Movies to See of 2008

Milk
Ghost Town (check, not bad)
Chop Shop
A Christmas Tale
Happy-Go-Lucky
Cadillac Records -- Darnell Martin's story of the founding and flowering of the legendary Chicago label Chess Records elides some of the facts -- and yet gets the spirit exactly right. It doesn't hurt that the performances -- from the likes of Eamonn Walker, Columbus Short, Mos Def, Jeffrey Wright and, especially, Beyoncé Knowles (as Etta James) -- are superb. This is what it means to make a picture that's alive.

"The Class" -- Since Laurent Cantet's "The Class" took the top prize at Cannes earlier in the year, I've heard a surprising number of my fellow critics talk about it as a typical "triumph over adversity in the classroom" story, a highbrow "To Sir, With Love." But Cantet's drama, which stars real-life teachers and students and takes place over the course of one year in the classroom of a tough Paris suburb, is less about the big victories of teaching than it is about the frustrating imperfection of even the small ones. In "The Class," the classroom isn't a safe place isolated from the outside world, but a miniature universe where disparate people from that outside world come together, with all the conflicts and revelations that that kind of messy mingling implies. It's a hopeful movie -- but not a smug one.

"The Visitor" -- Because marketing campaigns and marquee names are always jockeying for our attention in the movie universe, sometimes we forget that acting and filmmaking are two of the things we go to the movies for in the first place. Tom McCarthy's "The Visitor" -- in which veteran character actor Richard Jenkins gives a marvelous performance as a 60-ish widowed professor who befriends two illegal immigrants living in New York -- helps put everything back in perspective. Eloquent and unassuming, "The Visitor" hits home precisely because it doesn't overreach its grasp.

"Before I Forget" -- In "Before I Forget," Jacques Nolot (the French actor who is both director and star here) plays Pierre, a 60-ish former hustler living alone in Paris who's been HIV-positive for more than 20 years. He's survived many of his friends, but what does it mean to be a "survivor" when, in the end, the aging body you live in is going to betray you anyway? Pierre faces that inevitability with grace and good humor, but also with a realistic dose of mournfulness. Nolot has made one of the loveliest and most unflinching films about aging -- and about makeshift families -- I've ever seen.

"Trouble the Water" -- Filmmakers Tia Lessin and Carl Deal went to New Orleans, post-Hurricane Katrina, to make a film about the National Guard. They found an even greater subject when they ran into Kim and Scott Roberts, two self-described "street hustlers" from the Ninth Ward. Kim, an ebullient aspiring rap artist, had captured the hurricane's before, during and after with her video camera. Deal and Lessin helped shape the footage into a document that explains, without spelling it out in so many words, what it means -- or what it ought to mean -- to be an American.

"Sparrow" -- Maybe it's cheating to put an unreleased movie on a 10-best list, but in this case, I think it's justified cheating: Johnnie To's "Sparrow" didn't get a theatrical release in the United States, but at least you can watch it at home -- the DVD is available from DVDAsian.com and other vendors, and it's also available on Blu-Ray. More a musical than an action movie, "Sparrow" -- which details the adventures of a glam but broke gang of pickpockets -- borrows the mood, color and vitality of pictures like "Singin' in the Rain," "The Band Wagon," "An American in Paris" and even Jacques Demy's "The Young Girls of Rochefort." And its finale, a ballet of twirling umbrellas and graceful sleight-of-hand pirouettes, is one of the most gorgeous dance numbers I've ever seen.