1. The Dark Knight – Filmed and paced with throbbing forward motion, Christopher Nolan’s direction is a triumph of operatic action, drama and music synthesis. Batman (Christian Bale), further troubled by what public image to display in light of doing the most good, greatly compromises his ideals to protect Gotham’s citizens. As the head adversary, The Joker (Heath Ledger) is such a disturbing creation that he hotwires into your very nerves. The suspense is so palpable that your adrenaline is drumming incessantly, but that’s probably due to the immediacy of conflicts: There are always three or four noir-flavored plots toppled on top of each other simultaneously. The film’s visceral power is not to be ignored either. The Batmobile shedding its shell to convert into the Batcycle is the most exhilarating movie moment of 2008. If all blockbusters were this well made then critics wouldn’t have to complain about the quality of blockbusters. The bar has just been raised.
2. Burn After Reading –Like most of the Coen Brothers’ conundrums this is a story without a plot, it is all a commotion of accidents spilling into the next string of accidents. This is the kind of underappreciated movie that will get discussed on a VH1 movie countdown list of classic scenes probably ten years from now with its pundits explaining how it was misunderstood in its initial release. Time will prove it as most memorable, most repeatedly watchable, most intricately and ingeniously plotted. An actors coup with George Clooney as the compulsive womanizer, John Malkovich as a weirdly pompous CIA agent, and Brad Pitt as the clueless nimrod out to blackmail men that are way, way smarter than him.
3. Slumdog Millionaire – Jamal (Dev Patel) is orphaned at a young age, roams the streets peddling and hustling for survival, and entering adulthood lands a spot on the Indian version of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” only to be accused of cheating. Director Danny Boyle has taken some potentially grim and mirthless material and has triumphantly directed it like a rip-roaring action movie spurred with lightening pacing as it traces one remarkable boy with an unbreakable determination and willpower to succeed.
4. The Wrestler – It’s actor Mickey Rourke that makes the comeback of a lifetime as Randy “The Ram” Robinson, a wrestler on the brink of professional and personal oblivion, but the film deserves inexhaustible respect as well for it being a character study – the kind we got with regularity in ’70’s cinema when characters were allowed warts, faults and defects. Rourke’s powerhouse performance is a work absent of any vanity.
5. Changeling – Clint Eastwood’s most complex work in years yet criticized in some corners as merely a simplistic kidnapping tale. Did everyone miss and undervalue the depiction of 1920’s sexual inequality and inherent chauvinism in professional males during that era? Asylums were a common practice back then, and although it has been tackled in old black & white movies, it’s never been done as well as it does here with wronged woman Angelina Jolie being thrown in and stripped of her dignity just for being a good mother.
6. Paranoid Park – The most perplexing and intriguing avante-garde experiment of the year. Skateboard kid (played by non-actor Gabe Nevins) accidentally kills a security guard, holds this secret to himself and to his journal, and spends the rest of the film trying to free himself from the guilt. Gus Van Sant’s disaffected approach, emphasized through a jumbled non-linear narrative that seems to pop out of Alex’s dissociated mind, can be a mesmerizing cinematic experience if you get Van Sant’s meditation on vacuous youth.
7. W. – Oliver Stone’s lingering film dared to dissect, by means of psychological probing, the professionally fallacies and personality inadequacies of George W. (Josh Brolin). As president, George Jr. wants to outshine his father’s legacy. A father whose course of action as former president was too slow, too conservative, not thorough enough. The film sees baseball as W.’s first love obsession, and politics as not so much as a love obsession but as a heritage entitlement.
8. Tropic Thunder – Robert Downey Jr. delivers one of the best comedic performances ever, crossing lines over into the subversive as an Australian actor thespian metamorphosing into character as a black military sergeant. Ben Stiller and Jack Black also play actors who go to the jungle to shoot a Vietnam movie. Full tilt with the vulgarity but ridiculously funny nonetheless, it took extra viewings for me to see this as an extreme satire on celebrity egomaniacs.
9. Frost/Nixon – Riveting historical drama with British TV personality David Frost (Martin Sheen) going after Richard Nixon (Frank Langella) in an exclusive interview in effort to make the disgraced former president apologize for his trespasses. The film builds an unexpected rooting interest for Frost to absolve himself in what could be a career destroying debacle. Top-class script is by Peter Morgan (“The Queen”).
10. Iron Man – You have to love an action movie with incredible whooshing flying sequences. But at ground level the movie hooks us into the ethics transformation of Tony Stark. In the lead, Robert Downey Jr. gives the movie a real breathing human soul, and the actor maintains the same quirkiness in this blockbuster as he does in his smaller independent films. Hoorah for Downey!
    

Also Highly Recommended: 'Revolutionary Road" with Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet as a trouble 1950s married couple seeking escape from conformist culture; "Rachel Getting Married" featured the remarkable Anne Hathaway as a rehab junkie returning home to her sister’s wedding; the sublimely animated "Wall-E" is particularly special in its dialogue-free scenes; "Encounters at the End of the World" is Werner Herzog’s supercool Antarctica documentary; "Man on Wire" about a daring trapeze artist is also a documentary of astonishing sights.

The Worst Films of the Year:

1. Repo! The Genetic Opera – Death-metal musical with non-stop bad lyrics that relentlessly polluted my mind with ugly images.
2. 88 Minutes – Al Pacino tumbles to his career low with this tick-tock turkey.
3. The Happening – There are a lot of deaths by osmosis in this movie, but stupidity by osmosis too.
4. Fool’s Gold – So dumb and contrived and far-fetched and witless that it causes oxygen deprivation to the brain.
5. Made of Honor – The worst sex humor of any comedy in recent ages.
   

Best Performances: Mickey Rourke (“The Wrestler”); Robert Downey Jr. (“Tropic Thunder”); Heath Ledger (“The Dark Knight”); Anne Hathaway (“Rachel Getting Married”); Kate Winslet (“Revolutionary Road”); Kate Winslet (“The Reader”)

Best Action Scene: Anything in “The Dark Knight”

Best Action Scene Runner-Up: The cathedral hooks-and-pulley grappling scene in “Quantam of Solace”

Worst Action Scene: The speedboat chase where James Bond miraculously avoids machine gun bullets with no shield from behind in “Quantam of Solace”

Best Trashy B-Movie Scene: “Rambo” where are hero outruns an explosion then dodging the falling jungle foliage that is thunderously falling from overhead

Best Cheesy Frights of the Year: The attack of the Amazon red ants in “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull”

Funniest Movie Line of the Year: “You were my Brothuh!” in “Tropic Thunder”

Best Pissed-Off Old Man: Clint Eastwood in “Gran Torino”

Best Musical Interlude of the Year: Tom Cruise’s hip-hop moves in “Tropic Thunder”

Best Body Language of the Year: George Clooney in top form in “Burn After Reading”

Worst Casting of the Year: Any American or British actor playing a German in “Valkyrie”

Worst Performance of the Year: Patrick Dempsey’s smelly-looking armpits in his first bedroom scene in “Made of Honor”

Grossest Scene: The white dog-poo in the execrable comedy “Step Brothers”

Most Disappointing Film of the Year: Ridley Scott’s “Body of Lies”

Most Love It or Hate It Film of the Year: “Funny Games”