Top Ten of 2008

Here are my Top 10 films of the year just passed. It's a Spinal Tap top ten - cos this one goes to 11.

1.Let The Right One In
A beautiful, moving, poetic, humane film about... adolescent vampires in remote Sweden during the early 1980s. No, really. An amazing story, directed beautifully, channelling the Gothic poetry of Night of the Hunter and David Lynch.

2. Gomorrah
Because it's about as close as a fiction film can come to news reportage, like a Magnum photo essay brought to life. Because it's the definitive essay on modern crime. Crime as socio-economic structure that inhabiting a nether region between street violence and legitimacy - from top to bottom, infiltrating and penetrating societies, economies and psychologies. Gomorrah made the links and the connections real, human and visual. And it was cinema.

3. Waltz With Bashir
Because it was heart-rending. Because the animation showed a unique way into the war film cliches - young kids sent into a cauldron of chaos. Because it was human and spiritual - those dream sequences still live on. And because the bold, utterly simple ending took me to pieces.

4. Cloverfield
Because it was a committed reinvention of the monster film that pulled no punches, gave you everything you wanted and made it real. It had no stars. Because pushed the medium (my ears were ringing and the floors still shook after we left the theatre). For once, Hollywood approached a genre remix the same way a crazy Asian director would - shake it up, add tons of style, and kill off all the heroes.

5. Wall-E
An animated film about two robots who never speak which had more romance and pathos than a hundred romantic comedies. And it was really very funny. And, yes, of course it was a bloody allegory about what we're doing to the planet.

6. Mongol
Whoa baby, the private life of Ghenghis Khan and guess what...? He was just a simple peasant kid, with a devoted wife and a crazy best friend who got sold into slavery and came back to TAKE OVER ALL OF ASIA!!!!! There's always room for a huge epic that does things seriously (and I don't mean a big Kleenex commercial with lots of extras and sunsets - yes Baz Lurhmann, I am speaking to you) - windswept shots of the steppes, sequences involving hundreds of thousands of Mongol hordes riding into battle under a storm black sky, vast mud cities with towering fetid prisons containing the Emperor of the steppes - these things are like human catnip. We need them. Cinema must provide. And Sergei Bodrov did. And this was just the beginning of the story. Part Two will bring the pain - Genghis unbound.

7. Linha de Passe
Because the spirit of Rosselini lives strong in this beautifully rendered portrait of working class life in Sao Paolo. Four brothers (hullo, gods of neo-realism) each with a different father live under one matriarch's roof. One wants to be a football star, one is a smalltime criminal, one is born again and the youngest is a bus-riding whippersnapper. Lives unfold and fray at the edges but the spirit of compassionate humanism runs strong through every frame distilled into the final image - funny, surreal, tragic and strangely human.

8. The Edge of Heaven
While the Oscar drones hoover up their nominations with this years' slabs of relentlessly middle brow noodlings on faith, redemption and love (films which exist in a strange limbo between the Hallmark Channel and GCSE English Lit Passnotes, a netherzone which is, I am told, one of the Circles of Hell - look that up in your Clift notes motherfucker!) - this is the real deal. A mature, meditative and affecting study of loss, betrayal and redemption that has the feel and weight of an early century novel. Beautifully, elegantly made and acted with great sincerity and emotion this is a wonderful variation on Fateh Akin's previous crazy/beautiful speedball of a film 'Head-On' and reminded me that he's a great fucking director unafraid of big emotions and deep themes.

9. You, The Living
For me, the art movie of the year. No one does Roy Andersson quite like Roy Andersson does Roy Andersson with his Monty Python-meets-Ingmar Bergman worldview. The trademark single shot, static frames full of drama and action and magnificent detail was taken a step further (the camera actually moved, like, 5 times?). There's something about his apocalyptic Buster Keaton slapstick that is so true.

10. Hellboy 2
Yes, there were some excellent comic book adaptations this year - like the Dark Knight (could have lost a subplot and 45 minutes) and Ironman - but I go with this because this is why I love cinema... Those rare, brief moments in cinema when an artist gets handed the keys to the car and is allowed to make exactly the film he wants to make, using all the vast resources, knowledge and expertise of the studio system. And that's how you get Hellboy 2. A comic book adaptation, yes, but entirely from the mind of Guillermo del Toro with new characters and setpieces (like the dying tree monster turning an entire city block into a verdant forest) that were near-hallucinatory in their visual power. Sure, it made no money but thats fine cos he's going to make the Hobbit now.

11. Tropic Thunder/Pineapple Express
OK, the list is more like 11.5. But I put these two together because they're companion pieces - crazed action comedies that used Bruckheimer violence as sight gags like Michael Bay sized banana peels. The 50% of Tropic Thunder that isn't pure noise is one of the funniest satires on Hollywood acting ever by a troupe of actors who play what they know. Robert Downey Junior's bullet point acting tips ("I don't read the script, script reads me") sound so good they'd be taken seriously in an episode of the Inside the Actor's Studio and an unrecogniseable Tom Cruise proves that he is an awesome comic actor. Meanwhile Pineapple Express - WTF? The fact that David Gordon Green directed a big Hollywood stoner comedy which was so determinedly weird (scenes played like sitcoms, some of the weirdest casting in a studio film ever, committed John Woo-esque action scenes that made you laugh like a drain) and it did really well is cause for celebration.

And there you go.

There were lots of other good films this year, I have a list of the worst films of 2008, the Alan Shearer 'good but not that good' prize for the most overrated film and the honorary Amanda Platell Donkey Punch Award for the best film called Donkey Punch about a Donkey Punch involving a Donkey Punch and not made by a Donkey but packing a punch... But the dog ate the notebook and now I've forgotten them all.

Happy New Year