Best Of The Decade: The Playlist's Best Films Of 2008

Here are our 2000, 01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06 and 07 picks.

As the decade came to a close, we have little to complain about. The second-half of the aughts were fantastic and gave us many of our best overall films.

At the box-office, it was nice to see something that wasn't part 4 of a McFranchise. Instead, a piece of smart, thrilling entertainment, Christopher Nolan's "The Dark Knight" took the #1 spot worldwide grossing over more than $1 billion dollars. Even if your opinions of that film are negative (a small minority to be sure), one has to admit this was a step in the right direction. But OK, looking at the rest of the international box-office not so much as films like, "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull," "Kung Fu Panda" and "Hancock" were the films that dominated.

Still, things were looking optimistic, at the Oscars, Fox Searchlight's persistent, mini-major campaign — which brought two small indie-major films to the Oscar previously ("Juno" and "Little Miss Sunshine") — finally paid off as Danny Boyle's vibrant and immensely enjoyable fairytale "Slumdog Millionaire" (reminding the haters that it has a 94% RT score with Top Critics, not the plebeian masses) deservedly took the Best Picture award. Sean Penn was rewarded for his turn in Gus Van Sant's "Milk" and Kate Winslet finally won a Best Actress Oscar for "The Reader" (she was nominated three times before, and five times in total. It wasn't her best work, but it was her first Oscar). And Heath Ledger won the second ever posthumous acting award in Academy history for his riveting turn as the Joker in "The Dark Knight" (perhaps the film wouldn't have been half of what it was without him).

A rather stellar year for film, 2008 — and the last half of the decade, really — gave us tons of unforgettable classics.

10. "The Wrestler"
Just describing "The Wrestler" sounds like a clumsy jumble of clichés. After all, it's got a down-on-his luck, drug-addled former athlete (a hypnotic Mickey Rourke) who wants to reconnect with his daughter (Rachel Evan Wood) and marry the stripper-with-a-heart-of-gold he covets (Marisa Tomei), all while vying for a return to his former glory. But Darren Aronofsky, taking a documentary approach that wouldn't be out of place on ESPN, captures all the emotion, unexpected comedy and character that lies in between the banalities, signaling a new and brave direction in his filmmaking that brings the story to fully formed life. And at the center is Rourke giving a tour de force performance that seemed to parallel his own career. Raw, modest and austere, his soulful, naked performance blurs reality and fiction in entirely riveting and uncomfortable new ways.

9. "The Edge Of Heaven"
A profoundly entrancing meditation on kismet, chance occurrence, and the capacity for human forgiveness, three seemingly disparate Turkish and German families (Nurgül Yeşilçay, Baki Davrak, and noted Fassbinder actress Hanna Schygulla among them), spanning a few generations, are touched by death and intercede through fate in this Kieslowski-esque- drama by noted director German/Turkish director Fatih Akin. Travel and migration being a major theme in all of Akin's work, characters journey back and forth between the two countries, but any of the-universe-is-all-interconnected conceits are subdued and told in three elliptic vignettes that overlap softly like a dissolve. It's a resonantly compassionate and intricate quilt handcrafted by an intelligent and thought-provoking filmmaker.

8. "A Christmas Tale"
Arnaund Desplechin's "A Christmas Tale" runs down the most rote and well-worn Christmas movie formulas: a family is brought together for the holidays; the matriarch is terminally ill; there's a whole bunch of skeletons in the closet (unrequited love, implacable, long-standing feuds, etc). In lesser hands, this could have been a French "Family Stone." Instead, Desplechin — ironically influenced by "The Royal Tenenbaums" but exceeding it by miles — has woven a novelistic little gem of a movie, odd and oddly moving filled with prickly and vindictive characters giving us a much rawer, and honest view of family life. Stacking the deck with almost all of France's renowned stars (among them Catherine Deneuve as the matriarch and Mathieu Amalric, more villainous than he was in Bond, as the asshole son) and subtle stylistic flourishes (Iris ins, etc.), the movie is acidic, yet eventually, warm and rewarding and a future classic for discerning film lovers who enjoy some bite in their holiday cheer.

7. "Ballast"
Lance Hammer's self-distributed this stark, raw, deeply rich and emotional ravaged tale of a fragmented African American family in a poverty-stricken Memphis delta. Mostly unknown actor Michael Smith Sr. gives an outstandingly inward, yet profoundly projecting performance as a twin quietly devastated by the suicide of his brother who has lost the will to live, yet has to attempt to guide and mentor his troublesome nephew and desperately lost sister-in-law. Pathologically unsentimenta, often bleak and unnervingly spare — with the only moments of music being diegetic sound — the fractured poetry of the austere picture is viscerally gut-wrenching.

6. "Happy-Go-Lucky"
Sally Hawkins gives a fizzy tour-de-force performance as Poppy, a character filled with such bubbly levity she would float off the ground, if she weren’t so grounded by the realities of the world around her. Eddie Marsan is as heartbreaking as he is terrifying as Scott, the tightly wound, paranoid, angry driving instructor whose ill will is no match for Poppy’s eternally sunshiney attitude. The dialectic forces of these two actors’ opposing performances explode in the small confines of the car, and director Mike Leigh uses the jumping off point of Poppy’s always-up demeanor to explore some of humanity’s darker and more interesting moments. Some of Leigh's greatest work in years and bolstered by two of the best performances of the year in Hawkins and Marsan. To write off this film as aggressively ebullient is deeply shortsighted.

5. "Silent Light"
A transcendent and slow-moving tale of adultery set amongst deeply religious Mennonites faced with a personally fractured morality, "Silent Light" is luminously shot and practically a religious experience in itself. Mexican arthouse director Carlos Reygadas' third feature film features all unknown, untrained actors, a meditative and quiet, Terrence Malick-ian tenor, breathtaking, patient visuals and a stunning conclusion that is utterly radiant. Spoken entirely in Plautdietsch, the language of the Prussian Mennonites, this bewitching story of a married man who falls in love with another woman in a small community has not been widely-seen, but it's worth the effort to track down this heavenly piece of cinema endorsed by Martin Scorsese and given award props at Cannes.

4. "4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days"
As an abortion-drama, '4 Months' is the first of its kind, but manages not to skimp on either side of the description. Directed by Cristian Mungiu, this raw-nerve and unflinchingly told picture takes place in the late-80s Communist Romania, and follows a pair of college students (Anamaria Marinca and Laura Vasiliu), one of which needs an abortion dangerously far into her pregnancy. The harrowing chronicle becomes extra potent by being told through the eyes of the friend trying to assist the matter who pays her own heavy psychic toll. As desperation sets in, a roughhewn handheld style not dissimilar from Paul Greengrass' docu-drama feel heightens the tension and immediacy of the girls' situation. Fortunately never falling into the traps of an "issue film," after the most brutal moments are over (and some of it is hard to watch), the film lets you reflect on the disquieting and disturbing acts that have followed.

3. "I've Loved You So Long"
Just thinking of this movie makes us want to quietly weep in a corner. A soulful and extremely moving portrait of the seemingly limitless and incontestable bonds of sibling love, the ugliness of family dark secrets and the hope of personal rebirth, writer Philippe Claudel's directorial debut is anchored by an arresting (and criminally overlooked by Oscar) performance of Kristin Scott Thomas. She plays a drained-of-life woman just released from prison after 15 years for the murder of her six-year-old son. After the family has denounced her, the only one waiting for her is the loving younger sister, Lea, terrifically played with tenderness and empathy by Elsa Zylberstein. Forgiveness and self-absolution in the picture is an arduous and painful cross to bear and 'Loved You So Long' is one of decade's most emotionally wrenching films made about family.

2. "Reprise"
A vibrantly alive and magnetic ode to youth, a passionate chronicle of friendship and the manic energy of a restless mind, "Reprise," struck a chord and never left. Some called this dynamically visualized tale of two competitive best friends (Anders Danielsen Lie and Espen Klouman-Høiner) with literary aspirations and their chronicles of love, loss and mental illness, "Charlie Kaufman-esque," but that's actually banal and fairly reductive. The film does traverse in concepts of fluid time, but the electrical human energy, Bergman-esque contemplation and kinetic zeal is distinctly its own work. A startlingly affecting feature-length directorial debut by Norwegian filmmaker Joachim Trier (born in Denmark), now the big question on our mind is what is he doing next and why hasn't Hollywood, or some smart producer, swooped down on this preternaturally gifted filmmaker to direct an ambitious new project? Perhaps he's far too good for them all. We can only hope another work arrives soon.

1. "Che"
Steven Soderbergh's two part epic is not going to win any points for politics, as it jumps around Che Guevara's life quite liberally and tiptoes around his more serious discretionary acts. However, it does not lionize the man either. Soderbergh takes his coolly proficient scalpel to instead illustrate the anatomy of a revolutionary, a field leader, and a man capable of great change, who was intrigued with the verbal exchanges in the middle of sieges, the physical steps taken between two points, the hairsbreadth between being the leader of your people and being a victim of unmanaged hubris. Soderbergh benefits from a go-for-broke performance by Benicio del Toro as the political game-changer, and he presents an intense and typically focused characterization that helps create a full picture of a man we might not want to befriend or vilify, but one we desperately want to know.

Honorable Mention:
It really pains us how many great films we had to leave off this list. Number one in that category is perhaps French-Tunisian director Abdel Kechiches' sprawling, roving cinema verite family restaurant drama "Secret Of the Grain." Other strong films that unfortunately could not make the cut, but we still wish to pay recognition to include, Guy Maddin's drunken, wintry and hilarious docu-fantasia, "My Winnipeg," Kelly Reichardt's micro-minimalist poverty tale, "Wendy & Lucy" which suffers from zero plot, but boasts a devastating performance by Michelle Williams; Hou Hsiao-hsien's meandering, but touching, "Flight of the Red Balloon"; still-going at 79 years of age, French New Wave stalwart, Claude Chabrol's deliciously sardonic, "A Girl Cut In Two," featuring excellent performances by Ludivine Sagnier and François Berléand; Danny Boyle's kinetic and celebratory fairy-tale, "Slumdog Millionaire," Gus Van Sant's fourth experimental film in a row, the skate-park teen drama, "Paranoid Park" featuring lovely lensing by the great Christopher Doyle; the German-made Jewish Holocaust prisoners story, "The Counterfeiters" and Claude Miller's absorbing WWII family drama, "A Secret," including an excellent performance by Cécile De France who Clint Eastwood recently tapped for his near-death experiences film, "Hereafter." Also quite amazing is Steve McQueen's IRA hunger-strike drama, "Hunger" featuring an amazing performance by Michael Fassbender.
Other films we appreciate are Martin McDonagh's feature-length directorial debut, the hit-man comedy, "In Bruges" (someone please figure out how to adapt his amazing play "The Pillowman," we elect someone like Bong Joon-Ho or Park Chan-Wook), the Swedish tender-vampire film, "Let The Right One In," "Waltz With Bashir," Harmony Korine's most successful feature film, the dreamy and melancholy, "Mister Lonely,"the under appreciated (at least in the U.S.), Palme d'Or winner, "The Class," by director Laurent Cantet, Thom McCarthy's simple, but effective sophomore picture, "The Visitor," David Gordon Green's Altman-eseque, and surprisingly funny drama, "Snow Angels," David Mamet's mixed-martial arts drama, "Redbelt," Charlie Kaufman's swirl-headed and dour dream, "Synecdoche, New York" and enjoyable entertainment like, "Wall-E" and "The Dark Knight." — Gabe Toro, Drew Taylor, Katie Walsh & RP.