For some reason making a list of my Top 10 Movies of the year was a bit harder than usual this go around.  I usually like having a list that mixes the best of (more mainstream) American cinema with the art/foreign films that I truly adored. Last year I was able to put together such a list, with films ranging from There Will Be Blood, The Assassination of Jesse James and Sweeney Todd to After the Wedding, Syndromes and a Century and Regular Lovers.

However this year I wasn’t as taken with the end of the year films that usually fill up a few spots on my annual Top 10.   The two I’ve liked the best, Milk and Revolutionary Road, while good, just aren’t good enough to warrant taking a film off of the list I am going to present to you below.   This is probably a good place to mention that I haven’t yet seen The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Doubt, Slumdog Millionare or Frost/Nixon - but I am fairly confident that they too will be unable to beat any of the films on my current list.

A few quick notes about how I chose the films.   Everything on the list below was released in a movie theater sometime in 2008.   Some of them only came out in NY or LA and some had a week long run at an alternative theater (like MOMA or Anthology Film Archives) but they were all available for a larger group of people to see for at least a week.  Being that many people don’t live in NY or LA, the list below also mentions where you can find the films now and in the future.  My last note is that while the first film list is without a doubt my top film of the year,  the rest of the list is not ranked.  I’ve been futzing with an order for a week now and nothing seems right, so I just plopped them down randomly.

And be sure to stay tuned to TakePart for more movie lists.  I’ve already posted my Top 10 Movie Performances of 2008 and a Top 10 Movies That Inspired People to TakePart list is right around the corner.

And be sure to takepart and let us know your favorite movie this year in the comments.

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Still Life (Jia Zhangke)

Jia’s beautiful mix of fiction and non-fiction filmmaking was by far the best thing I saw all year and now stands as one of my favorite films of all time.  His story of a man and a woman searching for their missing spouses near the Yangtze River in town of Fengjie is a hypnotizing meditation on the modernization of China.  More than just a story of two specific people though,  the characters drift through the town and their individual quests quickly give way to their surroundings making Still Life a film about place as much as people. The surroundings in this case are about to be submerged in water due to the creation of the Three Gorges Dam.   This is a daring, lyrical film about where our world is headed and the reality and fantasy that encompass that progress.

- Still Life is now available on DVD from New Yorker Films.  You can buy it at HERE or rent it on Netflix.

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In honor of Cinco de Mayo, I thought I would do a post about one of my favorite and fairly unknown Mexican filmmakers, Carlos Reygadas. Reygadas has directed three feature films - Japon, Battle in Heaven and most recently Silent Light. He’s a visual filmmaker who focuses on landscapes and people instead of plot and action.

I was lucky enough to see Silent Light at the New York Film Festival last year - it hasn’t been distributed yet. It’s a beautiful, Dreyer-esque story of a love triangle in a small Mennonite community:

You can go here to read an interview with Reygadas from a few years ago :

http://www.close-upfilm.com/features/Interviews/carlosreygadas.htm/

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