Best of 2008: Rentals and Revivals

Without any further ado (if a month-long silence can be considered ado), here are the top ten films I saw on my couch, on someone else's couch, or at a revival house in 2008.

10. Gone with the Wind (1939) proves that 1939 was one of the cinema's greatest years, since it wasn't even the best 1939 film I saw last year.

9. That would be Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), which is John Ford at the peak of his mythmaking abilities, and Henry Fonda at the peak of screen acting.

8. The Crime of Monsieur Lange (France, 1936) is Renoir at his devious best, making a solid case for justifiable homicide and painting a glowing picture of prewar optimism. (But the real crime is that it's still not on DVD in the United States.)

7. If Hud (1963) were only Paul Newman's pheromone-dripping-sex-panther of a star turn, well, it would still be great; but there's more, like Patricia Neal in one of the handful of best Best Actress-winning performances and James Wong Howe's heartbreaking cinematography.

6. Punishment Park (1971) might not be so frighteningly effective the next time I watch it, but it was so terrifying that I may not ever watch it again.

5. Even if The Young Girls of Rochefort (France, 1967) is a lesser film than its less-traditional predecessor The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, they're both so astoundingly good that such distinctions don't mean much.

4. Judge Priest (1934) is equal parts jaw-droppingly racist and mind-blowingly great, one of the best depictions of the rhythms of small-town life in American cinema.

3. To Be or Not to Be (1942) is the funniest movie about Nazis ever made, and one of the funniest films of the 1940s all time. And the 1942 Oscars were much poorer than they should have been, since this deserved a nom, and in some cases a win, in many categories.

2. La Chute de la maison Usher (France, 1928) showed me that silent films can be scary as hell, and that Jean Epstein might be the best director I'd never heard of before this.

1. Nashville (1975) makes me want to make dramatic, perhaps even ridiculous statements, like "it contains everything great that the cinema is capable of producing!" But, you know, it might not be such a ridiculous statement. I gave it 473 goats after I saw it, and I stand by that rating.

Beautiful Losers: I watched so many great films at home or in revival houses that I had to ditch a whole heap of 4.5-goat films, and let me tell you, it hurt to cut these from my list, like cutting off a finger. (Since I had to cut sixteen of them, I finished off the fingers and started on the toes. I'm typing this with my elbows.) Each one of them is in my top ten films for its respective year. In alphabetical order: Ballad of a Soldier (USSR, 1959), Force of Evil (1948), Holiday (1938), Imitation of Life (1934), Lady Windermere's Fan (1925), The Long Day's Dying (1968), Movie Crazy (1932), Odd Man Out (1947), One Way Passage (1932) (this one hurt the worst), Playtime (France, 1967), The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), The Southerner (1945), Steamboat Round the Bend (1935), Sunday at Six (Romania, 1965), Tess (1980), and They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1969).

This might be the extent of my awards-giving this season, since I saw so few films in the theater that I don't feel comfortable naming any of them "the best." We'll see how I do playing catch-up in the next few weeks, but things are heating up over at CIMMfest, so I might not have much time for non-festival movie watching.