A look back at the best the movie year 2008 had to offer

In a year for movies with little to celebrate, Scene film writers Noel Murray and Jim Ridley sifted through the past 12 months panning for gold and found a few nuggets. For more on overlooked films, performances and the year's worst movies, see a longer version online at nashvillescene.com.

The Best:
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button It's far from perfect—the final third seems particularly rushed, even if that fits a story about the inconveniences of time and aging—but David Fincher's picaresque storybook fantasy for adults was one of the only movies in 2008 that affected me as a movie. Loaded from top to bottom with piquant character performances, captivating digressions and dazzling widescreen images and unobtrusive special effects used always in service of creating a world, it's full of things only movies can do—like a simple shot of an empty room that somehow conveys the holes people leave, noticed or not, when they pass from this life. (JR)

The Dark Knight Director Christopher Nolan raises superhero realism to dizzying heights by placing Christian Bale's morally conflicted Batman and Heath Ledger's creepy Joker in a Gotham City that looks disturbingly like contemporary America, not some remote, fantastical movie set. Nolan's impressionistic images hold a lot of power, as does his gutsy choice to use iconic characters to explore—with no compromise—his usual themes of identity and lost ideals. Like the heroes of Memento and The Prestige, this Batman makes a plan, then changes with each step he takes towards his goal, such that by the end he's working for a stranger: the man he used to be. (NM)

The Exiles I put the long-delayed release of Kent Mackenzie's amazing 1961 film at the top of my list because it was there when I needed a reminder of why I love movies—and the thrill of seeing vanished locations in razor-sharp black-and-white, populated by actors with vast reserves of life to share with the camera, filled me with a joy I didn't feel often this year. The clincher: an electrifying score of honking 1960s garage-rock by Anthony Hilder & The Revels, including the same tune that blares during the big basement stand-off in Pulp Fiction. Many thanks to Milestone Films and UCLA's restoration team—if nothing else, this'll be one of 2009's coolest DVDs. (JR)

Let the Right One In Going into its second held-over month at the Belcourt, where people left hungry by Twilight keep returning with first-time viewers, this accomplished Swedish vampire movie was the kind of buried treasure I long to recommend to people—satisfying as both a gruesome, unsettling genre movie and a beautifully shot mood piece. As the mysterious heroine, forever 12 but trailing several lifetimes' depravity, little Lina Leandersson was the year's most intriguing monster. (JR)

Milk Though some have been turned off by the idea of artsy filmmaker Gus Van Sant making a conventional biopic, there's a method to Van Sant's lack of madness. This straightforward portrait of the life and times of openly gay San Francisco politician Harvey Milk fulfills one of Milk's own goals: to make straight America comfortable with their homosexual neighbors and relatives. Given the darkening climate for gay rights in '08, there were few more moving scenes in American cinema this year than Sean Penn's Milk kissing his boyfriend (played by James Franco) next to a store sign reading, "Yes, We're Open." (NM)

My Winnipeg This bizarre and singularly delightful docu-history of Guy Maddin's hometown is entangled with memories of Maddin's childhood—all simultaneously preposterous and plausible. Like Synecdoche, New York, this is another film about re-creating the past in scale-model form, from the daily, Sisyphean ordeal of straightening the rug in the Maddin family's front hallway to the piled-high snowdrifts that lead Winnipeg's perpetually sleepy citizens through an inescapable maze. (NM)

Paranoid Park and Synecdoche, New York These radically different puzzle-box films fight the reduction of movies to one-time consumables, without resorting to cheap gimmicks and gotchas. Charlie Kaufman's directorial debut expands Hamlet's life-as-play-within-a-play idea into a massive metafictional funhouse whose games with time and recombinant themes demand a second viewing. Compared to the accessibility-as-activism of Milk, Paranoid Park is the triumphant culmination of Gus Van Sant's apprenticeship in noncommercial cinema: it gathered all those experiments in looped chronology, sinuous long takes and meandering with intent into gorgeous, artfully scattered fragments of a skater boy's doomed now-is-forever youth. It contains perhaps my favorite music cue this year: skatepunks slouching shoulder to shoulder, congealing in slow-motion amber, while the wheezy organ and cascading guitar line of Billy Swan's "I Can Help" form a dirge for listless teenage beauty. (JR)

Rachel Getting Married Even more polarizing than Synecdoche or Benjamin Button, Jonathan Demme's devastating fly-on-the-wall domestic drama recognizes that people are not either-ors: they can be well-meaning and destructive, selfish and remorseful, happy in the moment and irreparably wounded, and foolish and noble even in the same disastrous gesture. No movie this year made me worry so with affection for its entire messed-up ensemble. As the absent-with-leave recovering-junkie heroine—she's not in the title, but the absence announces her—Anne Hathaway can break your heart with just the back of her downcast head. (JR)