The Fifties: A 2008 Progress Report

By the time I wrote this annual feature last year, as a traditional mile-marker for the moment I've seen 50 U.S. theatrical releases within the calendar year, I wound up with a list that, with amazingly few reservations, I would have been proud to repeat at the end of the year. And thank goodness, since I still haven't gotten around to finishing my actual end-of-year feature (which you'll be kind enough not to reiterate in the comments; I know). This year, it's such a different story: I feel strong affection for a solid field of ten or twelve films, but almost always because of messages, ironies, complexities, and surges of entertainment value that well up from the spaces between discrete contributions. What I mean is, my favorite movies from 2008 aren't much laden with great performances, great scripts, or great cinematography, and while it takes nothing away from them to celebrate their game-raising coordination of strong raw materials, I admit that I'd like to be a little more dazzled before the year gets much older. And I'd love to avoid more half-formed mediocrities and out-and-out howlers, which have really been piling up of late. Which is to say, my 50th official screening for 2008, of Claude Chabrol's A Girl Cut in Two, brought zilch to the party beyond its unbelievably static and belabored theses about class and gender, an uncharacteristic bout of boring photography from Eduardo Serra, and a Ludivine Sagnier performance so vacuous that I started to feel contagiously light-headed.

To be sure, there have been brighter moments in 2008, and for my money, these have been the brightest:

BEST PICTURE
Burn After Reading - The Coens' most consistent, balanced comedy since Raising Arizona
The Dark Knight - A pop blockbuster with emotional and thematic ambition
The Fall - Gorgeous and inventive, with a beauty of a finale
Savage Grace - A ferocious drama that holds tight to its own strangeness
Up the Yangtze - A doc that blooms from familiar dogma to poignant humanism

BEST DIRECTOR
Yung Chang, Up the Yangtze - Intimate without leering, sobering without glops of rhetoric
Joel and Ethan Coen, Burn After Reading - Indulgent to actors, but nimble with pace, tone, and endless oddity
Alex Gibney, Taxi to the Dark Side - Stages a rich, compressed, and polished argument
Tom Kalin, Savage Grace - Treats engimatic behavior with bold, unsettling technique
Alexander Sokurov, Alexandra - Pushes a familiar style into revealing, resonant terrain

BEST ACTRESS
Juliette Binoche, Flight of the Red Balloon - Freer and funnier than ever, with convincing neuroses
Penélope Cruz, Elegy - A sterling portrait of candor, patience, and disappointment
Vera Farmiga, Never Forever - Will she ever tire of spinning gold from flax?
Famke Janssen, Turn the River - Announces her gifts for specificity and layered motivations
Catinca Untaru, The Fall - A restless tyke who deepens and enriches an outlandish tale

BEST ACTOR
Chris Cooper, Married Life - Above par for a strong career, with a heartbreaking climax
Ben Kingsley, Elegy - An ideal bridge between Roth's ferocity and Coixet's compassion
Heath Ledger, The Dark Knight - Preternaturally inventive, wittily frightening, physically indelible
Karl Markovics, The Counterfeiters - Fine shadings of rattled stoicism and shifting motivation
Ryan Phillippe, Stop-Loss - Thrives and matures under Peirce's direction

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Patricia Clarkson, Elegy - Stands up mightily for her character, but also grasps her fears
Penélope Cruz, Vicky Cristina Barcelona - Indulgently reviewed, but cleverly comedic
Jenifer Lewis, Tyler Perry's Meet the Browns - Plays to the balcony, but you can do that when you're this funny
Julia Ormond, Kit Kittredge: An American Girl - Lovely; makes her downturned aloofness work for a change
Claude Sarraute, The Last Mistress - Just the puncture we need in the film's turgid self-seriousness

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Thomas Haden Church, Smart People - Dare I say his sad-sack routine has aged like good wine?
Barney Clark, Savage Grace - Startingly composed among scary adults, and bigger stars
Stephen Dillane, Savage Grace - A swift sketch of sour arrogance that lingers through the film
Jaymie Dornan, Turn the River - Yet another wise, subtle, convincingly expressive kid
Peter Sarsgaard, Elegy - Quivers with Rothian malignancy and barely veiled self-disgust

BEST SCREENPLAY
Burn After Reading - Reaps laughs from runes and non-sequiturs that would die in other films
The Counterfeiters - Credible suspense that evades obscenity in this context
The Dark Knight - The dangling plots amp up the film's concern with unresolvable evils
Elegy - A stale seduction plot opens out to confused desires, unexpected dares
Jellyfish - Piquant mini-narratives, even when the film is too opaque

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY
Alexandra - A fragile blend of heat, fridigity, daybreak, and dust
The Fall - Resonant snapshots of the florid and the mundane
Flight of the Red Balloon - A kid's-eye view shorn of mawkish overemphasis
Mister Foe - Brilliant with composition, tension, depth, and color
Savage Grace - Color and framing as frontal assaults, in the mode of Contempt

BEST FILM EDITING
Reprise - Agility and zesty curlicues enliven a weirdly empty story
Savage Grace - Brusque edits evoke a peculiar, psychically specific violence
Taxi to the Dark Side - Mostly a feat of balancing so much data and narrative
Up the Yangtze - Allows curt impressions to resonate with wider patterns
Yella - A better than average apprentice of Lynch and Polanski

ADDITIONAL JURY PRIZE
Original Score, Burn After Reading - Carter Burwell at the peak of stone-faced parody
Makeup, The Dark Knight - Yes, it's flashy work, but that Joker is already an icon
Art Direction, The Fall - Even when he quotes himself, Tarsem dazzles the eye
Song Score, Mister Foe - A mainline into Hallam, and a window into a city
Sound Design, Wall•E - Melodic interplays of clanks, whirs, and blowing winds