Tag: year in film

Our three critics put a cap on 2012 with their lists of the year’s best (and then some):

Chris Herrington:

It was a good year for ensemble casts and mainstream prestige movies — the quality of which should make for an unusually worthy Oscar race. It was a pretty bad year for foreign language selections and/or audacious full-on art films, at least in Memphis, with only one of each cracking my Top 10. My final findings:

1. The Master: The opening 20 minutes, which track Joaquin Phoenix’s Freddie Quell from the final days of WWII through an itinerant homecoming until he hops aboard a yacht and into the life of Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman), is the boldest, best filmmaking of the year. After that, this magisterial but ornery would-be Scientology exposé instead digs down into an irresolvable, darkly comic battle between the belief systems we impose and the animal urges that resist them. Or maybe it’s just about Phoenix’s face.

2. Zero Dark Thirty: As a rule, I’ve always restricted my lists to movies that played Memphis during the calendar year, but I’m making an exception for Zero Dark Thirty, which will open here on January 11th, which I’ve been living with for nearly a month, and which is such a movie-of-the-moment that it’ll look a little silly on a year-end list next December. I’ll have more — much more — to say about Kathryn Bigelow’s follow-up to The Hurt Locker in a couple of weeks. For now, suffice it to say that this decade-long procedural is gripping and sobering from first pointed moment to last, earns its nearly three-hour running time more than any of the other awards-season behemoths, and, while not undeserving of question, is far more intellectually and emotionally conflicted than many have suggested.

3. A Separation: This Iranian import opened in Memphis in March, right after picking up an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. In this suspenseful, high-stakes domestic drama, director Asghar Farhadi’s busy naturalism is so subtly orchestrated the film seems simply to be happening, and a crucial, complex portrait of modern Iran emerges with the illusion of accident.

4. Lincoln: Yeah, it’s a Spielberg film. But in an old-fashioned gem with righteous contemporary resonance, other creators vie for authorship: screenwriter Tony Kushner, who honors the best of Lincoln’s public speeches and private writings with his eloquent, demanding, deeply satisfying script; star Daniel Day-Lewis, in savant mode, who turns an ace Hall of Presidents caricature into something unexpectedly rich, funny, and human; and casting director Avy Kaufman, who marshaled to the screen a veritable army of standout supporting players.

5. Silver Linings Playbook: A fruitful return to the shaggy, neurotic comedy that launched writer-director David O. Russell’s career, Silver Linings Playbook repurposes the spirit of classic-Hollywood screwball for an utterly contemporary paradigm of broken families, name-brand medications, and the National Football League. Robert De Niro gives his most meaningful turn in ages. Jennifer Lawrence graduates into a fully adult star.

6. Bernie: By using a Greek chorus of actual townspeople to spice up this ripped-from-the-headlines, East Texas, small-town crime comedy, director Richard Linklater suggests what a Coen Brothers/Errol Morris mashup might be. Jack Black, in the title role, has never been better. If you can’t say the same for Matthew McConaughey (Wooderson — never forget), he still delivers the best of three great 2012 supporting turns (along with Magic Mike and Killer Joe).

7. Keep the Lights On: Ira Sachs’ best film is a diaristic account of a troubled, decade-long romance, but it contains as much grace as darkness, and its homemade feel and rich grounding in gay/New York subculture elevates it.

8. The Perks of Being a Wallflower: Author Stephen Chbosky adapts and directs his own novel and taps into truths about certain kinds of teen experience that you almost never see on the screen. One of the very best high school movies.

9. Looper: A time-travel crime thriller that is smart rather than merely clever and takes as its credo, “I don’t want to talk about time-travel shit.” A provocative, appreciably subtle, and low-tech view of futuristic dystopia. And the best movie-music moment in a year rich with them, when Joseph Gordon-Levitt and gal pal Piper Perabo drop a needle on Richard and Linda Thompson’s “I Want To See the Bright Lights Tonight.”

10. Moonrise Kingdom: Wes Anderson’s better-than-expected return to live-action is part Godard, part Peanuts, and all Anderson.

The Asterisk: I admire newcomer Benh Zeitlin’s visual and conceptual ambition too much to label his Beasts of the Southern Wild merely “overpraised,” though I found its relentless style wearying on a second viewing and its attraction to Southern exoticism questionable on contact.

Second 10: A Dangerous Method, Your Sister’s Sister, Argo, Detropia, The Deep Blue Sea, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Compliance, Undefeated, Django Unchained, The Kid With a Bike.

Fest Faves: Open Five 2 and Pilgrim Song.

Best We Missed: Margaret, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, Take This Waltz.

Better Than Expected (or Than You Heard): Bachelorette, Damsels in Distress, Frankenweenie, The Grey, Hope Springs, Magic Mike, Men in Black III, Pitch Perfect, The Secret World of Arrietty, Where Do We Go Now?.

Overpraised or Disappointing: The Artist, The Avengers, Brave, The Cabin in the Woods, Cosmopolis, The Five-Year Engagement, Hitchcock, ParaNorman, Prometheus, Searching for Sugar Man.

Duds or Disasters I Failed To Avoid: Cloud Atlas, Dark Shadows, The Dictator, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, The Iron Lady, John Carter, Rock of Ages, Shame, To Rome With Love.

Performers Better Than Their Films: Amy Adams (Trouble With the Curve), Michael Fassbender (Prometheus), Richard Gere (Arbitrage), Anne Hathaway (The Dark Knight Rises and Les Misérables), John Hawks (The Sessions), Philip Seymour Hoffman and Catherine Keener (A Late Quartet), Brit Marling (The Sound of My Voice), Matthew McConaughey (Killer Joe), Aubrey Plaza (Safety Not Guaranteed), Rachel Weisz (The Bourne Legacy).

Ten I Wish I Hadn’t Missed: Flight, Footnote, Friends With Kids, Haywire, In Darkness, Lawless, Life of Pi, Pina, Premium Rush, Rampart.

Greg Akers:

1. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy: The L.A. Confidential of spy films; a labyrinthine period mystery that turns on character interaction as much as plot. Director Tomas Alfredson brings John le Carré’s novel to life and populates it with great actors, chief among them Gary Oldman in a career-best performance as George Smiley. All I wish for Christmas is that the band gets back together in the Tinker Tailor sequel The Honourable Schoolboy.

2. Lincoln: A serious film that proves that movies don’t have to be stiflingly dry to be intellectually engaging or dumbed-down to be crowd-pleasing. Daniel Day-Lewis dominates and Steven Spielberg handles the dramatic material with a soft touch. Also co-starring some of my favorite character actors from contemporary TV, including Jared Harris (Mad Men), Michael Stuhlbarg (Boardwalk Empire), Walton Goggins (Justified), David Costabile (Breaking Bad), and Adam Driver (Girls).

3. The Dark Knight Rises: Batman Begins is a great Batman movie and The Dark Knight is a great Joker movie; with Christopher Nolan’s trilogy-capper The Dark Knight Rises, we finally get a great movie about Bruce Wayne, the most interesting character in the mythos. The film answers the question, Was Wayne doomed when his parents were killed, or can he be redeemed and find life after death? Plus: Anne Hathaway! Thematically dense but topically diffuse — its politics are satisfyingly hard to pin down — The Dark Knight Rises surpasses its predecessors.

4. The Master: In P.T. Anderson’s latest masterwork, Joaquin Phoenix gives the best performance since Daniel Day-Lewis in Anderson’s previous film, There Will Be Blood. In The Master, L. Ron Hubbard analogue Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a self-described “hopelessly inquisitive man,” finds in Phoenix’s Freddie Quell a broken, irresistible presence he wants to save. I suspect The Master was a different film before Anderson edited it to maximize Phoenix’s arresting performance. The ending is maddeningly elusive.

5. Undefeated: One of the best movies ever made in Memphis, the Oscar-winning Undefeated is an emotional tour de force. Framed by a season of football at Manassas High, the film explores the lives of inner-city kids struggling to make it in a world that has done them few favors and a coach who tries to inspire them to turn their certain defeats into victories. Directors Daniel Lindsay and T.J. Martin turn hundreds of hours of film into a document of ordinary lives on the brink.

6. Looper: In September, I subbed for Chris Herrington on The Chris Vernon Show and gave my five favorite time-travel movies. I hadn’t yet seen Looper, but if I had, it would’ve topped the list. In addition to making me swoon with bromance, Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays a mean Bruce Willis. Writer/director Rian Johnson also provides one of the great time-travel critiques in a conversation between young and old versions of the same man.

7. Moonrise Kingdom: The ultimate expression of Wes Anderson’s visual aesthetic to date, with a joyous formal precision. At first, a period piece set in the 1960s; at last, it literalizes Anderson’s nostalgia/fetishism for childhood paraphernalia.

8. Skyfall: James Bond has rarely been better than in this capstone to what is thus far a Daniel Craig trilogy. Skyfall goes back to Bond’s childhood and considers his mortality and, relevantly, his place in 21st-century pop culture. With Javier Bardem as an unforgettable villain and Sam Mendes and Roger Deakins making it all look pretty.

9. Silver Linings Playbook: I’m not normally a fan of Bradley Cooper, but he’s wonderful here as an emotionally wounded cuckold fresh out of a mental institution who meets a beguiling woman (played to the hilt by Jennifer Lawrence) who is herself recovering from severe psychic trauma. Silver Linings Playbook is a realistic, engaging romantic comedy that’s also about everyday psychological foibles.

10. Beasts of the Southern Wild: Trouble the Water meets George Washington in this remarkable, original indie. Set in an impoverished rural community, Beasts of the Southern Wild is futuristic in that it’s post-polar melt, but it also comments on our species’ roots. Its characters are purposefully living so far outside of normative society’s caretaking as to be prehistoric. But really it’s the coming-of-age of a remarkable protagonist named Hushpuppy (an astonishing Quvenzhané Wallis).

Honorable Mention: Django Unchained, Argo, Prometheus, Bernie, Anna Karenina, Life of Pi, Carnage, The Avengers, The Bourne Legacy, The Sessions.

Addison Engelking:

1. Damsels in Distress

2. The Deep Blue Sea

3. The Kid With a Bike

The month of May was not just a great time for barbecue fanatics; it was also the richest movie-going month of the year. Amazingly, the top three films on my list all opened in Memphis between May 4th and May 18th; I loved them then, and seven months and several prestige pictures later, I love them even more now. Taken together, these diverse, idiosyncratic masterworks ended up as an inadvertent tribute to the late film critic Andrew Sarris, who passed away in June. Whit Stillman’s verbal effervescence, Terence Davies’ pictorial romanticism, and the Dardenne Brothers’ spiritual tough-mindedness once again reaffirmed Sarris’ claim that “The director … would not be worth bothering with if he were not capable now and then of a sublimity of expression almost miraculously extracted from his money-oriented environment.”

4. Chronicle/Haywire (tie): Chronicle was my favorite superhero movie of the year, an exciting and ultimately tragic account of teenage outsiderdom that’s packed with found-footage innovations as impressive as the famous split-screen prom-queen massacre sequence in Brian De Palma’s Carrie. And tireless craftsman Steven Soderbergh cranked out his leanest, coolest movie since 1998’s Out of Sight. Haywire, a golden-hued, gender-flipped homage to John Boorman’s Point Blank, also let Soderbergh celebrate his leading lady, former mixed-martial-arts star Gina Carano, like she was Marlene Dietrich in Shanghai Express or Uma Thurman in Kill Bill.

5. A Dangerous Method/Cosmopolis (tie): Supporting some movies is a lot like gambling — only instead of money, we critics put our reputations and our good taste where our mouths are if we want to get in the game. This year, a lot of critics are letting it ride on Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master: They love its intractability, its strangeness, its stubborn, animal refusal to follow any muse but its own. In the long run, they may be right. Of course, in the long run, we’ll all be dead, too. For now, these two films directed by David Cronenberg seem to me like surer bets. Cronenberg’s dispassionate interest in the baffling complexities of the human mind are already as queasy and provocative as his earlier meditations on the terrifying fragility of the human body. Plus, to paraphrase Sarris one last time, his movies always follow the same pattern: Each new film is assailed by his detractors as his biggest mess yet, but a year later the same film looks like a modern masterpiece and two years later like the last full-bodied flowering of classicism.

Honorable Mention: Moonrise Kingdom, A Separation, The Five-Year Engagement, Bernie, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Safety Not Guaranteed, all the 3D overhead shots in Life of Pi, and “Amateur Night,” the opening segment of the horror anthology V/H/S.

Five That Missed Memphis But Are Worth Seeking out: Coriolanus, Headhunters, Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present, Holy Motors, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia.

Appropriately in a rich but divergent year in cinema, no film made all three of our critics’ Top 10 lists. From art-flick epics to mainstream comedies to comic-book adventures, our picks for the year’s best moves:

Chris Herrington:

1. Certified Copy: The Western debut of Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami, this French production is like a dream-logic rewrite of Richard Linklater’s great Beyond Sunset, setting two people — antiques dealer Juliette Binoche and art critic William Shimell — on a near-real-time driving, walking, and talking trip across the Tuscan countryside. They may have just met. They may have been married for years. But Certified Copy isn’t a mystery to be unlocked. Like life or love itself, it’s insoluble.

2. The Tree of Life: Encompassing a level of artistic ambition increasingly rare in modern American movies, this audacious Terrence Malick epic is both his most personal — an intimate, autobiographical portrait of nuclear-family life in 1950s Waco, Texas — and most universal — imagining no less than the birth of the universe. Less a narrative than a flood of quotidian fragments, the Waco material is astonishing: an intense hymn to the sensorial and emotional sovereignty of childhood.

3. Another Year: Brit director Mike Leigh might be my favorite practicing filmmaker, and this autumnal late-2010 release, which arrived here in February, is another knockout. Brilliantly acted by members of his revolving company — most notably, an almost painfully recognizable Lesley Manville — it takes on the prickly issue of companionship as a component of happiness.

4. Hugo and 5. War Horse: Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg, twin titans of what was once dubbed “New Hollywood,” match each other with extravagant period films connected to Europe and the Great War. Both are adapted from works of children’s literature. Both deploy exquisite, surprising ensemble casts. Both are models of classical craft and construction. Both are cinema-inspired in their own ways: War Horse is Spielberg’s The Quiet Man or Sargeant York, with a little Au Hasard Balthazar thrown in; Hugo is a celebration of silent cinema that understands and appreciates the form far better than the year’s actual silent movie cause célèbre, The Artist, and is also the most artful use of 3-D produced by the technique’s recent boomlet. And both are rooted in a rich humanism (mis)taken for too simple or sentimental by some.

6. Take Shelter: Arkansas-bred auteur Jeff Nichols — brother of Lucero’s Ben! — makes a big leap from his fine regional-indie debut, 2007’s Shotgun Stories. In perhaps the lead performance of the year, Michael Shannon is a soft-spoken, blue-collar father and husband suddenly beset by dark visions. This tight little genre movie taps into a sense of unease in modern American life — the fragility of employment, the uncertainty of health care, the burden of credit, the weight of worry, and the fearsome responsibilities of parenthood amid everything else.

7. Bridesmaids: The best mainstream comedy since producer Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up, this tour de force from co-writer/star Kristen Wiig similarly grounds its gonzo scenarios in real characters and real emotions and features some of the year’s most memorable movie moments — Wiig’s outstanding impression of an expectant penis, a wedding-gown-clad Maya Rudolph squatting defeated in the middle of the street.

8. Win Win: This third feature from veteran actor turned indie filmmaker Thomas McCarthy (following The Station Agent and The Visitor) was the year’s most overlooked film, a superb middle-class family drama with Paul Giamatti and Amy Ryan as the most believable married couple in recent movie memory.

9. Tabloid: After years of heavy stuff, non-fiction genius Errol Morris returns to news-of-the-weird territory, with dazzlingly hysterical results.

10. Melancholia: I resisted this on a first viewing because I wasn’t emotionally affected by it and because I always feel the urge to resist Lars von Trier movies. I realized on a second viewing that neither of those initial responses was relevant. Here is a black-hole comedy about a woman whose depression is so profound it not only ruins her wedding night, it destroys the world. And it’s perhaps the first time von Trier has put the dynamic of skeptical viewership on-screen, with depressive Kirsten Dunst embodying the filmmaker’s own rancid worldview and rage-against-the-dying-of-the-light sister Charlotte Gainsbourg fighting a good fight on behalf of audience resistance. A major film. Like it or not.

Second 10: Martha Marcy Mae Marlene, Young Adult, The Help, Drive, Margin Call, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, The Descendants, 13 Assassins, Tiny Furniture, Senna

Addison Engelking:

1. The Tree of Life and Melancholia: Terrence Malick’s boldest, wildest, and most divisive movie yet, The Tree of Life is an unstable, provocative mix of evolutionary biology, Christian metaphysics, family memories, and contemporary anxieties. When it works — and most of the time it does — it’s almost embarrassingly intimate, as though Sean Penn’s voiceover narration is coming from your own head. In contrast to Malick’s exuberant, Whitman-esque conviction that “every leaf is a miracle,” Lars von Trier’s Melancholia offered a potent, Emily Dickinson-like negation of the universe that’s just as uncomfortable and sincere. Somehow, they both feel right.

2. Another Year: I didn’t like director Mike Leigh’s decision to alter the color scheme of his film every time the seasons changed. That seems like a too-obvious way to chart his characters’ growth. As long as Leigh keeps coaxing such finely shaded work from actor/collaborators like Jim Broadbent, Ruth Sheen, and (especially) Lesley Manville, though, he’s allowed to be heavy-handed every now and then.

3. 13 Assassins: Aside from an early appearance by a limbless mute victimized by a wicked warlord, there’s very little of the boundary-pushing gore and shock tactics that make Japanese director Takashi Miike’s name synonymous with a certain kind of in-your-face Asian cinema. For those too squeamish to explore his work, it’s fortunate that Miike can play within the rules as well as break them, thus this perfect slice of genre-film professionalism, starring a baker’s dozen of swordsmen as suicidally beautiful and existentially badass as William Holden’s gang in The Wild Bunch.

4. Martha Marcy Mae Marlene: The second half of Sean Durkin’s cannily chopped-up psychological horror story sort of argues that upper-class materialism is just another kind of cult. But why add extra layers of significance to a paranoid fable that compares more than favorably to Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 masterpiece The Conversation? Elizabeth Olsen’s polysemic heroine slips in and out of memories, dreams, and possible visions as Durkin keeps poking and prodding primal American fears — about religion, about group membership, about something making noises in the woods.

5. Win Win and Terri: These two compassionate films offer the year’s richest (and most troubling) portraits of teenagers. Both films also build up to vital, scary set pieces, like Win Win‘s wrestling match and Terri‘s long night of underage drinking and sexual flirtation.

6. Of Gods and Men: In the stomach-punch movie of the year, a group of monks in a remote abbey try not to lose their religion while the world around them collapses. Seldom have what author Octavio Paz called “the traps of faith” seemed more noble, or more dangerous.

7. 127 Hours: A stunt film not unlike last year’s Ryan Reynolds solo vehicle Buried, this biopic of Aron Ralston’s epic ordeal in a crevasse successfully harnesses director Danny Boyle’s morbidly whimsical imagination to James Franco’s Mr. Cool self-absorption, with fine and uncharacteristically heartfelt results.

8. Bridesmaids: Even though the film nearly implodes during the Judd Apatow-imposed sequence in the bridal store that climaxes with projectile vomiting and Maya Rudolph defecating in the street, this is by far the year’s best Hollywood comedy, featuring the year’s most eccentric and jovial ensemble cast.

9. Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop and Bill Cunningham New York: Two compelling documentaries about men at work. The portrait of O’Brien as a manic sarcasm machine driven by a bottomless desire for attention is compelling in a nice, chintzy, gossip-magazine way, but like Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, the film also shows just how tough it is to be famous. In contrast, what a guy this Cunningham is: an ageless, endlessly curious fashion photographer and workaholic who subsists on cheap pastries and pure joie de vivre.

10. Paul/Attack the Block/Rise of the Planet of the Apes: Sometimes high concepts work out pretty well. Whether you’re watching the misadventures of a stoner E.T., the struggles of a gang of London street rats against an army of hairy aliens, or the seventh installment of that talking-monkeys-conquer-the-world franchise, they all contain sprightly storytelling shortcuts and well-earned moments of heart-tugging emotional intensity.

Honorable Mentions: Midnight in Paris, Margin Call, Cave of Forgotten Dreams

Greg Akers:

1. Of Gods and Men: In a year full of bombastic films, including ones about the birth and ending of the world, no less, my favorite film is power served in a tiny package. A great film about faith and good people, Of Gods and Men tells the true account of the fate of Trappist monks in a civil-war strewn Algeria in the 1990s. With long stretches just observing the men going about their daily rituals, Of Gods and Men is a quiet prayer for peace, knowing that it’s never going to come.

2. Contagion: Not a fun film by any stretch of the imagination, but Contagion is a procedural that dazzles with its dedication to its rigid structure. Steven Soderbergh’s film about the genesis, spread, and devastation of a pandemic depicts medical and governmental professionals fighting the threat and holding their emotions in check. The characters rarely act afraid. It leaves the terror for the viewer.

3. The Adventures of Tintin: Steven Spielberg’s first animated film, Tintin follows in the footsteps of his Indiana Jones and Jurassic Park movies: popcorn entertainments that don’t insult the intelligence. It’s the most fun I had in a theater this year.

4. Martha Marcy Mae Marlene: A harrowing film about a young woman escaping a cult, Martha Marcy Mae Marlene flirts with indie drama, horror, and character study, keeping the audience guessing for nearly its entire running time before finally revealing what kind of movie it is. I really liked what kind of movie it is.

5. X-Men: First Class and

6. Captain America: The First Avenger: Two Marvel comic-book adaptations that aren’t flawless, but they’re perfect. First Class gets around to the business of giving the X-Men a proper early-1960s origin. The interpersonal dynamic of young mutants struggling with the human population is good, and better yet is the relationship between Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) and Erik Lehnsherr (Michael Fassbender) as they debate the inherent good or evil of the world less than two decades after the Holocaust. Captain America similarly takes a comic-book icon back to his roots, in this case the World War II battleground. Minus an action montage that tries too hard, Captain America is pulpy, atmospheric fun, as if torn from a period propaganda poster.

7. Tabloid: Errol Morris’ documentary of an immensely bizarre episode of abduction in the 1970s. Joyce McKinney “stars” as herself. The film also contains the line of the year: “DOO-DOO DIPPER.”

8. The Descendants: Alexander Payne does George Clooney in Hawaii. What makes The Descendants better than that, though, are the human infills that surround Clooney’s character, most notably Shailene Woodley, who plays Clooney’s rebellious daughter. I prefer the film to Payne’s past portraits, About Schmidt and Sideways.

9. Super 8: J.J. Abrams does Steven Spielberg in 1979. An ode to E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind but with a nasty edge, Super 8 is more memorable for the kid actors (particularly Joel Courtney and Elle Fanning) than for the ‘splosions and special effects. The film essentially asks, what would E.T. have been like if E.T. had been the alien from Alien?

10. Rise of the Planet of the Apes: The great surprise of the summer was that yet another Planet of the Apes film was actually the best one since the Charlton Heston original. In Rise, the subtext is all oppression politics and revolution. Andy Serkis provides the physicality of the ape, in his best performance since the last time he did that, as King Kong.

Honorable Mentions: The Tree of Life, The Illusionist, Another Year, The Muppets, Rango, Somewhere, Even the Rain, Take Shelter, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Guard

Maybe 2010 wasn’t the best film year in recent memory, but across three separate year-end lists, our critics found 43 different films to recommend — even if we occasionally looked back (Metropolis) or ahead (Another Year) to get there. In a somewhat surprisingly lack of consensus, we tab three distinct number-ones, none of them the lone film — financial crisis doc Inside Job — to be cited in all three Top Tens. Our picks:

Chris Herrington

1. The Social Network: No surprise here. The Social Network is dominating year-end lists, and while it might be fun to buck the trend, sometimes the consensus is right. The widespread Citizen Kane comparisons that greeted this film’s arrival were partly a function of it being a portrait of the rise and not-quite-fall of a brilliant, ambitious, and arrogant media tycoon. But more so, David Fincher’s finest film provoked the comparison because this is narrative filmmaking at a frequently ecstatic pitch of achievement, with Aaron Sorkin’s rat-a-tat-tat dialogue, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ bravura score, deft performances from a deep ensemble cast (Rooney Mara!), and Fincher’s audaciously assured editing and shifting, natural camera locking into a hypnotic rhythm.

2. Winter’s Bone: This modern mountain noir from filmmaker Debra Granik, where meth is a more destructive replacement for moonshine, has an increasingly Southern Gothic narrative that could be the skeleton of a mediocre movie. But Winter’s Bone becomes something special due to a steely, engrossing lead performance from newcomer Jennifer Lawrence, an undeniable sense of place, and persuasive — if sometimes misread or misunderstood — social detail. And the film’s perilous story arc and starkly depicted landscape is nailed in place by stray snatches of visual poetry and bits of observed beauty that mark it as something of an Ozarks answer to Charles Burnett’s subterranean classic Killer of Sheep.

3. Inception: After pushing the superhero movie into uncharted territory, director Christopher Nolan tops himself here, combining the scope and command of The Dark Knight, the intricacy and demand for audience attentiveness of his breakout Memento, and the richness of his underrated The Prestige. The result was the most complex and daring mega-blockbuster in film history. Underrated key: a luminous, vulnerable Marion Cotillard, who adds essential danger and emotional weight to what could have been merely a fanboy wet dream.

4. Inside Job: The kind of traditional, big-issue-overview documentaries made by Charles Ferguson don’t tend toward dynamism. But as with his previous film, the Iraq war-focused No End in Sight, Ferguson overwhelms with detail, clarity, and a relentless pursuit of truth on Inside Job, a stomach-turning examination of the global economic crisis. With this mammoth film, audience rage emerges from an accumulation of facts, not from operatic prodding.

5. Night Catches Us: The year’s best debut feature, from writer/director Tanya Hamilton, is a prickly portrait of former Black Panthers in late-’70s Philadelphia that eschews easy or fashionable nostalgia to deliver a sad, honest reckoning with the complications and contradictions of the Black Power movement ­— bolstered by a killer score from hip-hop band the Roots and terrific performances from underused young actors Anthony Mackie and Kerry Washington. Night Catches Us screened this fall at the Indie Memphis Film Festival.

6. Black Swan/Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans: A should-be double-feature of the year’s two most wonderfully insane movie entertainments, one soon to be Oscar-feted, the other barely released, both blowing past such petty distinctions as “good” and “bad” in their increasingly gonzo back halves.

7. The Ghost Writer: This elegant, subtly self-referential political thriller from Roman Polanski — featuring gracefully classical direction, crisp performances (Ewan McGregor, Olivia Williams, Pierce Brosnan), and coolly mordant comedic notes — was the year’s most neglected mainstream film.

8. Please Give: A barbed but surprisingly generous comedy of manners set amid an interconnected group of comfortably middle-class Manhattanites (most notably Catherine Keener and Rebecca Hall), Nicole Holofcener’s richly observed fourth film sketches complicated characters with identification, understanding, and rueful amusement.

9. Broken Embraces: A late-2009 release that slipped into Memphis this past January, Broken Embraces is a twisty, shimmering, movie-mad soap opera from Spanish art-house fave Pedro Almodovar that puts his favorite actress, Penelope Cruz, on opulent display.

10. The Fighter: More Rocky than Raging Bull, this engaging story of boxer Mickey Ward (Mark Wahlberg) and his troubled, crackhead brother (Christian Bale, somehow channeling Ed “The Honeymooners” Norton, somehow making it work) satisfyingly treads familiar ground but has something to say about the limits of familial loyalty.

Best We Missed: Carlos, French director Olivier Assayas’ five-plus-hour, decades-spanning, multi-language docudrama is on the “career” of international terrorist Carlos “the Jackal.” In terms of scope, achievement, and pure film-watching pleasure, it rivals The Social Network and Inception as the Movie of the Year regardless of how few U.S. screens it will appear on.

Best To Come: Another Year, British master Mike Leigh’s latest, a brilliantly acted, autumnal study of marriage, friendship, and growing old is tentatively scheduled to open in Memphis on February 4th.

Honorable Mentions: Lebanon, Animal Kingdom, And Everything Is Going Fine, The American, The White Ribbon, The Town, The Kids Are All Right, Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, Exit Through the Gift Shop, Chloe

Greg Akers

1. Inception: I’ve never had a filmgoing experience as exhilarating, engaging, and intellectually stimulating as Inception. The movie is simply badass. Christopher Nolan is a filmmaker who’s more impressive the more money he has to spend. As visually agog as Inception is — the hallway battle is my favorite sequence of the year — the cast is what propels the movie to the top: Leonardo DiCaprio, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Page, Tom Hardy, Ken Watanabe, and especially Marion Cotillard as the terrifying Mal.

2. Inside Job: I can’t tell you how angry Inside Job made me. The documentary, by Charles Ferguson (No End in Sight), chronicles the worldwide financial implosion of the last few years. Ferguson takes complicated schemes and explains them for the layman. His case is airtight and undeniable. The bad guys are the financial-industry warlords who manipulate the system for staggering gain. Reagan, Clinton, the Bushes, and now Obama: one administration after another enabling the screwing of the American people. Inside Job makes the point clear: America is a plutarchy, and things aren’t getting any better.

3. The Social Network: I suppose any other year The Social Network would be king. For sure, David Fincher’s opus is as engrossing and whippy a film as was released this year. The secret history of a known, familiar phenomenon fascinated, as did the period trappings of a time so recent and full of nascent import.

4. The American: George Clooney may be the best current American actor, and The American might be his best film since Three Kings. Clooney has been great in plenty of “bigger” films, but none has demanded of Clooney what The American does, which is to put the whole production on the back of a character — a professional assassin/gunmaker — of questionable moral fiber who doesn’t talk much. With photographer/filmmaker Anton Corbijn at the helm, The American is elegantly shot and executed.

5. Black Swan: The Late Show does a bit where an amateur performer does something unusual, and David Letterman and Paul Shaffer determine if what they’ve seen “is anything.” The human trick they observe may not even be good, but if it’s at least interesting, it gets a pass. The same logic holds for how I feel about Black Swan, an insane, claustrophobic look at a ballerina (Natalie Portman) cracking up. Many of the words I would use to describe Black Swan are expletives. Director Darren Aronofsky merges many of the themes and emotional underpinnings from his earlier films. What he comes up with is a brilliant movie that goes off the rails too many times to be great. What is great is Portman — about as good as any actress in any role in the last couple years. Not for the faint of heart.

6. Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky: All due respect to Black Swan, but the cinematic ballet scenes of the year come in Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky, which opens with a 20-plus-minute re-creation of the infamous 1913 Parisian premiere of The Rite of Spring. The movie then leaps ahead several years, to when Igor (the always-appreciated Mads Mikkelsen) meets Coco (luxurious Anna Mouglalis). They have the hots for each other. The movie has the hots for Coco’s gorgeous rural estate. See, kids, ballet doesn’t always lead to madness, psychological horror, and physical mutilation. Sometimes it just leads to torrid extramarital affairs in the French countryside.

7. Winter’s Bone and 8. True Grit: A couple of movies about Ozark-area girls forced to act as adults and take charge of difficult situations for their family’s sake. Winter’s Bone is measurably better — set in the provincial hollows and ridges of the contemporary Ozarks, the movie has a plucky gravity shot through with details and observations that lend an irascible verité. The Coens’ True Grit features more of a mythical, problematic Arkansas: a citizenry no less grumpy but maybe a little more worthy of jest. What makes Winter’s Bone and True Grit stand above are the performances of their leads, Jennifer Lawrence and Hailee Steinfeld, respectively. I believe their characters would get along.

9. Hereafter: Clint Eastwood’s Hereafter isn’t about what happens to people once we shuffle off the mortal coil, it’s about what we do with our existential struggle while we’re alive. Hereafter is a movie about the afterlife that is supernatural in conception, humanistic in perspective, and mundane in scope. It’s quietly powerful.

10. Toy Story 3: This Pixar thing is getting old: Make wonderful family films full of energetic storytelling, charm, and visual panache but not at the expense of poignancy.

Honorable Mentions: The Town, Knight and Day, Edge of Darkness, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, The Messenger, Conviction, Lebanon, Let Me In, Crazy Heart, The Kids Are All Right

Addison Engelking

1. The Ghost Writer: Roman Polanski’s latest triumph takes a beach-read story and uses wit and skill to turn it into a classic. Polanski is one of the few old-fashioned auteurs left, and although there are maybe three shots in the film that might pique discerning formalists’ curiosity, no other contemporary director better assays the quotidian horror and absurdity of modern life.

2. The Square: I hope independent video stores don’t totally vanish, because this clever Australian noir deserves a prominent place on an “Employee Picks” shelf, where it will delight future cinephiles and seen-it-alls looking for something different. It unfolds like a classical tragedy. One bad decision after another buries the film’s protagonist (an agonized David Roberts), as the slow, snooping camera plays the Greek chorus, creeping through houses and peeking around corners to reveal the next impending disaster.

3. Metropolis: The hand-meets-heart ending of Fritz Lang’s restored 1927 futuristic class-conflict allegory may be cheesy, but it doesn’t erase or even dent its visual and thematic richness. Lang’s imagery here is more dense and provocative than it ever would be again: One shot shows a whole galaxy of eyes; another reveals a reptilian claw formed by lines of workers; a third shot watches a dozen workers on the job, shifting back and forth like metronomes as they pull and push gears and levers. Lang’s knack for plotting and his interest in exploring social stratification ensure the continued vitality of this silent masterpiece. Screened at the Brooks Museum of Art.

4. Please Give: The characters in Nicole Holofcener’s fourth feature ask themselves all the right uncomfortable questions: What can I do if I feel guilty about my success? How am I supposed to treat my neighbor? Why can’t I connect with my mom? Why can’t I connect with my kid? And, of course, am I a good person? Even if there aren’t any clear answers, the subtle, realistic performances (especially Rebecca Hall and Amanda Peet) offer the solace of recognizable, unpredictable human interaction — and possibly grace.

5. Looking for Eric and 6. Micmacs: These two foreign films, which aim for both human comedy and social commentary, exude a thrilling, risk-taking unevenness. Looking for Eric‘s first half stands out for the dreamlike therapy sessions between a single dad and his favorite soccer player, who has become some sort of guardian angel to him. Then it moves into some messy, scary emotional territory before its unlikely, uplifting finale. Like many Jean-Pierre Jeunet films, Micmacs offers imaginative alternate social groups and wondrous gadgetry that work together during scenes of visual ingenuity and crack comic timing. His latest film also shifts into a more serious register when its two dueling arms dealers are forced to reckon with the results of their own business.

7. Despicable Me: Never underestimate the power of a good time, which this film certainly provides. It’s sweeter and funnier than the creepy and over-praised Toy Story 3. And it has my favorite 3-D animation sequence of the year, when a handful of the super-villain’s plucky minions get a really long ladder and try to break free of the movie screen and reach the audience.

8. Buried and 9. Inside Job: These are the two most frightening films I saw in the theaters. Thanks to a well-paced, clever script, Buried is more imaginative and haunting than anyone could have expected. On the other hand, Charles Ferguson’s financial-crisis documentary Inside Job is exactly what you’d expect. And it gives us a chance to hiss and jeer at the villainous investors and advisers running the financial industry, because it’s pretty clear that they won’t ever suffer any major punishment for their actions. In fact, they’re probably managing your 401(k) right now.

10. Chloe/The Other Guys: These two genre exercises refresh their genres in unexpected ways. Chloe, as critic Jonathan Rosenbaum points out, is a film about a female mid-life crisis masquerading as an erotic thriller. (It’s plenty sexy, though, thanks to another very fine performance by an older, wiser, and bolder Julianne Moore.) The Other Guys charges along thanks to the chemistry between Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg, one of the greatest “straight men” of the modern era. Plus, I’ve been waiting all my life for the shot where hot dog detectives Danson and Highsmith take an ill-advised leap from a rooftop.

Honorable Mentions: The Social Network, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Broken Embraces, The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus

Last year in this space, we proclaimed 2008 the “worst year ever,” and I think that designation has held up pretty well. Comparatively, 2009 was a year of cinematic plenty, despite a lack of anything I might be tempted to call a masterpiece, inspiring my personal “Top 20” list to go 25 films deep, every one of which would have made my top dozen a year ago.

If the film story of 2008 was better-than-normal popcorn movies, 2009 was the year of animation and “kid” movies.

Half of my 10 favorites fall into one or both categories, with my colleagues’ lists similarly dotted with cartoon epiphanies. Overall, there’s surprising consensus here, along with personal picks, but none of us struggled to fill out a list of faves. — Chris Herrington

Chris Herrington

1. The Hurt Locker: Kathryn Bigelow’s story of U.S. soldiers in Iraq could be given the Godardian title Six or Seven Things I Know About Bomb Units. Structured as a series of missions, none more or less perilous than the next, Bigelow captures the cycle of danger and excitement that informs her film’s “war is a drug” theme. It works mostly because of the maturity and control Bigelow brings to the “action” set pieces, a spatial coherence that’s key to the tension created and skillfully maintained for 131 minutes.

2. Where the Wild Things Are/Coraline: These are visually inventive literary adaptations about kids escaping from and returning to the family cocoon, boys’ and girls’ versions. Spike Jonze turns Maurice Sendak’s slim kid-lit classic into an intense, dreamy, emotionally rattling depiction of childhood and brings the title characters to life with enormous visual and verbal nuance. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a film with as heightened a sense of how sensitive kids think and feel. Henry Selick’s stop-motion Coraline is perhaps not as gripping but has a similarly refined feel for childhood behavior and pushes its fairy-tale scenario into even more delicate, dangerous territory.

3. Goodbye Solo: This “New South” indie rewrite of the Cannes-winning Iranian film Taste of Cherry paired a charismatic Senegalese immigrant (Souléymane Sy Savané) with an aging white Southerner (Memphian Red West in a career performance) for the year’s most moving and interesting on-screen partnership. With his film’s feel for urban isolation and cultural assimilation, director Ramin Bahrani evokes a more sincere, less mannered Jim Jarmusch.

4. The Class/Waltz With Bashir: A weak year for foreign-language films on local screens, but these two, which made U.S. debuts in 2008 and slowly made their way here, were the best. Laurence Cantet’s The Class is a doc-like feature about a French middle-school class, embedding its camera in the middle of the volatile action. Ari Folman’s Waltz With Bashir is an animated, nonfiction fever dream built on first-person stories from Israeli soldiers who fought in the 1982 Lebanon war.

5. Fantastic Mr. Fox: Wes Anderson’s stop-motion animation take on the Roald Dahl children’s book explodes with visual and verbal wit and infuses the inherited characters with a yearning, aspirational spirit. The result is the snazzy, emotionally serious rebirth of a directorial style that had been threatening self-parody.

6. A Serious Man: Set in a predominantly Jewish Minnesota suburb circa 1967, A Serious Man might be the first Coen Brothers film inspired more by real life than by a (mis)reading of cinematic or literary source material. A smirking black comedy like all the rest, and with some overripe characterizations, but the Coen Brothers know and feel this world, their plotting is virtuosic, and their bemused skepticism about religion is serious indeed.

7. Gran Torino/Up: The stories of gruff widowers who strike up reluctant friendships with younger neighbors, the link between these films has been cleverly captured by a YouTube trailer mash-up. Gran Torino finds director Clint Eastwood killing off icon Clint Eastwood in style. Up ultimately succumbs to the standard Pixar problem — settling for relatively mundane action sequences in the final stretch. But the opening section, capped by a melancholy five-minute montage about the life of a marriage, might be the year’s most intense and beautiful filmmaking.

8. Adventureland/An Education: Coming-of-age stories: one male, one female; one post-collegiate, one pre-collegiate. Greg Mottola’s ’80s-set Adventureland was the year’s biggest sleeper, a deftly conceived period romance about driving around late at night with your would-be dream girl while listening to Hüsker Dü cassettes. Set in pre-swinging London, An Education wasn’t flawless, but lead Carey Mulligan sure was. Every good thing you’ve heard about this performance-of-the-year is true.

9. Let the Right One In/Drag Me to Hell: The year’s two best horror films were neither as gory as the contemporary norm nor all that frightening. The Swedish Let the Right One In is a vampire procedural suffused with adolescent melancholy. With Drag Me to Hell, director Sam Raimi sets the Spider-Man franchise aside for something far better: a witty, merciless black comedy about a young career woman cursed.

10. Inglourious Basterds: Better moment by moment than in toto, Quentin Tarantino’s nervy, unwieldy WWII epic contains some of the year’s best scenes (the long opener at a dairy farm in Nazi-occupied France) and performances (Christoph Waltz and Mélanie Laurent).

Honorable Mentions: Alexander the Last, Wendy and Lucy, Hump Day, Red Cliff, Bright Star, Up in the Air, Avatar, Hunger, The Informant!, Food, Inc.

Greg Akers

1. Where the Wild Things Are: A landmark achievement in children’s cinema, adaptation screenwriting, and technical filmmaking, Where the Wild Things Are is the best movie of the year and one of the best of the decade. Exhilarating and profound, the film is a mature, non-condescending kids’ movie. It respectfully trusts its audience to be cognitive, cogitative, and competent thinkers, and it’s emotionally honest. Not bad for a reworking of one of the most beloved books of the 20th century, a 10-sentence marvel. I’ll go ahead and say it: The movie’s better.

2. Julie & Julia: For sheer entertainment value, it doesn’t get much better than Julie & Julia. Impeccably acted and directed, the film is a delight: a comedic soufflé made savory with dramatic gravitas. It never deflates. Julie & Julia should be in the clubhouse as a major Oscar contender.

3. A Serious Man: Following their Oscar-winner No Country for Old Men and the nice little palate cleanser, last year’s Burn After Reading, the Coen Brothers return with A Serious Man, arguably their most sober film yet and maybe the one with the most to say. It’s thematically, figuratively, and literally a coming-of-age moment for the filmmakers. After a period of diminishing returns earlier in the decade, this film puts the Coens back on the shortlist of most interesting major moviemakers going.

4. Gran Torino: Inexplicably overlooked for 2008 Oscar honors, Gran Torino is a minor-trending-toward-major masterpiece from Clint Eastwood. It’s the kind of personal document that filmmakers usually make early or late in their career. Here’s hoping Eastwood has many more years ahead of him, in front of and behind the camera.

5. Fantastic Mr. Fox: Not unlike the Coen Brothers, Wes Anderson has suffered from a mild artistic retreat over his last few releases, but he’s back on terra cussing firma with Fantastic Mr. Fox. A more charming, ebullient animated film you’ll be hard-pressed to find — to the point that Mr. Fox is a kids’ movie even though it’s not really a kids’ movie. Like Where the Wild Things Are, Up, and Adventureland, 2009 is the year for adults pondering what it means to be young.

6. Adventureland: How surprising is it, in our age of deathly ironic, ribald teen comedies, to find a movie as sweet, romantic, and elegantly unforced as Adventureland? Set in the ’80s and marketed as yet another gross-out, R-rated assault on the senses, the film sidesteps the formula and instead wraps its characters in an appreciative, gracious embrace.

7. Star Trek: The best so far of the recent spate of Hollywood reimaginings of franchise properties, J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek boldly braves remaking not just one icon but a fistful of ’em. Stuffed with philosophic and speculative science, adventurous fiction, and hot people to look at, Star Trek has something for everyone who sidles up to it.

8. The Wrestler: As only he can, filmmaker Darren Aronofsky follows the “celebrity as modern Christ” metaphor to a surprisingly appropriate end — the wrestling performer — in this brilliant, tough film. The crucial scene is the hardest to watch: Randy “The Ram” Robinson (Mickey Rourke) mutilates his body with barbed wire and a staple gun to the howls of joy from the crowd. We demand blood and, ultimately, death from our celebrities. Aronofsky delivers.

9. Avatar: Avatar is often enough a fantastic and immersive cinematic experience, though it’s prone to some bad dialogue and military grunt clichés. It plays out at times as a greatest hits parade of ideas and character tropes from previous James Cameron movies, and it seems intended as a mea culpa for the xenophobia of Aliens, but Avatar is certainly better than the “Ewok Battle of Endor done right” that the trailer makes it out to be.

10. Up: Pixar continues its win streak and inches closer to master animator Hayao Miyazaki. The opening 15 minutes of Up are as good as anything all year, heartwarming and heartbreaking, and a joy to behold. The film gets relatively pedestrian afterward but retains its high watchability. One of these days, Pixar will produce an entire feature worthy of Miyazaki and become a studio making world classics — not just excellent American animated movies.

Honorable Mentions: Pontypool, Drag Me to Hell, Tyson, Let the Right One In, The Hurt Locker, Zombieland, Goodbye Solo, Adoration, The Informant!, Up in the Air

Addison Engelking

1. Coraline: In a year chock-full of animated fantasies as gratifying for adults as they are for kids — including grand achievements such as Fantastic Mr. Fox, Up, Where the Wild Things Are, and Monsters vs. Aliens — Henry Selick’s adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s eerie children’s book is at the top of the pile, not only for its engaging story but for its sly references to 20th-century modernist painters. When I was not staring in slack-jawed amazement at the 3-D stop-motion animation and the cornucopia of arresting imagery, I was blown away by the Mondrian allusions that popped up during the apocalyptic final showdown between plucky, stubborn Coraline (Dakota Fanning) and her wildly wicked “Other Mother” (voiced by Teri Hatcher, her best film work since Soapdish). The most complete entertainment of the year and one of my favorite films of the decade.

2. Crank: High Voltage: This comedy/action/media overload stimulated my hyperactive, socially maladjusted, I just-wanna-see-crazy-shit inner child far more than Inglourious Basterds ever did or ever could. Utterly shameless and tasteless but endlessly creative, this sequel to 2006’s underrated Crank is the epitome of the fish-eye lens and a hunk of pop-culture garbage too inventive to dismiss. Unfortunately, I missed Gamer, the second film released by Crank co-creators Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor this year, so I have no idea if their adrenaline-rush diptych (do I smell a sequel?) is a fluke or an early high point in a long, wild career.

3. The Class: After she saw this film, one of my former students told me, “Whenever the bell rang in that movie, I wanted to get up.” Along with Chalk, these are the two films I’d show if I could run a back-to-school workshop. And yes, there would be a graded discussion afterward. Participate twice in the conversation, or your grade will suffer.

4. Waltz With Bashir: Another unlikely, highly rewarding, ultimately very troubling fantasy, this cartoon is about the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Ari Folman’s excavation of his military memories is aided by an astounding visual sense: a man pirouettes amid spent shell casings; an enormous blue woman carries a soldier from an attack at sea; a man trudges through his post-war days while the world whizzes by him.

5. Tyson and 6. Michael Jackson: This Is It: Thanks to a pair of sensitive filmmakers willing to stand by and let their subjects present themselves to the public, two massively misunderstood cultural icons get the last laugh. Contemporary psychologists have argued that, in lieu of a single mutable but essentially consistent personality, humans are comprised of multiple, impulse-driven selves. Tyson director James Toback takes this conceit literally, overlapping images and voices at key points in his subject’s filmed autobiography to broaden not only our conception of the fallen champ but our ideas about human strength and weakness. Turns out that the man who bit Evander Holyfield’s ear off (with far more justification than we knew, it seems) is also a devoted family man, a word-a-day autodidact, and a remarkable monument to a teacher’s power to build a better human. This Is It dispels the numerous distressing public King of Pop personas in favor of a startlingly soulful, stripped-down performance record that lets Jackson sing, dance, and choreograph his heart out for a tour that never was.

7. Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs: Not only is this slam-bang animated feature totally hilarious, it gets many of its laughs by embracing the casual cruelty that electrified so many Bugs Bunny cartoons. There are wonders galore: The world’s largest sardine meets an untimely end; Mr. T jumps through a giant nacho to save his family; a giant steak falls from the sky and brains a restaurant patron; and a man who’s part chicken saves the world.

8. Adventureland: Greg Mottola atones for the unfunny hi-jinks of Superbad with this remarkably scored and sensitive take on the lost year after college when all that book-learning has sufficiently alienated you from your hometown, except you find yourself back there anyway because no one else will take you.

9. A Serious Man: My favorite line of the year: “What happened to the goy? … Who cares?”

10. Wendy and Lucy/The Hurt Locker: Two films that tackle two major issues nobody wants to address in America: hopeless poverty and endless war. Both films are more of a chore to sit through than you’re led to believe, and both have protagonists who challenge your patience and tolerance for crazy risk. But both films grow in memory, although neither film is one I’d care to revisit.

Honorable Mentions: An Education, Taken, The Time Traveler’s Wife, Food, Inc., Let the Right One In, Every Little Step, Hump Day, Soul Power, Me and Orson Welles, Lorna’s Silence

To find out what’s playing in your favorite theater tonight, check out the Flyer’s film times section.

If 2008 was a year of smarter-than-average popcorn movies (The Dark Knight, WALL*E, Tropic Thunder, Iron Man), that’s where the good news ended. Foreign and indie distribution continued to dry up (no 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, Paranoid Park, or Flight of the Red Balloon for Memphis, among countless other intriguing titles), Hollywood Oscar bait underperformed, and pleasant surprises were outnumbered by disappointments. (On a more optimistic note, perhaps things will look better after a flood of promising January releases, including Waltz With Bashir, The Wrestler, I’ve Loved You So Long, and Gran Torino.)

Amid the wreckage, our critics scavenged for good stuff. This is what we found.

Chris Herrington:

1. Happy-Go-Lucky: In the worst film year in the more than a decade I’ve been keeping track, this deceptively minor character study from the medium’s greatest working artist takes the top spot by default. From the dreamy, on-the-move, triptych opening credits to a serene closing seemingly indebted to ’70s art-house classic Celine & Julie Go Boating, British master Mike Leigh (see also: Topsy-Turvy, Naked, Vera Drake) has never exhibited as light a touch or been as inspiringly humanistic as with this portrait of a London schoolteacher (Sally Hawkins) whose sunny demeanor is challenged by others’ ways of seeing — and being in — the world.

2. Rachel Getting Married: Jonathan Demme directs this blend of intense family melodrama and epic, Robert Altman-style party sequences with the same intimacy and purpose he put into such masterful concert docs as Stop Making Sense and Neil Young: Heart of Gold. The tumultuous homecoming of Anne Hathaway’s doe-eyed narcotics addict is shown as an oscillating series of white-knuckle interactions and quiet retreats, a handheld camera capturing furtive reaction shots. As the gonzo wedding celebration fights against the family tension, Demme turns indulgence into strength, and the viewer is sucked into the middle of the most audacious home movie ever.

3. The Dark Knight: At one level an almost sympathetic critique of post-9/11 government overreach, The Dark Knight achieved resonance without straining for topicality. The late Heath Ledger’s agitated, sarcastic performance as the Joker managed the impossible task of exceeding pre-release hype, but credit director Christopher Nolan with making a movie that wasn’t overshadowed by it. There’s a procedural tension and insistent, palpable anxiety to The

Dark Knight common to great crime films (from Fritz Lang to Michael Mann) but unprecedented in comic-hero adaptations. This was grand, gripping, propulsive filmmaking.

4. Cadillac Records: This story of the rise of Chicago R&B label Chess Records exposes good movies like Ray and Walk the Line for the self-serious Oscar bait they were. Don’t believe me that this under-marketed, late-year “B” movie was the 2008’s most purely enjoyable Hollywood film? Search YouTube for the clip of Eamonn Walker’s ferocious Howlin’ Wolf singing “Smokestack Lightning” to Muddy Waters’ woman while Muddy (Jeffrey Wright, earning the nomination he won’t get) looks on from the other side of the recording-studio window. That should be all the convincing anyone needs.

5. There Will Be Blood: Paul Thomas Anderson’s three-hour fever dream about the unsteady partnership of capitalism and Christianity in forging manifest destiny opened in Memphis in January 2008 — even if it seems to have come out two years ago. But it seems even older: an increasingly rare handcrafted American cinema epic; a celluloid triumph in a digital age.

6. Man on Wire: This documentary about the day in 1974 that French tightrope walker Phillipe Petit spent 40 amazing minutes on a strand of wire between the World Trade Center towers is the most exciting caper flick in years. And Man on Wire is all the more effective because its wonder at dual human achievements (Petit’s walk and the buildings’ construction) and its melancholy that Petit outlasted the towers are both allowed to emerge without direct commentary.

7. Milk: Gus Van Sant’s fiercely patriotic biopic of martyred gay politician Harvey Milk (Sean Penn’s best lead performance in years) is novel for celebrating Milk as simultaneously a principled leader and a hard-nosed, pragmatic politician. Pertinent viewing in the Age of Obama.

8. Persepolis: This sharp adaptation of Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novels about growing up Iranian during and after the revolution cleverly, believably, and movingly weaves the personal and political.

9. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly: As befits the story of a man reduced to communicating with the world via one functioning eye, Julian Schnabel’s biopic of late journalist Jean-Dominique Bauby is a profoundly visual film — from its disorienting point-of-view opening to its increasingly devotional and sensuous embrace of a world its locked-in protagonist can no longer fully experience.

10. WALL*E: In the Worst Year Ever, the wordless, severe, beautiful opening section of this latest Pixar blockbuster was enough to sneak it onto the best-of list, even if I was disappointed by how noisy, violent, and conventional it became when action moved to the mothership.

Honorable Mentions: Trouble the Water, My Blueberry Nights, Married Life, Priceless, Taxi to the Darkside, Tropic Thunder, Son of Rambow, Slumdog Millionaire, Tell No One, Forgetting Sarah Marshall.

Addison Engelking:

1. Happy-Go-Lucky: Mike Leigh’s study of hard-working London educators loses none of its charms even after multiple viewings: Its bright, children’s-book imagery and its multifaceted humanism still gleam. Both on its own and as an inspirational counterargument to Leigh’s infernal 1994 film Naked, Happy-Go-Lucky is an essential, strangely necessary moviegoing experience.

2. The Diving Bell and The Butterfly: This celebration of the physical world — of beauty, of nature, of communication — doesn’t begin happily at all; it opens with a frightening sequence shot from the point of view of an immobilized stroke victim. But Butterfly director Julian Schnabel, much like Leigh in Happy-Go-Lucky, is more interested in the way a person’s consciousness colors a world than he is in any kind of sustained realism. What could have been a maudlin, predictable story about hope and affliction is thus turned into a poetic vision of everyday life.

The Dark Knight

3. Cadillac Records: So many of the character/actor pairings in this extravaganza deserve their own TV spin-offs. Think of it: “On this week’s episode of Moanin’ in the Moonlight, Muddy Waters (Jeffrey Wright) challenges Howlin’ Wolf (Eamonn Walker) to a knife fight, only to be told that shivs are for little boys and not grown-ass men. When Wolf asks Muddy whether he thinks he’s grown because he’s been ‘smelling his piss,’ sparks fly! Wendell Pierce guest-stars as Bo Diddley.”

4. Role Models: This was the funniest, most unpredictable comedy of the year. Director David Wain (Wet Hot American Summer) shows he can handle grown-up stuff better than Judd Apatow’s goons these days. Which is funny, because Wain is also working with Paul Rudd, the most reliable comic actor around. Yes, Rudd’s bid for maturity and social responsibility involves creating a breakaway heavy-metal republic that challenges the smug assholes in charge of a LARP battle royale, but any comedy that encourages its characters to enlarge their sense of self is pretty special.

5. The Forbidden Kingdom: Aside from those Jason Statham quickies and Rob Marshall’s splatter-pocalyptic Doomsday, this was the only action movie this year with fight scenes that looked good and said something about its characters. Why expect less?

6. My Blueberry Nights/Ashes of Time Redux: Wong Kar-Wai’s criminally underappreciated romance is both a perceptive movie about the American landscape and an insightful look at the psychology of neon lights and window graffiti, which function like mood rings for the two leads (Jude Law and Norah Jones). It ends with a kiss that should draw sighs. Ashes of Time remains enigmatic and beautiful; made in 1994, it’s Wong’s least accessible film — which nevertheless makes it better than all but a half-dozen other movies released this year.

7. Man on Wire: This is a film in which a gifted French gab re-creates the literal and figurative high point of his existence through inspired, nonstop storytelling. It is also an ode to the expressive possibilities of urban architecture that, at its best, recalls the great dream-city films of F.W. Murnau and Frank Borzage.

8. The Wackness: This story of a mixed-up New York City kid wandering in and out of love in 1994 stuck with me because it captured every moment of sincere or awkward adolescence I recall from the headphoned summers I spent between the ages of 16 and 22, when each month pivoted on a new, surprising crush or love affair that was as instructive as it was painful. Clever/ postmodern moment: Method Man’s drug supplier sings along with himself on a Biggie Smalls mixtape.

9. WALL*E: Considering its fast-paced, visually stunning pedigree, its reliable storytelling, and its target market, Pixar’s complex, melancholy response to the Spielberg-Kubrick hybrid A.I. Artificial Intelligence is one of the most confounding major-studio films of the year. The first 45 minutes are wordless, lovable tertiary characters are absent, and the film seems constructed from garbage, dust, new and rusted metal, smog, and highly buffed synthetic plastic. After that, the image of fattened, immobile earthlings whose clothes change for them is probably too prescient to dwell upon.

10. Persepolis: It’s just like a graphic novel, except that it’s compelling, emotionally engaging, and worth revisiting.

Honorable Mentions: Ten performances just as good as Heath Ledger’s Joker: Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood, Dominique Pinon and Audrey Dana in Roman de Gare, Robert Downey Jr. in Tropic Thunder, George Clooney in Burn After Reading, Viggo Mortensen in Appaloosa, Anne Hathaway in anything, Audrey Tatou and Gad Elmaleh in Priceless, Belen Rueda in The Orphanage.

Greg Akers:

1. Frozen River: Compared to lots of my other favorite 2008 films, former Memphian Courtney Hunt’s debut film, Frozen River, says what it does sans hoopla and bombast. It saves the fireworks for the cherry bomb sparking at its emotional core, and the only scenery chewing going on is happening to leads Ray (Melissa Leo) and Lila (Misty Upham) as they’re mashed up and spit out by a callous world. But they find each other. And they push the ball forward a little. And sometimes that’s enough.

2. There Will Be Blood: P.T. Anderson’s Citizen Kane. Daniel Day-Lewis’ performance as American wolf Daniel Plainview is colossal. Too bad Paul Dano as preacher Eli Sunday isn’t up to snuff. But nothing can suppress the singular experience of watching Plainview eat the sun. Hey, kids: Come watch capitalism bash in the brains of religion. Woot!

3. The Dark Knight: Finally! A comic-book adaptation that’s more of a movie than just a stay-inside-the-lines, rote project based on origin-story source material or fanboy wish fulfillment. With Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, comic-book superhero movie meets genre pic. History will recall the moment Batman went crime epic on the big screen, but it just as easily could have been Superman going torture porn or Wolverine in X-Men: The Musical! I’m glad it happened the way it did.

4. Cloverfield: The movie’s probably not as good as I remember, but what I do recall is the electrical charge I had coming out of the theater. I could’ve pulled one of those Donald O’Connor climb-up-the-wall-and-flips off the side of the Paradiso. I was high on life, man. The best theatrical experience of the year; cinema in all its visceral glory.

5. Rachel Getting Married: The less narrative Rachel Getting Married becomes, the better. When it’s a home-movie-style documentation of a wedding, it celebrates life and possibility in ways most films can’t touch. When it’s in plot-forward mode, it’s still really good.

6. Iron Man: Growing up, I never much got over to the Marvel side of comic-book town. I had Batman/Bruce Wayne already — why would I need anybody else, much less another rich smart guy fighting crime, such as Iron Man? What I didn’t know worked in my favor. I went into the film relatively cold and came away pleased as punch. For once, make mine Marvel.

7. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas: A solid film with a napalm ending: I’ve rarely been so obliterated by a movie. Designed like a long con, Striped Pajamas suckers the audience into believing this may be the one story you could tell about the Holocaust that’s — to the extent that is possible — feel-good. Wrong. There are no happy Holocaust stories.

8. Be Kind Rewind: A film that busts easy categorization, Michel Gondry has now made my favorite music video ever (the White Stripes’ “Hardest Button to Button”), my favorite Jim Carrey movie (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), and my favorite movie about video stores, making movies, and Fats Waller (Be Kind Rewind). He’s a five-tool director.

9. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull: I’m not sure I understand the vitriol surrounding the latest installment in this popcorn series nearing three decades old. Aren’t movies sometimes supposed to be fun? Can’t some fiction be improbable? Isn’t it occasionally a good thing to see people eaten alive by ants or surviving a nuclear blast in a refrigerator? And sure, Shia. But did he, like, spill wine on your couch or something? Sheesh.

10. Redbelt: This isn’t by a long shot David Mamet’s best film. But Redbelt‘s protagonist, Mike (Chiwetel Ejiofor), is by far Mamet’s most likable character and the only one I think I’d like to see again in another adventure. The ending has stayed with me for seven months now, so I guess it’s in my head to stay.

Honorable Mentions: Doubt, The Fall, Man on Wire, Milk, Taxi to the Dark Side, Quantum of Solace, Not Your Typical Bigfoot Movie, Persepolis, Wall*E, Slumdog Millionaire.

Cadillac Records

Several hundred movies opened in Memphis in 2007. Here are our critics’ faves:

Chris Herrington:

1. Knocked Up: The movie of the year in so many ways, Judd Apatow’s riotous comedy about a mismatched couple confronting an unwanted pregnancy united art and commerce like no other 2007 flick. It’s wildly unlikely to receive the Oscar nomination it certainly deserves because it isn’t deemed “serious” enough, though it’s as serious a mass-released movie as I saw this year. Knocked Up isn’t perfect for the very reasons its detractors cite: It privileges a male perspective, no doubt, as most movies do, which is why we need more female filmmakers. But, after four viewings, I find the women here every bit as likable, funny, and relatable as the men whose collective Peter Pan syndrome Apatow critiques even as he mines it for comedic bonhomie. And I find that the film’s generous depiction of life as a series of fumbling negotiations to be as real and vital as anything on the big screen this year.

2. Children of Men: This futuristic, dystopian journey from Mexican filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón (Y Tu Mamã También) takes a familiar genre and reinvents it — with outdoor settings, quietly poetic moments, and bravura long takes — as something unusually organic and intimate. A rattling, resonant response to a litany of public anxieties (nuclear threat, terrorism, flu pandemic, immigration, etc.), the film imagines a future in which mankind has become infertile, but it never offers a scientific explanation, suggesting that new life has simply rejected a world so rotten. Yet, from this dire premise, a movie emerges that’s essentially about hope. From city to forest to war zone to a lone boat in the sea, it’s an unforgettable experience.

3. Black Book: No American studio released a film in 2007 as briskly paced and consistently exciting as this merciless Dutch World War II epic from former Hollywood director Paul Verhoeven. Set in Nazi-occupied Holland, Black Book is a serious, morally complex, intensely entertaining adventure yarn about a Jewish woman (a dazzling Carice van Houten) trying to stay alive amid the chaos of the war and its messy aftermath.

4. Zodiac: David Fincher’s finest film, about the investigation into the real-life “Zodiac” killings that haunted the San Francisco era in the late ’60s and early ’70s, is essentially a movie about not quite knowing something. It’s an obsessive movie about obsession, perversely engrossing in its withholding of any kind of resolution.

5. Pan’s Labyrinth: Like Children of Men, Pan’s Labyrinth is a 2006 film from a Mexican director that arrived in local theaters last January. A lyrical but somber adult fairy tale, Guillermo del Toro’s film presents a child’s-eye view of the Spanish Civil War, where the adolescent Ofelia copes with new life under the watch of her Fascist stepfather by escaping into a fantasy life. Both of these worlds are envisioned with great richness, and the parallel narratives comment on each other. But part of the depth and mystery of Pan’s Labyrinth is how del Toro resists obvious symbolism or underscored doublings. The connections between Ofelia’s waking Fascist nightmare and her equally dangerous dream life are intuitively graspable and endlessly evocative yet defy easy explanation.

6. In the Shadow of the Moon and No End in Sight: I can’t think of a more persuasive or more depressing indictment of the recent degradation of our national character and competence than a double feature of the two best documentaries to play Memphis this year. A tribute to the Apollo space program told entirely from the perspective of the only living humans to visit the moon, In the Shadow of the Moon is an inspiring tribute to national resolve and an almost mystical treat. No End in Sight, a sober, comprehensive analysis of what went wrong in post-invasion Iraq, is a damning indictment of a government where can-do idealism has devolved into arrogant ineptitude.

7. No Country for Old Men: Intricately designed and richly photographed by Roger Deakins, No Country for Old Men is the Coen brothers’ most measured film ever, a tense, virtuoso thriller where violence is undercut by the rare appearance of actual human emotion. Like any other Coen movie, No Country for Old Men is more about their cultural source material (Cormac McCarthy’s novel, film thrillers from ’40s noir to Sam Peckinpah) than about real life. But here, unlike most of their work, they treat their influences right.

8. Juno: A precocious film about a precocious kid (the splendid Ellen Page in the title role), Juno is too in love with its own hipster verbosity at first but settles down then blooms into a family comedy of rare generosity.

9. Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead: Who saw this coming? At the ripe age of 83, veteran Hollywood director Sidney Lumet made his finest film in at least 25 years with this bleak, twisty heist flick in which Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke play a pair of desperate brothers who try to knock off their parents’ suburban jewelry store. The film’s oscillating chronology moves with the disorderly precision of a crossword puzzle where each correct answer sets up the next, while the bruising story emerges as a subtle generational allegory for an era of crushing debt.

Knocked Up

10. Away From Her: Canadian actress Sarah Polley emerged as a potentially major filmmaker with a directorial debut (which she also adapted from an Alice Munro short story) impressive in its utter lack of autobiography. This modest drama about an elderly couple coping with the onset of Alzheimer’s (including a great performance from Julie Christie as the afflicted) has palpable warmth but avoids sentimentality with its meticulous, unflinching austerity, achieving something like a sense of grace.

Special Jury (of One) Prizes

Grindhouse: At a time when the experience of filmgoing is being constantly debased, Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s high-concept double feature was a heroic effort to turn the movies into a communal event. So sad, then, that Grindhouse garnered such a meager audience. However, set together, the two films — Tarantino’s car flick Death Proof and Rodriguez’s zombie movie Planet Terror — functioned as an unintentional test of aesthetic judgment. Do you like great cinema (Death Proof, Tarantino’s finest work since Jackie Brown, if not Pulp Fiction) or do you just like to see stuff blown up (the comparatively inept Planet Terror)?

Killer of Sheep: Long as much a rumor as a movie, Charles Burnett’s haunting 16-millimeter 1981 feature about everyday life in Watts got new life in 2007, hitting the art-house and museum circuit, including a June showing at the Brooks Museum.

Team Picture: Barring Craig Brewer’s Black Snake Moan, Kentucker Audley’s Indie Memphis Film Festival winning feature debut was the year’s best local feature.

Honorable Mentions: Ratatouille, Michael Clayton, Waitress, Black Snake Moan, The Bourne Ultimatum, Eastern Promises, Offside, Gone Baby Gone, Paris Je T’aime, Little Children.

Addison Engelking:

1. Army of Shadows and Black Book: I said all I needed to say about Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1969 masterpiece, Army of Shadows, which screened once at the Brooks Museum, awhile back, but I can’t wait to gush about Paul Verhoeven’s best film, Black Book. In a movie where no one is safe or secure for more than 10 consecutive minutes, Carice van Houten’s lead performance is the only sure thing, and she gets you on her side early when she steals a kiss from a Dutch sailor while cooking a fish for him. Her vitality and star power remind me of the great bombshells like Marlene Dietrich and Carole Lombard. But Black Book is bolder when Verhoeven coolly punctures the mythology of World War II and all its “greatest generation” bravado and argues that even more heinous wartime atrocities occur after the loser surrenders. I wonder if he’s kept up with the U.S. involvement in Iraq?

2. Hot Fuzz: The Don Quixote of action-comedy buddy pictures; when you’re not amazed by its dual effectiveness as a dry, character-driven English satire — and, eventually, a kick-ass action flick in its own right — you’re marveling at the endless throwaway references in Hot Fuzz to the hyper-manly movies it knowingly steals from. (I still can’t get over the unexpected nods to Melville’s Le Samouri and the Chuck Norris discount-bin title Silent Rage.) All of Lethal Weapon‘s bastard children are hereby euthanized.

3. Zodiac: An obsessive-compulsive nightmare about murder, paperwork, and telephone booths, David Fincher’s epic study of the men who couldn’t stop pondering the identity of the “Zodiac” killer is the year’s most outrageous studio release. Holding narrative closure eternally at bay, this is principally a film about almost knowing something, and its loose or dead ends may frustrate some viewers. But once you nestle into its brown polyester world, you’ll stay there spellbound.

Children of Men

4. The Curse of the Golden Flower: Will Zhang Yimou’s period epic, which is perhaps the apex of the high-gloss martial-arts fable, lose its considerable visual power on a smaller screen? I hope not. The Curse of the Golden Flower contains some of the most breathtaking battle choreography I’ve ever seen. I’m sure Chow Yun-Fat’s triumphant, slow-motion hair-shake as he’s about to beat down his challengers will still hold up, though.

5. Pan’s Labyrinth: The most memorable sequence from this ghoulishly smart and inventive phantasmagoria (when brave little Ofelia steals some food from the lair of a stringy demon) should soon belong to all of horror-film history. Take a look at that demon once more and you see Nosferatu’s cousin, zonked out at the dinner table, waiting for his next tyke-shaped hors d’oeuvre, his eyeballs on a plate next to him.

6. Paprika: This surreal blast of sensory overload captures the boundless possibilities for pleasure and misery of all the virtual universes we care to inhabit: the Internet, our memories, dreams, wherever. And to keep you focused and fearful, Paprika boasts the year’s most jarring, disorienting sound design.

7. Paris Je T’aime: I’m still pleased by this outstanding work of artistic democracy. Just look at the kinds of lives we get to see in this anthology depiction of Paris. Whether you’re old, young, single, married, divorced, native-born, tourist, immigrant, live, or dead, everyone gets a voice and a couple of moments to be seen. City air breathes free.

8. Knocked Up: You know, the funny Seth Rogen-Judd Apatow collaboration.

9. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and No Country for Old Men: Two from cinematographer Roger Deakins. The first one is photographed for show and contrast; Deakins is such a magician in Assassination that he seems capable of anything, like lighting a whole crowd scene with flame from a half-burnt matchstick. He shot No Country with less fanfare and swagger, in a cool, man-with-a-job-to-do style. It’s beautiful all the same. I keep coming back to that queer, grave Coen brothers picture and I can’t shake it; I keep hearing Tommy Lee Jones’ voice and seeing his bewildered, trancelike stare. To be continued, I reckon.

Zodiac

10. No End in Sight and In The Shadow of the Moon: America: Love it or leave it, buster.

DVD Highlights: Here are two films that saw commercial release during 2007 but never made their way to Memphis. I urge you to catch them in the privacy of your own home.

1. Inland Empire: David Lynch’s impossible, masterful three-hour opus (which grows to cover nearly four hours on the special-edition DVD) is a meta-movie as toxic as the most bitter striking screenwriter’s revenge fantasy: an epic avant-garde work whose scenes and tones pass back and forth into and out of the bleakest craters of fear, pain, and despair like runners passing batons in an endless relay; the comeback vehicle of the new century for Laura Dern, who plants herself in the movie and runs wild as the id of every backlit Hollywood film goddess; a black hole trimmed in pastel and tissue paper; a crock; the least likely home of the feel-good ending of the year. I could keep going; Inland Empire might be a film without a ground floor. Maybe I still am; maybe it is.

2. Chalk: As the much-needed antidote to nearly a century of stupid “inspirational” movies about education, this unsparing and funny look at the everyday lives of high school teachers may be too much of an insider’s film. But see it anyway. I teach high school, and Chalk‘s endless, petty conversations about the tardy policy and other bureaucratic nonsense are the God’s honest truth.

Greg Akers:

1. Children of Men: Children of Men is one of those rare films that is so singular, it really doesn’t have any historical cinematic analogue. What’s not to worship about it? It’s dystopian, with a hopeful outlook; an actioner, with a pacifist heart; political and moral, without being preachy. Director/co-writer Alfonso Cuarón goes documentary-style to put the viewer right in the thick of things. Bar none and by a goodly margin, Children of Men is the best film of the 21st century thus far.

2. Zodiac: I’ve read plenty of books that chronicle an investigator’s personal decline after becoming obsessed with trying to solve a crime; it’s maybe my favorite subset of the mystery genre. But I’d never seen a movie that pulled off the trick until Zodiac. Who done it? Director David Fincher. His masterpiece, Zodiac imposes a dread that is both physical and existential and adds gorgeous photography and a brilliant script to outstanding performances from Jake Gyllenhaal and Mark Ruffalo and a career best from Robert Downey Jr.

3. No Country for Old Men: About as straight a poker face of a film as you’re ever likely to get from the Coen brothers. It even contains what amounts to the Coen mission statement: Deputy Wendell (Garret Dillahunt) is embarrassed when he can’t help but laugh upon hearing about a horrible crime. Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) responds, “That’s all right. I laugh myself sometimes. There ain’t a whole lot else you can do.” Oh, and Javier Bardem co-stars as Anton Chigurh, the scariest movie character since Li’l Zé in City of God.

4. Charlie Wilson’s War: The most fun I had watching actors act all year, even if Julia Roberts is in it. It’s too much to keep up with anymore, but Philip Seymour Hoffman and Tom Hanks turn in something close to career performances. The film’s mix of drama and comedy is utterly entertaining. For my money, Charlie Wilson’s War is the next Best Picture Oscar winner, and it would be deservedly so.

5. Grindhouse: It’s almost not fair, as Grindhouse gets two movies in the Top 10 list for the price of one. Though Robert Rodriguez’s splatter-happy Planet Terror is thoroughly entertaining, Quentin Tarantino’s half, Death Proof, is the real story here. Pure cinematic thrills, whether it’s tires or mouths going 100 miles per hour.

6. Atonement: A mathematical discovery: Keira Knightley + Joe Wright + Jane Austen (2005’s Pride & Prejudice) = Pass the barf bag. But Keira Knightley + Joe Wright + Ian McEwan (Atonement) = Pass the popcorn.

7. Lions for Lambs: Many critics who have panned Lions for Lambs — and that would be just about all of them — level two charges against the film: It isn’t cinematic enough and it’s too talky. Um, remember when breaking from convention was a good thing for art to do? A must-see political commentary for anyone who thinks it’s still okay to admit that another political side — from whatever side you’re on — might be capable of making valid points.

8. Knocked Up: Knocked Up might have made it on this list on the strength of its comedy alone, which, at times, had me laughing so hard my vision got fuzzy. But its nonjudgmental core values — accepting of the knuckleheaded and the ambitious alike — assures its place. Plus, Knocked Up led my wife and I to move Freaks and Geeks to the top of our Netflix queue, for which I am forever in its debt.

9. The Bourne Ultimatum: A workshop in brilliant editing — credit goes to Christopher Rouse — highlighted by one sequence’s hand-to-hand combat in a tiny bathroom. Director Paul Greengrass’ handheld camera is deft enough to get in so tight we feel we’re part of the fight but is still able to explain the action. What isn’t visually captured is revealed through audio clues, including the sounds of knives, fists, and breathing. The film’s the topper to a top-notch action series.

10. Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead: Enjoy the first few, pre-opening-title minutes of Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead. Once the title comes up, the devil has got it figured out. But it’s a highly watchable vision of human torment — and not the flames and hot pokers version. About two brothers (Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke) who conspire to rob their parents’ jewelry store to escape what their lives have become, the movie takes place in a hellish locale that is cold, lonely, and utterly personal. Convincing stuff.

Honorable Mentions: Lucky You, The Curse of the Golden Flower, Black Book, Jindabyne, Letters From Iwo Jima, The Lives of Others, Goya’s Ghosts, Michael Clayton, The Host, Pan’s Labyrinth.

Several hundred movies played in Memphis theaters in 2006. With Black Snake Moan delayed until next year, none were directed by Craig Brewer, and too few emanated from outside our own film culture. But despite a box-office dip this year, there were still plenty of good-to-great movies, and, collectively, our critics saw everything worth seeing. Here’s how we remember the year.

Chris Herrington:

1. Dave Chappelle’s Block Party: Those devoted to comedian Dave Chappelle for his Rick James impersonations may have found the dawdling pace and low-key laughs of this concert movie (sort of an updated WattStax) frustrating, but I found it thrilling, a utopian vision where Chappelle and his diverse group of friends concoct a seductive cultural alternative: Fierce but not coarse. Righteous but not rigid. Essentially Afrocentric but open to all. Honorable Mention: Sacha Baron Cohen’s movie-of-the-year candidate Borat was another guided tour of contemporary American culture, this one Alexis de Tocqueville by way of Jackass and The Daily Show. Where Chappelle’s show tapped into a generosity and openness too dormant in recent years, Borat was a comic attack on a heart of darkness all too real.

2. Brokeback Mountain: I first saw Brokeback Mountain in Minneapolis over Christmas, weeks before it opened in Memphis but well after the movie itself had been overshadowed by its cultural uses — as political football or punchline. And I walked out of the theater that night feeling fiercely protective of a movie as tender and wrenching as any classic Douglas Sirk melodrama — ready to roll my eyes equally at uptight straight men all too willing to sacrifice part of their humanity by dismissing it and lefty critics insisting it — groan — “wasn’t queer enough.” Re-watching it nearly a year later, it already looks iconic — again, as a work of art, not just as a cultural moment. Honorable Mention: Though more homosocial than homosexual, The Matador was another late-’05 standout that didn’t roll into local theaters until early 2006.

Brokeback Mountain

3. Caché (Hidden): This European art-film twist on a classic film-noir trope — a nuclear family threatened by a shadowy outsider — is more than just a good, twisty mystery. It’s an allegory of domestic insecurity, cultural privilege, and selective public memory that combines formal precision, political/cultural content, and personal intrigue better than any movie to play Memphis this year. Set in an unnamed French city, Caché is rooted in the history of minority communities in that country, but it also implicates Western culture more broadly. Honorable Mention: Another horror film of sorts, the better-than-the-genre-standard The Descent is similarly driven by the return of the repressed and the shock of violence.

4. Inside Man: “Slumming” in a Hollywood director-for-hire project, Spike Lee delivers an instant heist-flick classic that pays gritty homage to such “New York in the ’70s” gems as Dog Day Afternoon and The Taking of Pelham 123. Honorable Mention: Though it was seen on HBO instead of in theaters, Lee’s reflective but quietly furious four-hour Katrina doc, When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, might have been the real movie of the year.

5. A Prairie Home Companion: A fictionalized final performance of Garrison Keillor’s real-life public-radio staple, A Prairie Home Companion turned out to be the final film from octogenarian master Robert Altman, who died in November after battling leukemia, and even upon its release, Altman allowed that it was a film about death. As such, it was gentle, bemused, inspiring — a loving reverie about performers and performance with Altman’s floating, penetrating camera moving ghostlike around the theater. And the quintessential actors’ director gets particularly radiant performances from a backstage hen house of Meryl Streep, Lily Tomlin, and Lindsay Lohan. Honorable Mention: Neil Young: Heart of Gold, another handsomely shot concert film about the intimacy of collective performance (with virtuoso direction from Jonathan Demme), rhymes with Altman’s final testament emotionally, thematically, and visually.

6. L’Enfant: Belgian filmmaking brothers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne have delivered a series of great scruffy, morally searching dramas set amid an urban underclass milieu (seek out La Promesse and Rosetta), but this deceptively simple tale — a petty thief sells his newborn son and has to get him when the mother/girlfriend finds out — may be their best yet. Honorable Mention: The critically underestimated The Pursuit of Happyness is another sharp film about parenting and poverty, and though the Will Smith vehicle would seem to be the opposite of a Cannes-winning “art film” like L’Enfant, both works are clearly the product of filmmakers familiar with Italian Neo-Realism.

7. United 93: British director Paul Greengrass delivers the year’s most heroic directing job for this gripping yet sober and non-exploitive account of the 9/11 flight that crashed in a Pennsylvania field — much of it told in real time and with some air-traffic controllers and other on-ground personnel playing themselves. Honorable Mention: Where United 93 burrows deeply into a moment that changed the world, Why We Fight, the year’s finest theatrical documentary, pulls back to investigate the growth of American militarism and shows why we were primed to make the biggest mistakes in 9/11’s aftermath.

8. The Prestige: Christopher Nolan’s tale of dueling turn-of-the-century magicians didn’t get the press or box office of his Memento or Batman Begins, but I think it’s his most satisfying film and maybe the most purely entertaining studio drama of the year. Honorable Mention: Similarly, Martin Scorsese’s Boston gangster yarn The Departed proved that big-budget studio movies could be smart and cinematic without scrimping on popcorn-movie pleasures. So why can’t more filmmakers (and their studio overlords) pull it off?

9. Half Nelson: Emerging star Ryan Gosling and unknown actress Shareeka Epps delivered two of the year’s best performances as a teacher/student duo in this compassionate, perceptive, and unflinching character study, perhaps the year’s best American indie film. Honorable Mention: Though there are moments that descend into schmaltz, the under-recognized studio flick Akeelah and the Bee, another fine film about education and disadvantage, is something rare: a great movie both for 12-year-olds and the grown-ups who love them.

10. Quinceañera: This modest little gem about two teenage Mexican-American cousins in the rapidly gentrifying Echo Park neighborhood in Los Angeles is the kind of observant, naturalistic regional filmmaking that the American “indie” scene is supposed to be about. Honorable Mention: Actress Joey Lauren Adams’ Arkansas-set writing/directing debut Come Early Morning, which screened at this year’s Indie Memphis Film Festival, is another ace example of the genre.

Other Honorable Mentions: A Scanner Darkly, The Queen, Shut Up & Sing, The Black Dahlia, The Science of Sleep.

Addison Engelking:

1. Dave Chappelle’s Block Party and The Science of Sleep: These two films, both directed by Michel Gondry, capture two sides of the artistic temperament. Chappelle makes his most daring comic-humanist statement yet by staging and hosting a free concert in Brooklyn that doubles as a bona fide utopian community. Chappelle’s love for his fellow man — and his exuberant, demotic love of all humor and performance — are irresistible. The Science of Sleep, on the other hand, gives us an emotionally stunted dreamer (Gael Garcia Bernal) whose desires and fantasies mingle suggestively and then disastrously with his possessive feelings for his next-door neighbor. The pair’s botched romance attains tragic weight during the film’s whimsical, melancholy climax.

2. The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada and L’Enfant: Two films that dare to invoke titanic, unwieldy talents and succeed in spectacular fashion. With its temporal shifts, unexpected eruptions of beauty, wit, grotesque violence in unlikely places, and its passionate articulation of a moral code in a universe that seems to regard its inhabitants as so many insects melting under the refracted light of an enormous magnifying glass, Three Burials is the closest cinematic approximation to the novels of William Faulkner I’ve ever seen. And in spite of its breathless hand-held camera work and its complex, authentic lead performances, L’Enfant shares the same sense of the universe’s beauty and mystery found in the works of the great French director Robert Bresson, whose work is alluded to in the film’s final, lingering shot.

3. Monster House and Akeelah and the Bee: Two sensitive, wise films about adolescent hopes and fears. Monster House, Gil Kenan’s dark, fast-paced animated feature, balanced its playful visual and narrative style (including my favorite opening sequence of the year) with several knowing depictions of the awkward ‘tween age when boys’ interests in driveway basketball and dinosaurs are challenged by a new, mysterious interest in girls. Akeelah and the Bee, one of the great American family films, is more incisive about the relationships between knowledge, class, school, and community than any other film I saw this year, or maybe this decade.

4. The New World and Don’t Come Knocking: Two sublime visual experiences from Terrence Malick (cinematographer: Emmanuel Lubezki) and Wim Wenders (cinematographer: Franz Lustig). Although set centuries apart, both films argue that multiple histories and eras exist simultaneously, and both believe that the same personalities shudder and struggle through the years in search of their wounded heart’s cure. Essential cinematic poetry.

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest

5. Breakfast on Pluto and Duck Season: Two criminally underappreciated “foreign films” that borrow the pop and minimalist aesthetic that revitalized American independent cinema so long ago. Breakfast on Pluto is, among other things, a visionary interpretation of the songs of Van Morrison. Duck Season borrows the still-camera aesthetic from Jim Jarmusch’s seminal Stranger Than Paradise and forges a touching, multigenerational film that Wes Anderson or even Yasujiro Ozu would envy.

6. Wordplay and Why We Fight: The year’s two most informative and passionate documentaries. Like Block Party, Wordplay is a sincere celebration of community and fellowship. Plus, it’s a revealing ethnography of crossword puzzle culture and construction. Why We Fight turns the bold, assertive title of Frank Capra’s series of WWII propaganda films into a question as it provides an evenhanded account of the personal and structural damage wrought by the rise of the military-industrial complex.

7. Hard Candy and The Descent: Two meticulous, methodical, and thoroughly creepy “exploitation” films — one for the girls and one for the boys. The excruciating Hard Candy commands respect as an allegory about the Internet and teen sexuality, but it also earns its place here as a long-overdue corrective to decades of misogynistic, gynophobic horror films. The Descent is remarkable for its gorgeous single-source lighting and the accretive, inescapable dread of its opening 47 minutes. Stitch those minutes to the last half of Hard Candy and you have the most frightening and stylish horror film of the last few years.

8. Inside Man and The Black Dahlia: Two brilliant directors — Spike Lee and Brian De Palma — who, as hired guns, made the strongest, strangest, deepest police procedurals of the year.

9. Neil Young: Heart of Gold and Ask the Dust: Two more great artists return from the wilderness. Jonathan Demme’s Nashville-shot concert movie is a humbler, more relevant closing benediction than either A Prairie Home Companion or The Last Waltz. Ask the Dust is the year’s great sleeper, an incisive look at writerly insecurity that showcases Salma Hayek’s most volcanic, erotic, and powerful performance.

10. The Queen and Half Nelson: Two films about meaningful contemporary dialectics: royal/plebeian, student/teacher, youth/experience, image/reality.

Greg Akers:

1. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest: Hyperbole earned: The second part in the Pirates trilogy is the best popcorn adventure since the heyday of the Indiana Jones and Star Wars series. If director Gore Verbinski can avoid whatever amounts to the Caribbean Ewok in the final installment of the trilogy (At World’s End, due out in May 2007), he’s positioned to do George Lucas one better.

2. The Proposition: Beautifully directed (by John Hillcoat), savagely written (by Nick Cave), and breathtakingly acted (Guy Pearce, Ray Winstone, Danny Huston, Emily Watson), The Proposition fires on all cylinders in its portrayal of 1800s Australia in transition from badland to, ostensibly, civilization.”What fresh hell is this?” asks one character in reference to the land. The movie’s answer is unforgettable.

3. Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan: The “It” movie of the year, and it’s well-earned to boot. Knowing that it’s all real — the stunts Sacha Baron Cohen pulls, the reactions to him, the people believing badly, the bear — gives Borat a no-movie-magic vérité that a conventional satire wading in the same slime pool could never attain. I know the scene of the year is in this film, I just can’t pin down which one it is.

4. L’Enfant: It’s been seven months since I saw the emotional bildungsroman L’Enfant, and I still think about it. I think about the terrifying premise — an aimless petty criminal sells his son on the black market so that he and his girlfriend can still live carefree. I think about the direction by the Dardenne brothers, simple so as to not distract from the characters. I think about the prostrate, raw, perfect ending. I think it’s time to watch the rest of the Dardennes’ movies.

5. Casino Royale: Casino Royale is among the finest entries in the James Bond franchise — and the best since 1981’s For Your Eyes Only — but let’s not get crazy yet: I’ll wait until Daniel Craig has a few more 007 films under his belt as perfect as Casino Royale before I’m ready to say that nobody does it better.

6. Blood Diamond: In the Africa of Blood Diamond, wars are composed of opponents swapping massacres, roads are one ambush after another, and “devils are bad men who are only that way because they live in hell.” As evidenced by this film, director Edward Zwick knows how to shoot action, actors, and mountains; all three are captured beautifully in an affecting work that disturbs even as it entertains.

7. Brick: The first half of Brick revels in the winking fun of its premise — a hard-boiled noir set in high school. Then there’s a subtle shift midpoint, and suddenly the premise fades into the background and all of the pain and emotions of the characters gets earned. The movie was already thoroughly enjoyable (the opium-den noir trope transformed into stoners hanging out behind a gas station is marvelously clever). But when it shifted tone and actually became a serious movie, my jaw dropped a little.

8. The Protector: The Protector has two of the greatest martial-arts scenes I’ve ever laid eyes on. In one, Thai warrior Tony Jaa fights his way up four flights of stairs in a restaurant/bag-guy lair, all in a single take. In the other, Jaa takes on wave after wave of henchmen; his only finishing move is breaking bones and snapping joints. It’s a clinic in such action-movie scenes, and it’s magnificent. Required viewing for fans of the genre.

9. Brokeback Mountain: Nevermind the joke that is Crash beating Brokeback Mountain for the 2005 Best Picture Oscar: Brokeback is infinitely more worthy than Crash‘s melodramatic tripe. As Ennis, Heath Ledger is brilliant. But the less showy, more nuanced performance from Jake Gyllenhaal steals the show as the object of Ennis’ love. I’ll admit to being uncomfortable at times watching Brokeback, but no time more than when considering Jack Twist’s fate.

10. House of Sand: Real-life mother-daughter combo Fernanda Montenegro and Fernanda Torres put on a powerhouse acting show in House of Sand, playing, alternately, different generations at different ages in the same family. It never comes across as a gimmick, either. Each actress follows the lead of the other in crafting characters that don’t feel patchwork.

Honorable Mention: United 93, Strangers With Candy, Down in the Valley, Fateless, Flags of Our Fathers, Miami Vice, Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny, Stranger Than Fiction, V for Vendetta, Half Nelson.