Sight and Sound magazine's Jan 2009 issue has fifty film critics
(including two ex-AMKers, Michael Brooke and Mark Fisher) waxing about
their fave five films of 2008.
The complete list, with one-line 'reviews' of each film, is here (pdf
file):
http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/pdf/films-of-2008.pdf
Here's Fisher's and Brook's selections:
MARK FISHER
Acting Deputy Editor, The Wire, UK
The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, USA)
Enjoyable as a symptom as much as anything else, this is a
depthless film, but that’s good, since it means that it avoids Frank
Miller’s portentous psychologising. Instead it’s about surfaces and
masks, chance and justice.
Joy Division (Grant Gee, UK)
An evocation of a lost time and place, the film restores the
exhilarating grandeur to Joy Division’s music that Control failed to.
It
succeeds because it has what Control didn’t: the voice and body of
Ian Curtis.
Tyson (James Toback, USA)
How to throw away your life, twice – documentary as tragedy, life as
a compulsion to repeat.
Wall•E (Andrew Stanton, USA)
Until the humans arrive this manages to combine silent-movie
whimsy with a picturesque vision of extinction. After that it’s hohum
satire.
Heavy Metal In Baghdad (Suroosh Alvi, Eddy Moretti, USA)
A view of war-torn Iraq that goes where news cameras fear to tread
that’s moving, seemingly in spite of itself, or in spite of the too-
cool for-
school posturing of its Vice magazine directors.
------------------------
MICHAEL BROOKE
BFI Screenonline, UK
Gomorrah (Matteo Garrone, Italy)
The best believe-the-hype film I saw all year and welcome proof that
cinema can still be urgent and relevant, while systematically
deconstructing hoary old gangster myths dating back to Cagney, Paul
Muni and beyond.
Import Export (Ulrich Seidl, Austria)
The most confrontational film I saw this year, Seidl’s second feature
was simultaneously revolting and riveting, lurid and tender,
despairing and yet strangely respectful of human dignity.
My Winnipeg (Guy Maddin, Canada)
An utter delight, and probably the best beginners’ introduction to the
work of Canadian straitjacket-case Maddin, who pays tribute to his
hometown in his usual inimitable fashion, with lashings of
melodramatised autobiography.
You, the Living (Roy Andersson, Sweden)
A real surprise, since Andersson’s Songs for the Second Floor left me
fairly cold, but this tickled my funny-bone from the moment it
pulled off a whip-smart reversal of the old tablecloth gag.
I Served the King of England (Jirí Menzel, Czech Republic)
Puffball (Nicolas Roeg, UK)
I can’t make great claims for either, but seeing two of my favourite
film-makers back behind a camera after insanely long hiatuses and
on recognisable, if not full-strength form, was enough for me
And Kubrick scholar Michel Ciment's selections:
MICHEL CIMENT
Positif, France
Couscous (Abdelatif Kechiche, France)
Abdelatif Kechiche’s third feature is the outstanding French film of
the year with its vitality, its pathos, its sense of humour and its
exhilarating combination of the best of Pagnol and Pialat.
Gomorrah (Matteo Garrone, Italy)
This exemplifies the return of the great Italian political cinema with
its sense of places and faces and its exposure through a mosaic-style
narrative of the wrongdoings of society.
Hunger (Steve McQueen, UK)
Undoubtedly the debut feature of the year, this reveals McQueen to
be a powerful stylist capable of dealing with the contemporary issue
of prison life without preaching and Manichaeism.
There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, USA)
This has an epic scope that relates to the great Hollywood films
about America, from Greed to Citizen Kane and Giant. Daniel Day-
Lewis’ performance is on a par with Anderson’s inspired direction.
Three Monkeys (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Turkey/France/Italy)
This confirms Ceylan’s status as one of the few new, great names
that have emerged in the last decade. It is also a renewal of his
talent in the noir genre.
-----------------
And the overall 'Top Ten' films:
What seemed a lacklustre year has been turned on its head by our 50
critics who unearthed many terrific films in our poll and made
'Hunger' a clear winner. By Nick James
The Top Ten
1 Hunger (Steve McQueen, UK)
2 There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, USA)
3 WALL•E (Andrew Stanton, USA)
4 Gomorrah (Matteo Garrone, Italy)
=5 A Christmas Tale (Arnaud Desplechin, France)
=5 The Class (Laurent Cantet, France)
7 Of Time and the City (Terence Davies, UK)
8 Happy-Go-Lucky (Mike Leigh, UK)
=9 The Headless Woman (Lucrecia Martel, Argentina/France/Italy/Spain)
=9 Let the Right One In (Tomas Alfredson, Sweden)
http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/feature/49502
On The Hunger: An astonishing feature debut from Steve McQueen. Given
the
originality and variety of McQueen’s ‘gallery work’ for more than a
decade this shouldn’t have come as a surprise, but I’m sure I wasn’t
alone in being surprised by its authority. This is a film that goes to
the heart of the deep anger that has fuelled Northern Ireland’s
Troubles for over 40 years. With a minimum of historical scenesetting
or relief from the hellish intensity of the Maze prison,
McQueen and his collaborators take us to a time and place that
already seems unimaginable, and give it moral depth and almost
unbearable poignancy.
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Picture a synthesis of all those collegiate scenes in Hollywood
'golden era' musicals where movie stars are playing performers in some
new show and stay up all night after the premiere waiting for the
notices in the morning papers. I have in mind not only Gene Kelly and
Debbie Reynolds but also Mickey Rooney and Fred Astaire and Cyd
Charisse and Judy Garland and Rita Hayworth. They end up at a late-
night bar or a breakfast café still buzzing on adrenaline and booze
and confess to each other their wide-eyed hopes of success. It's
always an optimistic moment: movie stars playing just folks who are on
the brink of becoming movie or theatre stars. Then the bundle of
papers is thrown out of the van and magically the review's gist is
spelt out, as it never was in real life, in capitals on the front
page: FLOP or HIT.
That's a fantasy from an age gone by in which reviewers mattered so
much that performers lived in fear or delight of them. (Of course the
floppers in these movies become hitsters no matter what.) Now film
producers get the reviews sent to their BlackBerries and in most cases
they will have a pretty good idea beforehand if the thumb is going to
jerk up or down or if indeed the direction really matters. The one
unanswerably commercial function of the critic - immediate consumer
advice - is now undermined by the plenitude of information about any
film available to everyone before it comes out. This surplus enables
both film distributors and audiences to bypass reviewers. And in kind,
reviewers feel a greater need to distinguish themselves as individual
voices. That, at least, is the one explanation I can come up with for
the broad results of our 'Best of 2008' survey.
Come Christmas and the annual version of that HIT or FLOP question for
film is: was it a good year or a bad year? We have chosen to make much
of 2008 because it seems such a watershed moment for cinema criticism
and reviewing. In crude terms for film quality, the year has already
had the raspberry in these pages . But collectively our contributors
beg to differ. 2008 is a HIT they say. And they have said HIT by
choosing a very large number of films in their 'top fives'. So how is
it that in the so-called 'critics crisis' year (which happens also to
be credit-crunch year, and endangered-arthouse-distribution year) the
critics want to recommend so much?
We asked more than 50 writers around the world which five films seen
in 2008 most impressed them (they didn't all stick to the number).
Their answers include more than 150 different titles made in the last
two years (and at least 20 more made earlier). Only a cynic would say
that the wide choice must reflect a weak year, with our writers
looking for consolation prizes. The reason for this large number is
surely because cinema is now so rich in variety that opinion is
diffused.
That is certainly the view of most of the committed cinephiles I've
been talking to lately. And yet, looking harder at these lists, the
situation seems much more complex. There's a fair amount of posturing
for sure, of brandishing the coolest of outsider perspectives, but
then that's always been a welcome provocation from film critics. It
may also be that taking extreme positions is the only valid way to
cope with the 'crisis of the image' - better understood as the
ubiquity of the moving image and its consequent de-reification as a
hallowed experience. I remain concerned that if we sideline the
question of quality by always avoiding subjective value judgements and
what we mean by 'best' or most impressive, as some of our writers do
here, we play into the hands of those who see cinema only as
entertainment. It sometimes makes critics seem indistinguishable from
fans, but then maybe they are and should be?
One thing we can be sure of is the S&S film of the year. Steve
McQueen's stupendous Hunger received so many nominations it was never
in any doubt of being caught. UK bias seems to have little to do with
it because to be British is usually a home handicap (and yet we find
Of Time and the City and Happy-Go-Lucky among the best here too). As
Ian Christie puts it: "McQueen and his collaborators take us to a time
and place that already seems unimaginable, and give it moral depth and
almost unbearable poignancy." I'm now imagining McQueen chinking his
cocktail glass with Fred Astaire, but the newspaper at his feet
proclaiming HIT would have to be Irish, for Ireland is the one place
so far that he's had a surefire hit. Our congratulations go to him for
a well-deserved ranking.
The magnificent There Will Be Blood undoubtedly suffered from the
looseness of our rules since it received a few votes last year from
American early viewers. However, it did pip WALL•E to the silver
position in the last moments and it still wouldn't have caught Hunger
if last year's votes had been included. WALL•E was a clear bronze
(much to my chagrin, since for me the film's astounding first 40
minutes is traduced by the bathetic remainder), demonstrating not only
that S&S contributors have broader tastes than they're usually
credited with but also that they nurture small gardens of
sentimentality. The powerful lifelike gangster film Gomorrah (on my
own list along with There Will Be Blood, The Class, The Headless Woman
and Molly Dineen's doc The Lie of the Land) is scarcely undeserving of
its fourth billing. I'm particularly pleased, too, to see the
extraordinary vampire film Let the Right One In featured.
The ten films that charted here (and the eight more hanging just
below) prove that cinema is vibrant with ideas, but the true joy of
the following lists comes from reading about films one hasn't yet seen
that sound from their descriptions like special experiences. I can't
believe I've allowed myself to miss Tulpan, Our Beloved Month of
August, Hotel Diaries, RR, Bullet in the Head, Parque Vía, United Red
Army, Generation Kill and Tony Manero. Perhaps if I'd seen them, my
earlier diagnoses after the disappointments of the big festivals might
have been in tune with the rest of our cinephile crew. If critics are
no longer our Friday night cineguides, their passionate advocacy
remains treasurable. And even if writers don't always look quite so
glamorous as Rita Hayworth when drinking cocktails, the toast should
now be, "Crisis, what crisis?"
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