Unless you guzzle blood, wear a cape or fetch, 2008 probably wasn't your year at the movies.
Were there excellent films? Of course. Gutsy performances? Unquestionably. But sitting through an adult-aimed drama these days is like watching a polar bear gingerly cross a sheet of ice. Extinction looms, except the culprit isn't global warming -- it's Beverly Hills Chihuahua, the next Twilight instalment and this week's remake of, well, anything.
So if this is the bad news, what's the good? Answer: That great films still managed to hatch, survive and thrive -- at times exceeding their own limitations.
For me, no movie transcended its genre with more confidence than Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight. Remove the cowl, the Bat-trappings, even The Joker's chalk-white "war paint," and you have a thriller that's topical, moral, political and anything but cartoonish. Is it flawless? No, but it's arguably as close to a masterpiece as 2008 yielded.
The same could be said of Pixar's WALL-E, about a trash-compacting robot left to clean up an over-polluted Earth. Part-romance, part-satirical jab, it skewers as it dazzles. For all of WALL-E's computer-generated might, though, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button offers what might be the year's most mesmerizing visual: Brad Pitt as an 80-year-old child. David Fincher's epic is sublime and unsentimental as it follows the life of its titular character, who is born old and grows young.
Not that every film needed to break new whiz-bang ground to grab you. The sturdy craftsmanship of Milk and Frost/Nixon was enough, each buoyed by their respective actors: Sean Penn, unrecognizably jubilant as gay rights activist Harvey Milk; and Frank Langella as Richard Nixon.
Alongside them as one of the year's standout performances? Richard Jenkins in The Visitor, about a dullard whose inner life is re-ignited by a chance encounter with illegal immigrants.
For nerve-shredding thrills no film was sharper than Tell No One, a French production (adapted from an American novel) about a man who receives an e-mail from his murdered wife. Just as suspenseful -- particularly for those of us who aren't good with heights -- was the documentary Man on Wire about a tightrope walker who crossed the distance between the World Trade Center towers in 1974.
Lastly, a pair of crowd-pleasers showed how to be win audiences without playing dumb: Slumdog Millionaire from Danny Boyle and Forgetting Sarah Marshall, which married raunchy humour to heart and character with supreme seamlessness.
Kevin Williamson's movies of the year
The Dark Knight
WALL-E
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Milk
Frost/Nixon
The Visitor
Tell No One
Man on Wire
Slumdog Millionaire
Forgetting Sarah Marshall
