2008: The Films of The Year

Daniel Day Lewis’s moustache, bristling oil and blood. Heath Ledger’s lizard tongue-flick, eyes manic with dripping make-up; the lonely whirr of Wall-E, caterpillaring through the rust and dust of toppled cities; Javier Bardem flipping a coin as if your life depended on it; Sally Hawkins’ dangling earrings like demented grins; Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson cursing their way through Belgium. These are some of the images that prick the mind after another year at the cinema. Just in case you have been bunkered underground during the year, 2008 was an extraordinary time for the movies in Ireland. The biggest box-office draw of the year, Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, was a cinematic and cerebral tour-de-force; the best family film of the year, Andrew Stanton’s Wall-E, opened up the possibilities for animation in the way Orson Welles changed the rulebook for cinema in Citizen Kane. And then there was Paul Thomas Anderson, who, with There Will Be Blood, showed the world he is the Francis Ford Coppola of his generation. At the arthouse, two artists-turned-filmmakers, Julian Schnabel and Steve McQueen, tore up the rules about how to make a film; the directors of Couscous and Gomorrah both took a fresh take on neo-realism, while the Romanians reminded us why they have some of the most exciting filmmakers in the world. As a rule, we don’t like to give out five stars to films. Very few movies have the cinematic originality, artistic beauty, formal accomplishment and hair-raising watch-ability to be designated classics. But this year, with seven five-star films in the Sunday Tribune, it seems we couldn’t stop. In 1980, the famous critic Pauline Kael decried the end of the movies. She got that one wrong. The movies are here and they are as creative, potent, mind-bending, life-affirming, voracious, outrageous and indignant as they ever were. Here’s looking forward to 2009.

Best film of 2008:
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
(Julian Schnabel)
Breathtakingly sad, unsentimental and uplifting, Julian Schnabel’s transformational film about life and death has a spiritual charge that pulses through you, transporting you to the kind of height that leaves you exhilarated and appreciative for your own ordinary life. Staggeringly inventive, with a profound moral sense, it is one of the few genuine masterpieces of the new century’s cinema.

Runner up:
There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson)
Its greatness gnaws at you, long after you’ve seen it. Paul Thomas Anderson’s juggernaut is about oil and it is about America and it is one of the most cynical films about human nature ever made. It also added a great character to the film canon – Daniel Plainview, a perversely hilarious and monstrously amoral oilman unforgettably played by Daniel Day Lewis.

Five other five-star films:
Hunger (Steve McQueen)
A film about Bobby Sands and a work of stunning originality and dazzling cinematic expression. Its sheer visceral thump left viewers hobbling into the light broken, beaten and scarred. With just one film, McQueen has shown he is a major cinematic artist.

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
(Cristian Mungiu).
The pinnacle of the Romanian new wave, Cristian Mungiu’s film is a harrowing drama and a stunning thriller about one student’s plight while trying to help her roommate get an abortion.

Wall-E (Andrew Stanton)
The Citizen Kane of animation. A masterwork of visual, almost silent, poetry and a gentle love story between two robots set on earth and in space. And it does all this within the constraints of the family movie. Genius.

No Country For Old Men
(The Coen Brothers)
The Coen Brothers refashion Cormac McCarthy’s flinty, spare prose into images of spiritual simplicity – a serio-comic neo-western that is lament for modern times. It’s beautifully shot, acted and edited – a superior genre movie marks not just a return to form, but the best film of the Coens’ career.

Couscous (Abdel Kechiche)
There is something timeless about Couscous in its depiction of a man who just wants to do good for his family. But it is its richness that astounds. Abdel Kechiche invisibly, and very beautifully, knits a complex social portrait of this immigrant community – a stunning reimagining of neo-realism.

The next best 10
(in no particular order)

The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan)
Caramel (Nadine Labaki)
You, The Living (Roy Andersson)
Happy-Go-Lucky (Mike Leigh)
The Edge of Heaven (Fatih Akin)
Be Kind Rewind (Michel Gondry)
Still Life (Jia Zhangke)
Gomorrah (Matteo Garrone)
My Winnipeg (Guy Madden)
Silent Light (Carlos Reygadas)

Worst film of the year:
Speed Racer
(The Wachowski Brothers)

Best Irish film:
Saviours (Ross Whitaker and Liam Nolan)
Runner up: Kisses (Lance Daly)

Best Nearly-Irish Film:
Hunger (Steve McQueen)
Runner up: In Bruges (Martin McDonagh)

Most over-rated film of year:
Changeling (Clint Eastwood)

Most underrated film of the year:
The Mist (Frank Darabont)

Best Director:
Julian Schnabel (The Diving Bell and The Butterfly)
Runner up: Paul Thomas Anderson (There Will Be Blood)

Best new director:
Nadine Labaki (Caramel)

Best cinematographer:
Roger Deakins
(No Country For Old Men):

Best male performance:
Daniel Day Lewis (There Will be Blood)
Runner up: Heath Ledger (The Dark Knight)

Best female performance:
Kristin Scott Thomas (I Loved You So Long)
Runner up: Sally Hawkins (Happy-go-Lucky)

Best Documentary:
Man On Wire (James Marsh)

Best animation:
Wall-E (Andrew Stanton).

Most embarrassing cinematic moment:
Any moment of Al Pacino in 88 minutes.

Most spine-tingling cinematic moment:
Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight

The ‘please make it never happen again’ award goes to:
Summer of the Flying Saucer (Martin Duffy)