The Best of the Year

Pan's Labyrinth
A young girl gets caught up in an
underground world of fantasy to
escape the horrors of war, all the
while attempting to protect her baby
brother from her maniacal
stepfather. Guillermo del Toro is
able to deftly balance the grotesque
and the surreal in inventive form,
and offered one of the year's most
unique and original films. This is a
fairy tale not for kids, but for adults
ready to see the world through a
children's eyes. (And of course
nothing like this would come out of
the Hollywood studios.)

Dave Chappelle's Block Party
Exuberant and fun-loving would
be two ways to describe comedian
Dave Chappelle, but they'd be
excellent adjectives for Michel
Gondry's rousing documentary.
In it, he follows the Comedy
Central star to his Ohio
hometown, offering tickets to see
a rap concert in New York City.
Interspersed with some eclectic
performances is Chappelle
clowning around with the
neighbors, the musicians, a
marching band, and countless
others. It's a story about a man
who entertains as his life's calling.

Notes on a Scandal
A spinster of a teacher tries to take
advantage of the young object of
her affection in this surprisingly
entertaining thriller. Like Fatal
Attraction set in the principal's office,
Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett make
elegant opposites in this
suspenseful -- and often, quite
funny -- take on obsession. It's a
game of cat and mouse with a
pitch-perfect script, some forceful
scoring by Philip Glass, and a pair of
vivid performances.

The Science of Sleep
Director Michel Gondry enters the list again (I
really do like him) with this surreal tale about a
lonely artist (Gael Garcia Bernal) who has an
on-again, off-again courtship with his
soulmate-ish neighbor (the charming Charlotte
Gainsbourg). Bernal's dreamworld can be
off-putting at times, but there's no denying the
sweetness of the romance.

Hard Candy
A fashion photographer meets a
young girl at a coffee shop after an
online "seduction," and soon she's
back at his place proceeding to get
drunk. A line's about to be crossed,
but it'll never be the one you'll think.
A zig-zagging script and stellar
performances by the two leads (Ellen
Page and Patrick Wilson) make this
often-hard-to-watch thriller one of the
year's most welcome surprises. It's
definitely not for the faint of heart,
but you'll come away from Hard Candy
with one of the biggest swells of relief
in a long time. Maybe.

Little Miss Sunshine
MTV veterans Jonathan Dayton
and Valerie Faris ("1979" and
"Tonight, Tonight" by the
Smashing Pumpkins, among
many others) make their
bigscreen debut with this
wonderful dramedy. It's about a
dysfunctional family headed to
California for a beauty pageant,
and what could have been a trite
movie clogged with cliched
characters is instead a constantly
delightful road picture. I can't
imagine a better group of actors
assembled for a film of this type,
and the cast hits the right note in
every scene.

Babel
There are four simultaneous plotlines in
Babel: A nanny takes her kids unwisely
across the Mexican border; a vacationing
couple is besieged by bullets; some
Middle-Eastern boys commit a tragic
gun-related atrocity; and a deaf-mute
Japanese girl comes to terms with her
sexuality. All the while, each set of
characters is beset by difficulties related
to their inability to communicate with
others. It's a high-stress balancing act,
but Alejandro Inarritu (Amores Perros, 21
Grams) again amazes with his control.

Borat
It was the year of Borat. The film was
an unexpected box office hit, it
spawned several catchphrases, and it
became the pop-culture touchstone
that the movie season had lacked.
The film itself was nothing short of
hilarious: We see the fake Kazakh
newsman interview Americans across
the country who subtly reveal their
prejudices. We aren't all racists and
anti-Semites, but we apparently still
have a long way to go.

Letters From Iwo Jima
Clint Eastwood again strikes
gold with this somber, moving
tale about the Japanese side
of the infamous WWII battle.
He shows the reticence, the
hesitation, the uncertainty, and
the honor (or lack thereof)
exhibited by our onetime
enemies in one of the defining
military moments of our time.
The film is nothing short of
breathtaking in many ways, not
least among them the
performances (hats off to
Kazunari Ninomiya) and the
melancholy mood. It's an
anti-war film at the right time.

The Departed
One's a mobster hidden within the ranks of the
police, while another is a cop feigning his loyalty
to the mafia. Martin Scorsese hits his stride
again in this action-packed remake of Infernal
Affairs that shocks and surprises during its entire
running time. Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon,
Alec Baldwin, Martin Sheen, Jack Nicholson, and
Mark Wahlberg all give standout performances in
what will surely go down as one of Scorsese's
better films, regardless of what some naysayers
might have you believe. It's more than an
entertaining "popcorn picture"; it's a cinema icon
doing what he does best: revealing the grimy
underbelly of the law.