The Cinéaste's Progress from This List to That Which Is to Come (He Hopes)


Once upon a time, I used to play a coy, rather pointless game w/r/t my annual top ten list -- dramatically "unveiling" it sometime in January, as if most everybody who reads this site didn't already have a pretty good idea of what it was gonna look like. Instead, I now publicly revise the sucker as I go along, so that the whole affair becomes a suspenseful Journey Toward Aesthetic Nirvana. Or something.

Here, then, is what my list would look like if (god forbid) I were forced to make it today:


THE "PURE" LIST (2008 premiere)

01. American Son (Neil Abramson, USA)
02. Secrecy (Peter Galison & Robb Moss, USA)
03. Standard Operating Procedure (Errol Morris, USA)
04. Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired (Marina Zenovich, USA)
05. Forgetting Sarah Marshall (Nicholas Stoller, USA)
06. The Bank Job (Roger Donaldson, UK)
07. Iron Man (Jon Favreau, USA)
08. Slingshot Hip Hop (Jackie Reem Salloum, USA)
09. CJ7 (Stephen Chow, Hong Kong)
10. The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (Rawson Marshall Thurber, USA)


THE "POLLS" LIST (2008 commercial release)

01. Paranoid Park (Gus Van Sant, USA)
02. Funny Games (Michael Haneke, USA)
03. The Duchess of Langeais (Jacques Rivette, France/Italy)
04. Chicago 10 (Brett Morgen, USA)
05. My Winnipeg (Guy Maddin, Canada)
06. 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days (Cristian Mungiu, Romania)
07. Stuck (Stuart Gordon, USA)
08. Chop Shop (Ramin Bahrani, USA)
09. Standard Operating Procedure (Errol Morris, USA)
10. Woman on the Beach (Hong Sang-soo, South Korea)