He’s always been my favourite critic. Likely I will enjoy all of these though I’ve seen only two to date.

Ballast
The Band’s Visit
Che
Chop Shop
seen it … The Dark Knight
Doubt
The Fall
Frost/Nixon
Frozen River
Happy-Go-Lucky
seen it … Iron Man
Milk
Rachel Getting Married
The Reader
Revolutionary Road
Shotgun Stories
Slumdog Millionaire
Synecdoche, New York
W.
Wall-E

Every year I name a winner of my Special Jury Prize, so named in honor of the “alternative first prize” given by juries at many festivals. This year (roll of the drums) the honored film is:

“My Winnipeg” Guy Maddin’s latest dispatch from inside his imagination is a “history” of his home town, which becomes a mixture of the very slightly plausible, the convincing but unlikely, the fantastical, the fevered, the absurd, the preposterous, and the nostalgic.

Click PLAY or watch the My Winnipeg trailer on YouTube.

Five documentaries in equal first place:

“Encounters at the End of the World”
“I.O.U.S.A.”
“Man on Wire”
“Standard Operating Procedure”
“Trouble the Water”

The best films of 2008… and there were a lot of them