Ten Best Films of 2008

1. The Headless Woman (Lucrecia Martel, Argentina/France/
Italy/Spain)
The clear choice for the year's best, Lucrecia Martel's third feature articulates its female lead's psychological distress in terms of a narrative opacity that lifts in tandem with its heroine's renewed perception of her world. This cognizance, however, does not extend to the level of the social, which Martel analyzes in a mise-en-scène that continually reserves focus for her female protagonist while locating society's more marginal figures in an out-of-focus periphery. As with her 2001 La Ciénaga, Martel powerfully visualizes her metaphor - though, it is worth adding, she does so to a much more rigorous degree in The Headless Woman. Form and subject are indeed remade into one in this foremost masterpiece of the new Argentine cinema.

2. Tokyo Sonata (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Japan)
J-horror maestro Kiyoshi Kurosawa's generic change of pace represents nothing less than the director's best, savaging his nation's institutions (namely, the Japanese patriarchy, capitalist system, postwar anti-militarism and familial structure) and self-image, within a subtly expressionistic visually field. Timely mining remarkably similar thematic terrain to Laurent Cantet's Time Out (2001) with its out-of-work company man going to work daily, Kurosawa extends his critique to the film's other three family members who each challenge the authority of the aforesaid institutions. Kurosawa, however, reserves a revolutionary narrative "earthquake" or reversal for the final act, providing the ideal impetus for the film's ethos of resistance.

3. Summer Hours (Olivier Assayas, France)
Yet another filmmaker working at his peak, Olivier Assayas essentially adopts the pattern of Taiwanese master Hou Hsiao-hsien's Three Times (2005) in remaking his own corpus - especially his previous peak Cold Water (1994) and the fine Late August, Early September (1998) - through a three-part structure. While less clearly demarcated than in the Hou, each segment centers on a generation, who demonstrate France's evolving materialistic values. In fact, Assayas seems most critical of his own age-group, positioned between their family-minded elders and communitarian juniors. This is Assayas at both his most French and Asian, registering their distinctive naturalisms through an often mobile camera.

4. Liverpool (Lisandro Alonso, Argentina/France/Netherlands/
Germany/Spain)
Emphasizing tactile experience and sensory memory to extraordinary effect, Argentine filmmaker Lisandro Alonso's Liverpool adopts a conventional modernist strategy of long, often static takes to procure these realist qualities. Alonso likewise often holds his shots well beyond their narrative purpose has concluded, thus providing a visual analogy for his narrative structure: Liverpool continues even after on-screen subject Farrel has left the field-of-vision for the final time, thus emphasizing the robustness of life that this single film is unable to contain in its entirety. In other words, Alonso adapts modernist film language in the image of a narrative that seeks to do the same.

5. 35 Shots of Rum (Claire Denis, France/Germany)
Claire Denis's latest is the filmmaker in her most effective idiom, the romantic narrative poetics of her Friday Night (2002), following on the substantially more obscure fragmentation of the director's L'Intrus (2004). Here, as with her 1999 Beau Travail, movement returns to the fore, though in this instance it is less fetishistic exposition than the construction of a pattern of living particular to Paris's outer-suburb African immigrant community. These mobile, train-situated framings provide one of many echoes with Yasujiro Ozu's Late Spring (1949) source - as do the film's rice-cookers, static corridor set-ups, and its' concluding wedding - that Denis nevertheless transforms in the image of a racially-mixed 21st century France.

6. Two Lovers (James Gray, United States)
Perhaps the past year's biggest surprise - in spite of writer-director James Gray's notable previous forays into the Russian world of Brooklyn's Brighton Beach, Little Odessa (1994) and We Own the Night (2007); Gray is, in this regard, the supreme hedgehog of the US cinema, never straying very far from home - Two Lovers is easily 2008's most precise piece of American filmmaking. Modifying its classical decoupage in the variable image of superlative lead Joaquin Phoenix's variable psychology, Two Lovers offers a very traditional Jewish morality to replace the explicitly aestheticized romance of Phoenix and WASP love interest Gwyneth Paltrow. French critics again appear to be on the vanguard when it comes to the American Gray.

7. A Christmas Tale (Arnaud Desplechin, France)
One of this year's series of narratives depicting a rare family gathering, A Christmas Tale distinguishes itself for the pure bravado of Arnaud Desplechin's post-classical (and post-modern) direction. Adopting essentially every technique available to the filmmaker - from a shadow play to split-screen - Desplechin utilizes each as a means of maintaining a moment-to-moment quality of formal surprise; Desplechin, in other words, dislodges his signifiers from what they signify, selected instead for their syntactic effectiveness. This is filmmaking at its most free and intuitive, qualities that are no less present in the director's outstanding My Sex Life... or How I Got into an Argument (1996) and Kings and Queen (2004).

8. Still Walking (Hirokazu Kore-eda, Japan)
In a year of vivid family portraits - see French instantiations Summer Hours and A Christmas Tale - none comes close to the robust sense of reality procured by director Hirokazu Kore-eda. Centering on matriarch Kirin Kiki's exceptional performance, where she shows herself to be as capable of cruelty as she is motherly affection, Still Walking manages to be equally Japanese in its deliberate pacing and style, as well as in the film's carefully selected cultural details, and global in its upper middle-class habits and especially in the film's governing humanism. Japanese or not, the ordering of (sushi) take-out for the family gathering feels remarkably familiar, as does the step grandson's combination of cola and ginger ale at a soda fountain. A film of extraordinary texture.

9. Jerichow (Christian Petzold, Germany)
Further affirmation of the strength of Germany's "Berlin School" of filmmaking - joining Valeska Grisebach's exceptional Longing (2006) and the director's own Yella (2007) - Christian Petzold's Jerichow articulates a burgeoning anxiety in which the sons and daughters of Old Europe have suddenly found themselves on the lowest rung of the economic ladder, in this instance beneath an entrepreneurial Turk (thus displaying a racial revisionism for this newest German cinema). Petzold establishes this point in a narrative that systematically and expertly delays its dramatic pay-offs within a distinctly voyeuristic visual field that is itself as accomplished in its with-holdings and revelations as is Petzold's narrative.

10. Be Kind Rewind (Michel Gondry, United States)
Reaffirming Michel Gondry's status as the single American filmmaker most interested in bringing the cinema into correspondence with its sister visual arts, see his 2006 The Science of Sleep, Be Kind Rewind again establishes this relationship through its production of Nicolas Bourriaud's "Relational Aesthetics," where the residents of Gondry's rundown, environmentally-scarred suburban Passaic, New Jersey participate in the re-producing of VHS-era classics. Demonstrating both a nostalgia for Ghostbusters-period film art and a social consciousness, few if any contemporary American directors can come close to Gondry when it comes to the surfeit of his films' ideas. In the best sense, Gondry really is a filmmaker for film theorists.