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Newcity’s Top 5 of Everything 2008: Film

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Top 5 Domestic Filmsslumdog-1

“The Dark Knight,” Christopher Nolan

“Che,” Steven Soderbergh

“Paranoid Park,” Gus Van Sant

“Rachel Getting Married,” Jonathan Demme

“Ballast,” Lance Hammer

—Ray Pride

Top 5 Foreign Films

“Man on Wire,” James Marsh

“Reprise,” Joachim Trier

“Happy-Go-Lucky,” Mike Leigh

“Slumdog Millionaire,” Danny Boyle

“A Christmas Tale,” Arnaud Desplechin

—Ray Pride

Top 5 Films

“Slumdog Millionaire,” Danny Boyle

“Ballast,” Lance Hammer

“Hunger,” Steve McQueen

“The Dark Knight,” Christopher Nolan

“In The City of Sylvia,” Jose Luis Guerin

—Bill Stamets

Top 5 Films

“Milk,” Gus Vant Sant

“The Dark Knight,” Christopher Nolan

“Man on Wire,” James Marsh

“Let the Right One In,” Tomas Alfredson

“Rachel Getting Married,” Jonathan Demme

—Tom Lynch

Top 5 Performances – Female

Sally Hawkins, “Happy-Go-Lucky”

Melissa Leo, “Frozen River”

Kristin Scott Thomas, “I’ve Loved You So Long”

Kate Winslet, “Revolutionary Road”

Kat Dennings, “Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist”

—Ray Pride

Top 5 Performances – Male

Benicio Del Toro, “Che”

Sean Penn, “Milk”

Mathieu Amalric, “A Christmas Tale”

Michel Blanc, “The Witnesses”

Ben Kingsley, “Elegy”

—Ray Pride

Top 5 Supporting Performances – Female

Ann Savage, “My Winnipeg”

Nurgul Yesilcay, “The Edge of Heaven”

Viola Davis, “Doubt”

Penelope Cruz, “Vicky Cristina Barcelona”

Zoe Kazan, “Revolutionary Road”

—Ray Pride

Top 5 Supporting Performances – Male

Michael Shannon, “Revolutionary Road,” “Shotgun Stories”

Danny McBride, “Pineapple Express”

Richard Dreyfuss, “W.”

Toby Jones, “W.”

Anil Kapoor, “Slumdog Millionaire”

—Ray Pride

Top 5 Directors

Mike Leigh, “Happy-Go-Lucky”

Joachim Trier, “Reprise”

Danny Boyle, “Slumdog Millionaire”

Tomas Alfredson, “Let the Right One In”

James Marsh, “Man on Wire”

—Ray Pride

Top 5 Screenplays

Fatih Akin, “The Edge Of Heaven”

Joachim Trier and Eskil Vogt, “Reprise”

Simon Beaufoy, “Slumdog Millionaire”

Charlie Kaufman, “Synecdoche, New York”

Martin McDonagh, “In Bruges”

—Ray Pride

Top 5 Domestic Documentaries

“Encounters at the End of the World,” Werner Herzog

“The Order of Myths,” Margaret Brown

“At The Death House Door,” Steve James, Peter Gilbert

“The Unforeseen,” Laura Dunn

“Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father,” Kurt Kuenne

—Ray Pride

Top 5 Foreign Documentaries

“Man On Wire,” James Marsh

“Of Time and the City,” Terence Davies

“Waltz With Bashir,” Ari Folman

“Up the Yangtze,” Yung Chang

“Young@Heart,” Stephen Walker

—Ray Pride

Top 5 Follies

“Speed Racer,” The Wachowski brothers

“The Fall,” Tarsem

“Adam Resurrected,” Paul Schrader

“Australia,” Baz Luhrmann

“My Blueberry Nights,” Wong Kar-wai

—Ray Pride

Top 5 Films You Can’t See Yet

“24 City,” Jia Zhang-Ke

“35 Shots Of Rum,” Claire Denis

“The English Surgeon,” Geoffrey Smith

“Liverpool,” Lisandro Alonso

“Voy a Explotar (I’m Going to Explode),” Gerardo Naranjo

—Ray Pride

 

Review: Encounters at the End of the World

Documentary, Reviews No Comments »

Without mercy, Werner Herzog mocked himself in Zak Penn’s “Incident at Loch Ness,” a making-of take-off about the German filmmaker and a documentary crew chasing Scotland’s legendary denizen of the deep. Now Herzog does the real thing: “Encounters at the End of the World” is a transparent meta-travelogue about collecting exotica in Antarctica. For this G-rated essay for the Discovery Channel, Herzog embeds with likeminded “professional dreamers” doing chores and studies at McMurdo Station. A seven-week sojourn reveals debris, machinery and a tacky artificial ice-cream dispenser named Frosty Boy. As usual, Herzog is hungry for all that can disgust and intoxicate him. He spies the sublime above and below the ice. Seals emit signals that sound like those indecipherable signals from deep space heard in a sci-fi film. Herzog watches scientists watch a DVD of sci-fi film “Them!” He encounters an obliging geochronologist, glaciologist and others who sound as if they have seen a Werner Herzog film. Twice, though, our narrator interrupts the overlong tales of others. I winced when he asked a diver surfacing with three new species: “Is this a great moment?” Another overly italicized moment: Herzog implies his own peril with a third-hand story about a traveler to Guatemala who was macheted to death for taking a photo. Herzog’s surrealist misanthropy is best expressed in his inquiry into insanity among penguins. Does a closely packed colony ever drive a Herzog-like individual to make a mad existential dash into the void? As Sartre sort of said, “hell is other penguins.” 99m. (Bill Stamets)

Review: The Grand

Comedy, Mock Documentary, Reviews No Comments »

Not as zingy as his first semi-improvised comic mock-doc, “Incident At Loch Ness,” writer-director Zack Penn’s “The Grand” allows his actors a chance to chisel comic fineries with character consistency, if not always agreeable comic results. Unfortunately, the subject’s card playing, which like sex and infidelity is always a more interesting topic to those with hands in the pot than those outside. While there are bits from Woody Harrelson, David Cross, Dennis Farina, Cheryl Hines, Richard Kind, Ray Romano, Gabe Kaplan and Chris Parnell that miss and hit, I kept my eyes open for “The German”—Werner Herzog in another tasty passage of gleeful self-parody. Still, unlike recent Christopher Guest offerings, I didn’t feel like I needed a shower immediately afterward. There’s silliness here, but not much spite. 104m. (Ray Pride)