1. Rachel Getting Married
2. Wall-E
3. Happy-Go-Lucky
4. Cadillac Records
5. The Class
6. Kit Kittredge: An American Girl
7. Waltz With Bashir
8. Shotgun Stories
9. Doubt
10. Trouble the Water
1. Rachel Getting Married
The year’s best movie is a breathtaking mix of isolation and fullness. Side by side with a bleak family drama”an unstable woman (Anne Hathaway) fresh from rehab, sisterly antagonism, the insistent memory of a dead child, an emotionally stunted mother”is the overflowing heart of an extended family in which racial and cultural barriers dissolve. Jonathan Demme’s film looks backward and forward, from a self-indulgent past to an audaciously hopeful future.
3. Happy-Go-Lucky
In Mike Leigh’s profound comedy, the question hangs: Is the blithely optimistic Poppy (the effervescent Sally Hawkins) fatuously cheerful? Leigh tests her worldview by putting her in an enclosed space with a rage-ridden proto-Fascist driving instructor (Eddie Marson)”the first lesson hilarious, the last scary. It turns out Poppy’s is not a life of whimsy but a design for living that’s brave and hard-won.
4. Cadillac Records
Darnell Martin’s musical drama centers on Chicago’s Chess Records and the seminal blues artists it launched, among them Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry, and Etta James. The theme”black musicians struggling to find their voices in a society that keeps them segregated, beaten down, and infantilized”is beautifully sustained, and the ensemble is stupendous. Who could have imagined Beyoncé Knowles would find the anger and longing at the core of James’s music?
5. The Class
Based on the autobiographical novel by François Bégaudeau, who plays himself, Laurent Cantet’s wrenching drama centers on a teacher who attempts to win over a poor, racially mixed group of students. Every day is a high-wire act, a series of negotiations, small defeats, unexpected triumphs. Just as we’re getting high on this utopian vision, something goes wrong. See it. Brood on it.
6. Kit Kittredge:
An American Girl
It opened poorly against a Will Smith superhero picture and was largely shrugged off as a merchandising tie-in. But Patricia Rozema’s tale of an adolescent girl (a luminous Abigail Breslin) who, at the height of the Depression and amid widespread foreclosures, sets out to be a journalist and document the struggles of homeless families, is both enchanting and haunting. And as she learns to see the world with new eyes, Kit becomes one of the great contemporary role models for kids.
7. Waltz With Bashir
Fever dreams and recollections of the early eighties Israeli war with Lebanon: another film about the guilt of soldiers for what they did or didn’t do. But this one, by Ari Folman, is animated, and its fluid boundary between the real and surreal lifts it into the realm of myth.
