Many of 2008's best movies hashed out the Bush administration's sins, with allegorical comments on the War on Terror, environmental catastrophe, injustice in the immigration system, and economic pitfalls on the domestic and global scale.
But the No. 1 movie of 2008 shows us a family celebration whose naturally occurring pan-ethnic makeup -- a black groom, a WASP bride, a bridal party donned in saris, and musicians playing klezmer at all hours -- is the embodiment of the Obama generation. Let the new year begin!
Here are the top 10 movies of 2008:
1. "Rachel Getting Married" » A recovering drug addict (intensely played by Anne Hathaway) returns home for her sister's wedding, reopening family wounds that never really healed. Director Jonathan Demme's eavesdropping camera makes you feel as if you're one of the family.
2. "The Dark Knight" » "This city deserves a better class of criminal." That's The Joker, hauntingly played by a manic Heath Ledger, an urban Osama bin Laden whose worst crime is in using fear to make the good guys -- Batman (Christian Bale) and D.A. Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) -- subvert their principles in director Christopher Nolan's melding of art and action.
3. "WALL-E" » The sweetest guy left on planet Earth is a trash-compacting robot in Andrew Stanton's gorgeously realized fable of mechanical love among the trash heaps. More proof that Pixar can do no wrong.
4. "Slumdog Millionaire" » The terrorist attacks in Mumbai added poignancy to director Danny Boyle's underdog story about an Indian kid scoring big on "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" and proving that hope is an international language.
5. "Son of Rambow" » A sheltered kid (Bill Milner) discovers the magic of movies, thanks to a class bully and a bootlegged tape of Sylvester Stallone's "First Blood," in director Garth Jennings' charming fable of childhood imagination.
6. "Hellboy II: The Golden Army" » The grown-ups can be pretty imaginative, too, in director Guillermo Del Toro's second movie about the red-skinned comic-book hero (Ron Perlman) battling to stop a war among Earth's supernatural beings.
7. "Tell No One" » American novelist Harlan Coben's thriller gets one-upped by the French, as director Guillaume Canet runs an innocent doctor (François Cluzet) through a maze of twists and turns that Hitchcock would have admired.
8. "The Visitor" » Writer-director Tom McCarthy is an actor (recently seen in "The Wire"), so he knows when he's written a juicy part -- a morose professor who befriends the undocumented-immigrant couple in his apartment -- and he serves up the role of a lifetime to Richard Jenkins ("Six Feet Under").
9. "Let the Right One In" » It's not just the Swedish snow that's chilling in director Tomas Alfredson's vampire thriller, in which a lonely 12-year-old boy finds a neighbor who's been 12 for a long, long time.
10. "Frozen River" » A single mom (Melissa Leo) and a Mohawk woman (Misty Upham) are thrown together by economic circumstance into running illegal immigrants across the St. Lawrence River in this riveting and thought-provoking drama.
The second 10:
Darren Aronofsky's gritty character study "The Wrestler," starring Mickey Rourke; Guy Maddin's personal travelogue, "My Winnipeg" ; Gus Van Sant's sensitively acted biography "Milk" ; James Marsh's thrill-a-minute documentary "Man on Wire" ; Fatih Akin's cross-cultural drama "The Edge of Heaven" ; the awkward romantic charm of "Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist" ; the irrepressible personality of Sally Hawkins in Mike Leigh's "Happy-Go-Lucky" ; the unstoppable exuberance of Danny Ortega's "High School Musical 3: Senior Year" ; the detective-like work of Marina Zenovich in the documentary "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired" ; and the amiable characters of "Kung Fu Panda."
The bottom 10:
1. "Meet Dave" » After 90 minutes of Eddie Murphy's mugging, I really wish I hadn't.
2. "An American Carol" » There are funny conservatives out there. None of them were involved in this hack farce.
3. "88 Minutes" » The only mystery in this thriller is what was holding up Al Pacino's hair.
4. "The Love Guru" » What is the sound of no hands clapping? Ask Mike Myers' mystic character.
5. "What Happens in Vegas" » Should have stayed there.
6. "Beverly Hills Chihuahua" » No animals were harmed in the making of this picture. They didn't say anything about audience members.
7. "Delgo," "Fly Me to the Moon," "Space Chimps," "Star Wars: The Clone Wars" » Leave this spot for all lame computer-animated movies. Not everybody can be Pixar, and some shouldn't even try.
8. "Everybody Wants to Be Italian," "Made of Honor" » Romantic comedies only work if the characters are charming, not psychotic.
9. "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas" » A child-friendly parable on the Holocaust? Who thought that was a good idea?
10. "Four Christmases" » One holiday with Reese Witherspoon and Vince Vaughn was too much.
