Best In Film :: 2008
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Jellyfish

Writer Shira Geffen co-directs the strange, translucent, and nearly formless "Jellyfish" with Etgar Keret, creating a film that explores a handful of lives in Tel Aviv with grace and aplomb. A newly-wedded couple find that the honeymoon is over far too soon; an elderly woman’s nurse and companion struggles against prejudice and homesickness; a magical child emerges from the sea and an unhappy young woman takes her in; miracles start to happen all around. This is a modern fairy tale, and as such it’s one of those films (usually foreign) you just have to give yourself over to. Kilian Melloy

Let The Right One In

This was quite a year for vampires with "First Blood" on television and "Twilight" hauling in huge grosses at the movies, but no film was quite as haunting as this Swedish import. Filmed in bluish, wintry light, Tomas Alfredson’s film tells the story of a young boy abused by his classmates who befriends a girl living in an adjacent apartment. Of course we know why her windows have been covered, but does he? Part horror film, part coming-of-age story, part dark romance -- it’s easy to understand why it is winning citations as the year’s best foreign film by film groups throughout the country. You have to go back to "Near Dark" for a vampire film of similar power.Robert Nesti

Milk

Not only is this movie required viewing for gay audiences (particularly those younger members of our community for whom the name "Harvey Milk" engenders little more than a confused shrug), it’s shockingly reminiscent of the Proposition 8 battle in California today. "Milk" proves that the struggle for human rights is both cyclical and unending - and features an Oscar-worthy title performance by Sean Penn. David Foucher

Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist

Slight, but endearing is director Peter Sollett’s account of one long night in the lives of New Jersey high schoolers Nick (Michael Cera) and Norah (Kat Dennings), who meet cute in a New York club, then spend the next 12-hours traveling around Manhattan in a series of oddball adventures. Imagine "After Hours" as a teen comedy. With a great soundtrack, two extremely likeable leads and a sense of today’s youth scene that’s vibrant and real, especially in its treatment of its gay characters - a trio who play guardian angels to the couple and help make what could have been just another teen comedy into something special. Robert Nesti



The Orphanage

Under the tutelage of Guillermo del Toro, the young Spanish director Juan Antonio Bayona showed how everything old is new again with his chilling ghost story that harkens back to such classics as "The Haunting" and "The Innocents." No CGI-special effects in this film; rather working with his screenwriter Sergio Sanchez, Bayona crafts a rich, psychological study of a woman (the remarkable Spanish actress Belen Rueda) who returns to the orphanage she grew up in with her husband and adopted son to live. The boy disappears and is thought dead; but then she begins seeing him. Bayona gets everything right here - the eerie tone, the psychological underpinnings, the old-fashioned shock effects - that combine in an unusually subtle horror film. Robert Nesti

Paranoid Park

Gus Van Sant’s other movie this year is another in his series of Teen Angst movies, yet this one is remarkably effective. The teen in question is a skateboarder, played with cool aplomb by non-actor Gabe Nevins, who wanders aimlessly throughout his home town - Portland, Oregon - until a grisly turn of events intercedes. Based on a novel by Blake Nelson, the film has a dreamlike quality partly due to its fusion of different cinematic techniques (courtesy of cinematographer Christopher Doyle) and a soundtrack that ranges from Beethoven to country-and-western, and to Van Sant’s beautifully modulated direction. A film 180-degrees away from his vitally political "Milk," but one that stays with you for days after seeing it. Robert Nesti