes are set and scored like a Stanley Kubrick picture–The Shining, of course, in its corridors and environmental audio cues, but 2001 as well in the transcendence of its closing moments with Bobby in an antiseptic room, imagining familiarity at the moment of his rebirth as this…martyr? The first third is silent for the most part but for the thud of billy-club against naked back and the final third is silent but for the rustle of sheets and the gasp of birds; the middle is dominated by a fifteen-minute conversation, tracked in one long take, between Sands and the priest brought in to provide either dissuasion or last rites to our hero. Neither a defense of domestic terrorism nor a celebration of it, what Hunger reveals itself to be is a cry against the willing sacrifice of humanity in the pursuit of some imposed sense of justice. Thatcher’s recitation of the rationale for stripping these men serving at the discretion of Mother England of their rights echoes uncomfortably with the United States’ headlong mutation into every single thing it condemns and abhors in its own secret prisons with their own apolitical political prisoners. The film is fucking beautiful, too, and I’m a sucker for pictures in this primarily visual medium that respect it as a medium for artistic, visual representation. Much already made of a snowflake melting on a guard’s bloody knuckle, but how about the spray of gore decorating one mute witness (and the tears decorating the face of another)? How about the perfect inward spiral described with shit in one cell? The guard sweeping a river of piss towards the camera in the third picture on this list that tells parts of its story in reflections? Hunger is the true fana. — Walter Chaw, Film Freak Central
31. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (48 lists, 2 top spots)
In Romania under the Ceausescu regime, abortion was banned, and within 20 years some half a million women had died from having botched illegal abortions. This severe thriller from writer-director Christian Mungiu focuses on Gabita (Laura Vasiliu), a pregnant college student, and her friend Otilia (Anamaria Marinca), who finds a man who’ll do the job: a quietly thuggish fellow who calls himself Mr. Bebe (Vlad Ivanov). Remorseless long takes build the suspense as the young women secure a hotel room and, when Bebe explains how they’ll have to pay, question whether it’s worth the price. Strap yourself in for this minimalist, splendidly acted horror film — and count your blessings that you live in a country where choosing an abortion doesn’t mean losing a life. — Richard Corliss, Time Magazine
30. The Edge of Heaven (52 lists, 10 top spots)
The movie that Babel wanted to be, this sweeping yet intimate romantic-political roundelay from director Fatih Akin is structured so that our identification keeps shifting, as though the characters were passing a baton between them. In Germany, we meet a lonely old man, who hires a hooker, whose daughter is a Turkish radical, who escapes the police and falls in love with a German student, whose mother disapproves…. All the actors are splendid, but it’s Hanna Schygulla, as that scold of a mother, who floors you. Akin, hopping from Germany to Turkey and back again, has captured how globalization can tear us apart, and repair us, too. — Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly
29. Tropic Thunder (55 lists)
The funniest movie of the year is also a daring move for director and star Ben Stiller, who has the guts to lampoon his Hollywood colleagues with no mercy. Robert Downey Jr. is hilarious as a white actor playing a black soldier, and Tom Cruise shows up as an over-the-top profane studio head. — Peter Hartlaub, San Francisco Chronicle
28. Frozen River (55 lists, 3 top spots)
Melissa Leo should be nominated for her performance. She plays an hourly employee in a discount store, struggling to support two kids and a run-down trailer after her husband deserts her with their savings. After making an unlikely alliance with a Mohawk woman (Misty Upham) who was stealing her car, she finds herself a human trafficker, driving Chinese across the ice into the United States. A spellbinding thriller, yes, but even more a portrait of economic struggle in desperate times. Written and directed by Courtney Hunt. — Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
27. Still Life (55 lists, 5 top spots)
Jia’s beautiful mix of fiction and non-fiction filmmaking was by far the best thing I saw all year and now stands as one of my favorite films of all time. His story of a man and a woman searching for their missing spouses near the Yangtze River in town of Fengjie is a hypnotizing meditation on the modernization of China. More than just a story of two specific people though, the characters drift through the town and their individual quests quickly give way to their surroundings making Still Life a film about place as much as people. The surroundings in this case are about to be submerged in water due to the creation of the Three Gorges Dam. This is a daring, lyrical film about where our world is headed and the reality and fantasy that encompass that progress. — Gina Telaroli, takepart.com
26. My Winnipeg (58 lists, 4 top spots)
Guy Maddin’s latest dispatch from inside his imagination is a “history” of his home town, which becomes a mixture of the very slightly plausible, the convincing but unlikely, the fantastical, the fevered, the absurd, the preposterous, and the nostalgic. Oddly enough, when it’s over, you have a deeper and, in a crazy way, more “real” portrait of Winnipeg than a conventional doc might have provided–and certainly a far more entertaining one. — Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
25. Burn After Reading (60 lists)
Critics inexplicably dropped the ball on this, but audiences responded merrily to the Coen brothers’ richest caper since Fargo. Like that film, it’s an acrid thriller in which ordinary people commit desperate crimes. Only this time the Coens are misanthropes with sociological feelers. The crooks are two clueless gym employees, played to daft perfection by Frances McDormand and Brad Pitt, who the film presents as solipsistic specimens of the new Idiot America. Obsessed with plastic surgery, Internet hookups, ginormous soft drinks, and whatever else can wall off their gaze from anything beyond themselves, they’re not so far from WALL-E’s adult babies. When they get hold of a meaningless CIA disc, they’re in over their fluffy heads—but no more so than the movie’s spies and State Department flunkies (John Malkovich, George Clooney), who are just engaged in a more sophisticated self-betrayal. — Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly
24. Paranoid Park (60 lists, 1 top spot)
Before making the fine mainstream biopic Milk, Van Sant indulged himself with another of his periodic exercises in aestheticizing ennui. Paranoid Park is based on a YA novel about crime and punishment among the skateboarding crowd, but Van Sant merely skirts along the edge of the plot, preferring to linger on slow-motion shots of boys doing skate tricks. Nevertheless, this is still arguably the most accessible film of Van Sant’s recent art-film era, because its characters and emotions are immediately relatable. Doesn’t everyone remember adolescence as a constant shift between euphoria and panic—not unlike riding a skateboard high into the air, then tumbling back down? — The A.V. Club
23. Revolutionary Road (63 lists, 6 top spots)
It’s not getting all the buzz. Industry insiders have written it off as one of 2008’s “disappointments.” Even those in love with Richard Yates’ novel lament the choices made by director Sam Mendes. But for my money, this was the year’s most electrifying drama. Whenever Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet turned up the marital angst, the volume of bile left you breathless. Add in an amazing, in your face turn by Michael Shannon as insane neighbor/Greek Chorus, and you have the seminal suburban meltdown. It’s even better than Mendes’ Oscar winning American Beauty, and that’s saying a lot. — Bill Gibron, filmcritic.com
22. Vicky Cristina Barcelona (64 lists, 4 top spots)
Critics are always quick to trumpet each new Woody Allen comedy as a long-awaited return to form, but this sensuous romantic farce about two American girls (Rebecca Hall and Scarlett Johansson) and their encounters with a lusty Spanish artist (Javier Bardem) and his volatile ex-wife (Penélope Cruz) more than earned that distinction. — Alonso Duralde, MSNBC Movies
21. The Flight of the Red Balloon (65 lists, 10 top spots)
Another essential remake/adaptation from Chinese master Hou, whose update of Springtime in a Small Town doesn’t up the original so much as reinterpret it from the lens of a decades-long detachment. His films have about them this feeling, ineffable, of sleepy loss–the hours that slip away on lazy, brown summer days, hourglasses full of obsidian and amber in a Terrence Malick tableau. His update here of the 1956 kiddie-classic of whimsical surrealism (Lamorisse’s The Red Balloon) finds him the consummate alien artist in Paris’ looking glass, documenting in long, wordless stretches of dappled Monet cityscapes and interiors the essential cluttered dislocation of an existence lost in the translation. It’s the first of two films on this list that present themselves unapologetically as Impressionism made possible by DV–a new nouvelle vague, if you will, that marries technology with turn-of-the-last-century painting from a very specific philosophy even as the tale it tells, of a young boy longing for the attention of his distracted actress mother (Juliette Binoche), is the very definition of straight. Look at a scene reflected against the flashing windows of one of Hou’s trains, though, for the absolute, uncompromising vision of a director unwilling to relinquish his status as an outsider and all the perspective it offers. — Walter Chaw, Film Freak Central
20. Gran Torino (67 lists, 2 top spots)
If the thought of a grizzled and bitter Clint Eastwood staring down gangbangers in his front yard, waving a weapon menacingly, and growling “get off my lawn!” doesn’t thrill you to the core, then you’re probably a fan of Million Dollar Baby Clint and not Dirty Harry era Eastwood. Well mark me down for Dirty Harry. It’s been said by others before, but it’s true so it’s worth saying again. Imagine all of Clint’s most badass characters. Now imagine them as old men, retired and living alone in a neighborhood gradually being overtaken by immigrants and thieves. Gran Torino is the perfect goodbye to Eastwood’s incredible acting career and it may be the best performance he’s given in it. The film itself isn’t perfect, but Clint is. He’s riding off into the sunset scowling, snarling, and spitting blood. — Josh Obligatory, Cinemablend
19. Waltz With Bashir (83 lists, 10 top spots)
Israeli filmmaker Ari Folman masters the hybrid form of an animated, autobiographical documentary—and, in so doing, establishes a powerful new language for truth-telling. Revisiting his Israeli army service during the 1982 Lebanon war, he begins with remembered dreams, then leads up to painful waking memories, both for himself and his buddies. Waltz is this year’s other great example of the unique powers of animation. As each remembered moment leads Folman closer to scenes of horror he’d do anything to forget, the filmmaker finds fluid ways to swim in and out of his own psychological danger. The aims and animation style of Waltz With Bashir are located on the other side of the moon from WALL-E, but the two movies share a miraculous freedom of expression. — Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly
18. In Bruges (84 lists, 5 top spots)
Ahhhh, another one of those films I wasn’t quite sure if it would make my top ten or my Honorable Mention, but after watching it one more time there was no way I could not include it as one of the best of 2008. In terms of end of year awards In Bruges will likely be the number one snub. Of course, the Golden Globes have already nominated it for several awards, but that only comes as a result of them having a Comedy/Musical section, whereas they too would have given this great little film the shaft. Outside of the superb acting from all involved and the endless stream of quotable lines the one thing I noticed this fourth time around was just how beautiful this film looks and cinematographer Eigil Bryld deserves some serious recognition. — Brad Brevet, Rope of Silicon
17. Doubt (86 lists, 2 top spots)
John Patrick Shanley’s film of his play (starring Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Amy Adams) is a heavy-handed but primal dramatic force. Set in the early sixties in a Catholic school, it asks if a priest sexually abused the school’s lone black student, whom he generously took under his wing. Shanley understands that it’s the dramatist’s business to sow doubt, to set down points of view that can’t be reconciled. — David Edelstein, New York
16. Wendy and Lucy (92 lists, 5 top spots)
At the beginning of “Wendy and Lucy,” the camera tracks a young woman playing fetch with her yellow Lab as they amble along a sunlit path by some Oregon woods — an idyllic scene, underscored by Wendy’s warm, self-comforting humming. The rest of Kelly Reichardt’s quiet heartbreaker of a movie shows the fragility of this carefree community of two, how quickly and easily a girl on the road — or any of us — can fall outside the socio-economic safety nets folks with fixed addresses rely on. The narrative moves in small, undramatic increments: A casual act of self-righteous cruelty triggers an escalation of losses, counterbalanced by an old man’s gratuitous acts of compassion. Contingency colors the film’s weather and geography. Wendy’s fraying lifelines span a few crucial points of reference: gas-station restroom, garage where her beater of a car goes to die, Walgreens parking lot, pound. Dialogue doesn’t move this story; all the action is writ large on Wendy’s desperate young face, expressed through Michelle Williams intense, powerful performance. But don’t write off Reichardt’s movie as a downer, or a dour exercise in social realism. “Wendy and Lucy” celebrates character, the kind of spirit that just shines and shines. — Kathleen Murphy, MSN Movies
11. A Christmas Tale (101 lists, 15 top spots)
The title may sound generic, but Arnaud Desplechin’s mercurial “A Christmas Tale” spikes the punch of the familiar heartwarming family drama: It’s a turbulent journey into the emotional maelstrom of a fractured French clan during the Christmas holidays. Most families have fights; this one has an eldest daughter (Anne Consigny) who all but legally separates herself from her reckless brother (Mathieu Amalric, mesmerizing in his portrait of manic-depressive activity). Some parents have favorites; this has a coldly removed family matron (Catherine Deneuve, all brittle elegance) who can barely relate to some of her kids. As they gather in the family home to tussle and scuffle and reminisce, Desplechin roams through flashbacks, detours through old secrets and teases the audience with clues that don’t always lead to a solution. For all the creative sprawl and seemingly inexplicable jags of human behavior, there is a tenderness to this family portrait, and Desplechin’s appreciative warmth encompasses all his characters. It’s the most dense, inventive, playful and cinematically thrilling film I’ve seen all year, a magnificent journey that pulses with invention and energy and human life in all its terrible and beautiful irrationality. Desplechin has been making some of the richest movies in France for years (see “Kings and Queen” … now). This is his first to find real favor stateside. Catch it in theaters while you can. — Sean Axmaker, MSN Movies
14. Synecdoche, New York (101 lists, 20 top spots)
Ambition. That’s what most independent films lack, and what the directorial debut of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman has, ad infintum, ad gloriam. It’s an epic tragicomedy about Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a Schenectady, N.Y., theater director who moves to Manhattan with the gigantic notion of putting on a realistic drama as big as all New York City. A self-styled truth-teller (his full name anagrams to Acted Candor), Caden manages to exasperate or repel the fascinating women (including Catherine Keener, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Michelle Williams) who cross his downward path. The project drags on — it’s his life’s work, and it may take that long to finish — but Kaufman’s imagination never falters. The movie keeps getting bigger and weirder and denser and sadder and finnier, till all the pressure on Caden leads to a final implosion. A movie so human you’ll want to argue with it, spank it, take it home or give it some Xanax, Synecdoche is the richest, most devious — I’ll cut to the chase and say best — live-action film of the year. — Richard Corliss, Time Magazine
13. Iron Man (103 lists, 6 top spots)
The weapons designed by arms manufacturer Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.) are no sleeker, and his bombs no smarter, than the narrative lines of this marvelous Marvel Comics movie. A tin man who realizes that, if he is to become human, he must build himself a heart — and then a big red metallic airborne suit for buzzing unsuspecting planes and vanquishing his enemies. What a kick it is to see the thing fly. Same with the movie, for, like Tony, Iron Man is the perfect expression of Hollywood’s engineering ingenuity. In an excellent year for action films (Wanted, Hellboy II, The Dark Knight and, as you’ll soon see, Speed Racer), this was the coolest movie machine. — Richard Corliss, Time Magazine
12. The Visitor (111 lists, 9 top spots)
This year’s sad-sack prize goes to Richard Jenkins, a character actor getting a rare chance to gleam in a lead role as a widowed academic with a life whose empty moments just seem to repeat themselves. Writer-director Tom McCarthy flings this dead man walking into a touching, reinvigorating relationship with an immigrant illegally living in his Manhattan flat, lending our hero a reason to fight not only for his new friend’s life, but also his own. — David Germain, Associated Press
11. Happy-Go-Lucky (135 lists, 11 top spots)
As good as Mike Leigh’s films are, perhaps his greatest service to cinema is discovering wonderful performers, then workshopping stories tailored to their strengths. The result is the year’s finest performance, with Sally Hawkins a lively, merry, inspiring sweetheart, a teacher whose unshakable optimism survives all the negative vibes, from trifling to grave, that the world hurls at her. For fans of great film actors, this is the start of a beautiful friendship. — David Germain, Associated Press
10. Rachel Getting Married (138 lists, 12 top spots)
A Dogme film with an Altmanesque soul, Rachel Getting Married is a richly eccentric and instinctive look at addiction and the toils, troubles, and joys of blood relations, in which a young girl struggles to save herself using a language no one either speaks or cares to, set by Jonathan Demme during a wedding whose pretense to multiculturalism reveals itself as a narcissistic clan’s way of disguising from the world that they’re hurting just as badly as the next family. — Ed Gonzalez, Slant Magazine
9. Frost/Nixon (140 lists, 7 top spots)
I knew nothing about the Nixon versus Frost interviews until I watched this movie. Now I feel better versed about the disgraced ex-President as a fallen world leader and as a man who had to deal with being run out of office (something he brought on himself) and forced to live out his life away from the world of politics. Directed by Ron Howard and adapted for the screen by Peter Morgan (who wrote the stage play the feature film’s based on), Frost/Nixon isn’t just about politics and that’s what makes it so fascinating. — Rebecca Murray, About.com
8. Man on Wire (142 lists, 5 top spots)
James Marsh’s documentary about Philippe Petit, the diminutive French daredevil who walked a tightrope between the World Trade Center towers in 1974, plays more like an intricately timed heist flick. You know from the start that Petit makes it — he’s alive and all too happy to talk about himself — but you’ll still hold your breath as he and his partners in crime relive the feat. — Christy Lemire, Associated Press
7. Let the Right One In (149 lists, 13 top spots)
There is something both chilling and world-weary in the eyes of Eli (Lina Leandersson), the 200-year-old vampire trapped in the body of a 12-year-old girl in director Tomas Alfredson’s haunting “Let the Right One In.” Embedded in her gaze are both a familiar ache of loneliness and the impenetrable wisdom of a being almost beyond human comprehension. The tension between the known and the unknown has always been at the center of every great horror film, and now this Swedish import can be added to that esteemed list. It’s been a rough couple of years for fans of the genre, but a film like this — about Eli’s budding relationship with a forlorn, alienated little boy (Kare Hedebrant) in a bleak suburban development, set in the dead of winter — reminds us why it’s still so viable. Simultaneously moving, frightening and poetic, “Let the Right One In” and its two astonishing young stars (neither of whom have appeared in a feature film before) stay with you long after all the bloodbaths and remakes that Hollywood churns out. Forget Twilight; this is a vampire love story for the ages. — Don Kaye, MSN Movies
6. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (158 lists, 14 top spots)
“He was born old.” That expression, referring to the prematurely middle-aged among us, must have been what spurred F. Scott Fitzgerald to create his puckish 1922 short story about Benjamin Button, who was born an old man and got a day younger every day. In this greatly expanded, much less frivolous film version, Benjamin’s birth year is moved from 1860 to 1918; instead of fighting in the Spanish-American War, Benjamin sees action in World War II. What neither of those times possessed was the technological legerdemain that enables Brad Pitt to play Benjamin, through computer effects work (and old-fashioned makeup), for most of the character’s long life. But the most satisfying tricks are performed by writers Eric Roth and Robin Swicord and director David Fincher. They give flesh and feelings to the essentially passive Benjamin and provide him with a willful, glamorous partner: the dancer Daisy (Cate Blanchett). Of all the movie’s dazzling effects, the most special are the internal ones. Benjamin, a minority of one, can raise his resignation into wonder, and lift the viewer along with him. — Richard Corliss, Time Magazine
5. The Wrestler (216 lists, 26 top spots)
The movies you love the most don’t just thrill or move you, or dazzle your eyeballs; they create a moment-to-moment feeling of discovery. In this great, tender and haunting tale of a washed-up wrestler still living off the fumes of his ’80s glory days, Darren Aronofsky shows you Randy ”The Ram” Robinson from the inside out — his fears and dreams, his ringside rituals of triumph and pain, his saddened daily existence in a New Jersey trailer park. Randy is as complex and affecting as anyone seen on a movie screen this year. What lifts his story toward the sublime is the way that Aronofsky, fusing a raw poetry worthy of early Scorsese with the heart of old Hollywood, envisions Randy in mythological terms: He strikes a chord of noble-loser heartbreak as surely as the heroes of On the Waterfront or Rocky did. Playing this pumped-up, broken-down legend, Mickey Rourke turns his damage and survival into a legend of its own: the actor who ditched stardom, saw the lower depths, and came back with his face mashed but his grace softly intact. — Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly
4. Milk (248 lists, 23 top spots)
Affable and driven, Harvey Milk was a San Francisco politician who succeeded by inspiring crowds rather than making backroom deals. The country’s first gay city supervisor, he used his energy and intelligence to help homosexuals secure civil rights. This exceptional docudrama — written by Darren Lance Black, directed by Gus Van Sant and starring Sean Penn — covers the last eight years of Milk’s life, which ended when he was shot by fellow supervisor Dan White (Josh Brolin). Penn, who’s in nearly every scene, manages the neat trick of merging his star personality with the public figure well known from the 1984 documentary The Life and Times of Harvey Milk. Sunny, pushy and convincingly gay, Penn embodies a man hopeful for the future of his fellows but dreading what he believes is awaiting him. A how-to exercise in marshalling dozens of characters and one big political issue into exemplary, edifying entertainment, Milk is a must-see, right now. — Richard Corliss, Time Magazine
3. Slumdog Millionaire (262 lists, 54 top spots)
Who wants to be a millionaire? Not 18-year-old Jamal, though he’d like enough to live on, since he’s been scrambling to survive since he and his brother Salim were brutally orphaned as children. But he’s gone on a nationwide quiz show hoping that his brief celebrity will catch the attention of the ravishing, unlucky Latika, whom he’s loved for most of his life. Simon Beaufoy’s script tells the three lives in flashbacks that illuminate India’s dynamic and troubled history over the past 15 years (though not, obviously, of the last few weeks). As gaudy wealth and abasing poverty coexist in Mumbai, so Danny Boyle’s movie catches the contradictions of slum drama, love story, social document and Bollywood musical in its capacious embrace. With its nonstop pace and fearless dives into affairs of the heart, Slumdog Millionaire is a dervish delight. — Richard Corliss Time Magazine
2. The Dark Knight (287 lists, 77 top spots)
The best of all the Batmans, Christopher Nolan’s haunted film leaps beyond its origins and becomes an engrossing tragedy. The “comic book movie” has at last reclaimed its deep archetypal currents. With a performance by Heath Ledger as the Joker that will surely win an Oscar, a Batman (Christian Bale) who is tortured by moral puzzles and a district attorney (Aaron Eckhart) forced to make impossible choices. — Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
1. WALL-E (327 lists, 46 top spots)
Most smart filmmakers want to parade their facility with all the tools in the modern movie box. Andrew Stanton, the director and cowriter of the Pixar animated feature WALL-E, experimented with what talking pictures could plausibly do without. Talking, for example: the first third of the movie has almost no dialogue. How about depriving the two main characters — the humble, lonely trash compacter WALL-E and his space princess EVE — of emotional signifiers like a mouth, eyebrows, shoulders, elbows? Yet with all the limitations he imposed on himself and his robot stars, Stanton still connected with a huge audience. Great science-fiction love stories (there aren’t many) will do that. So will futurist adventures that evoke the splendor of the movie past. A dirt-of-the-earth guy hooking up with the ultimate ethereal gal, WALL-E and EVE could be the 29th century version of Tracy and Hepburn, or Seth Rogen and any attractive woman. It hardly matters that the movie is not-quite-silent, when it blends art and heart as spectacularly as WALL-E does. — Richard Corliss, Time Magazine
