Smitten robots, frantic slumdogs, and flawed politicians: colourful characters brought big-screen’s best to life.

As we bid adieu to 2008, the top 10 lists below reveal what resonated most with the Straight’s movie critics. The writers organized their preferences in a descending order of importance. As you’ll see, Milk, Man on Wire, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and Frost/Nixon made it into several of the critics’ picks.

Ken Eisner

Cinema’s hundred-year reign has been assailed by radio, television, porn, video games, and now Internet downloads of every kind (legal and otherwise). So far, the institution has been immune to poverty; the Great Depression may always be looked at as Hollywood’s Himalaya. But if filmmakers get smart enough in this daunting new age, infotainment-jaded citizens will stick with the movies to get the kind of public, big-screen experience that the coincidentally city-centred winners below provided in 2008.

Milk
Sean Penn delivers his greatest performance yet by bringing to full light the courage, colour, and human failings of slain San Francisco city supervisor Harvey Milk, a transformative figure whose inspiration—revived by director Gus Van Sant in conventional yet full-blooded form—couldn’t come at a better time.

Happy-Go-Lucky
Mike Leigh’s latest is a character study with a twist; no one is as they initially seem in this surprisingly jaunty look at today’s freewheeling London, with Sally Hawkins unforgettable as the flightiest gal in town.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
The aging process moves backward in David Fincher’s fable, with Brad Pitt genuinely impressive as a man born old and getting younger every day. This gorgeously crafted film is also a swooning, jazzy testament to New Orleans and its rich history.

Flight of the Red Balloon
In Hou Hsiao Hsien’s luminous film, Juliette Binoche is wonderfully off-kilter as a single mom (sort of) balancing Chinese puppetry with raising a fresh-faced boy, who wanders Paris with a Taiwanese nanny shooting her film-school tribute to France’s most famous short—itself a deathless poem to the City of Light.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona
The first two title characters might not be the brightest bulbs in the box, but, oh, how that Spanish city shines in Woody Allen’s most satisfying effort in many years. Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz steal the show as bigger-than-life painters who put blood in their art—for fun, of course.

The Visitor
An amusing and quietly moving study of how life can go right after something goes wrong. Richard Jenkins is superb as a drab academic whose zest for experience—alongside his love for music—is rekindled when he finds two illegal aliens inhabiting his Manhattan apartment.

Frost/Nixon
Ron Howard’s best handsomely dramatizes the fateful 1977 showdown between a disgraced American president (the great Frank Langella) and a fading TV personality (Michael Sheen). It’s a rapier-smart joust that underscores the decline of journalism in this attack-poodle era.

Man on Wire
In a year of fine documentaries about Iraq and other human disasters, I can’t shake this caperlike tale of a quirky Frenchman who strung a metal line between the Twin Towers and danced between them for a jaw-dropping 45 minutes. Still working out the metaphors on all that.

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas
It was a tough choice between this and The Reader. Taken together, these flawed English-language films offer provocative insight into the horrors of the Holocaust from within the German mind—here blindly, through the eyes of child.

I’ve Loved You So Long
Its ending almost undoes the tale, but the real story here is Kristin Scott Thomas’s indelible French-language portrayal of a woman, newly released from prison, gradually attempting to find new sweetness in a life spent mostly alone. It was kind of like WALL-E that way.

Janet Smith

For all this year’s alien invasions and superhero blockbusters, the most stunning special effect was the computer program that made Brad Pitt age backwards. If only you could buy one of those at the Apple Store.

Slumdog Millionaire
Few films have captured the frantic contradictions of modern India with the power of Danny Boyle’s knockout rags-to-riches epic. Boyle comes up with a rich masala of Bollywood colour, Dickensian humanism, and the kind of breathless, cranked-up style he coined in Trainspotting.

Standard Operating Procedure
One of the most chilling horror movies of the year is a documentary. We all know what happened at Abu Ghraib, right? Errol Morris works his mastery to prove us terribly wrong, meticulously accumulating photo evidence and interviews that force us inside the walls of a true American-made hell on earth.

Milk
What makes Gus Van Sant’s portrait so inspiring is that it refuses to gloss over the life of Harvey Milk, a gay-rights activist whose single-minded ambition is matched only by his weakness for boy toys. Because Sean Penn’s flawed but effervescent San Francisco politician is so real, he’s that much more of a hero.

In Bruges
Martin McDonagh’s black comedy about two Irish hit men hiding out in a Belgian city is as unruly as it is taut. Thanks to postcard scenery, an offbeat love story, and the world’s angriest dwarf, you have a British gangster movie that pistol-whips every genre cliché.

Cloverfield
The world’s coming to an end, and all people want to do is film it with their cellphones. Shot in disorienting shaky cam, Cloverfield savvily reinvents the alien-invasion movie while both sticking it to the YouTube generation and serving as a terrifying metaphor for 9/11.

Let The Right One In
Even though the plot sounds like Tweenage Vampire, this achingly bittersweet story of two young misfits—one a bullied boy, the other a girl who can’t go out in the sunlight—is elegantly adult. The film looks as cold and stark as the snowy Swedish winter that serves as the backdrop.

Funny Games
Repulsive yet brilliant, Michael Haneke’s ice-pick-sharp critique of American bloodlust is not easy to watch—and that’s the point. Preppies in tennis whites become monsters, golf clubs become torture devices, and gated estates become prisons in a movie that’s impossible to shake.

Man On Wire
The 1970s story of high-wire walker Philippe Petit plays out like the best kind of heist movie in this exhilarating documentary. Teetering between the Twin Towers, he becomes a large-than-life symbol of a more carefree, pre–9/11 time.

Frost/Nixon
Sometimes it just comes down to the performances. Sure, this cat-and-mouse game is engrossing from start to high-stakes finish. But the real fun comes watching the shadows flash across Frank Langella’s basset-hound face whenever his Richard Nixon temporarily succumbs to inner demons.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Here’s good, old-fashioned motion-picture magic served up using revolutionary digital technology. The tale of a backward-aging adventurer is so unlike anything you’ve ever seen—literally—you may not know what to make of it at first. So why is it you can’t stop contemplating the meaning of life?

Mark Harris

Those who read my reviews on a regular basis will know that I’m a hard-core francophile. This year’s top-10 list, however, might suggest that this fondness has mutated into out-and-out chauvinism (five films from France, six in French, another partially financed by French money, an eighth set in Belgium). This is not actually the case. It’s just that so many of the best foreign-language films to play in Vancouver in the last year (notably at the Vancouver International Film Festival, Pacific Cinémathí¨que, and the VanCity) didn’t run the one week mandatory for consideration here. As for Hollywood, it continues to be reluctant to engage with the real world and, as a consequence, remains art-unfriendly.

Waltz with Bashir
The war in Lebanon as seen through the prism of posttraumatic stress disorder. A rare “animated documentary”, it’s also one of the best animated films of any kind, ever.

Tell No One
Almost certainly the finest French thriller to be inspired by an American crime novel since Franí§ois Truffaut turned Down There into Shoot the Piano Player.

I’ve Loved You So Long
Kristin Scott-Thomas and Elsa Zylberstein play off each other perfectly in this beautifully written French drama about two sisters who try to reestablish a relationship after the elder is released from a long prison term.

Persepolis
Marjane Satrapi’s super autobiographical comic book about growing up in the Ayatollah’s Iran is transformed into an equally marvellous animated feature (two in one year: wow!).

The Band’s Visit
This droll comedy shows us what happens when a misdirected Egyptian police band encounters a group of Israeli slackers who have difficulty even spelling the word culture.

My Winnipeg
Once again Guy Maddin manages to delight us, this time with the most unreliable “documentary” since Georges Mélií¨s faked the coronation of Edward VII.

In Bruges
Blessed with rollicking acting, great scenery, and the best Belgian jokes ever (as one would expect from the man who coined the line, “You’re so boring, you could bore the head off a dead bee”), playwright Martin McDonagh’s film follows the misadventures of two mismatched Irish hit men cooling their heels on the Continent in the wake of a botched assassination. Great fun.

The Last Mistress
Catherine Breillat rewages the war between the sexes while following 19th-century rules.

The Duchess of Langeais
The most Balzacian of all literary adaptations, a minor miracle accomplished by Jacques Rivette and his now-deceased star, Guillaume Depardieu.

A Secret
A sad, subtle tale about the Holocaust, told mainly from a child’s point of view.

Ron Yamauchi

It’s an honour and a challenge to champion deserving movies, especially since I evaluate largely by gut reaction. If there is a theme, it is hybridization: movies that cross boundaries of genre and expectation, that spring from unexpected sources or apply a novel perspective.

Iron Man
If not based on an existing title, a movie that brazenly repurposed war-on-terror imagery to underscore Robert Downey Jr.’s radicalization from technocratic hedonist to antiwar warrior could have been called Irony Man. The droll dialogue, impeccable effects, and excellent performances begat a year of Marvel, The Dark Knight notwithstanding.

Happy-Go-Lucky
It’s a movie about a resolutely cheerful English schoolteacher (Sally Hawkins) who takes driving lessons. And? And nothing, except that its a terrific experience, like spending two hours with a new best friend or in a wonderfully reviving hot bath, or both.

WALL-E
Pixar’s latest triumph is a foray into hard science fiction, with an Earth devoid of all humans and animals but not, entirely, of life and emotion. WALL-E, the tiny, caterpillar-treaded, trash-compacting, souvenir-scrounging hero, is a fount and symbol of hope, optimism, and palpable, ineffable sorrow for lost joys.

Under the Bombs
The story of a rich expatriate and the hustling taxi driver she has hired to help find her son, lost in the Israeli bombardments of 2006, Under the Bombs is a romance, travelogue, road comedy, and insane stunt filmed on location, in the midst of the action.

Son of Rambow
Simultaneously a paean to lost fathers, a celebration of the filmmaking impulse, and a compendium of appalling, and therefore hilarious, child-endangerment situations, Son of Rambow is the story of two English boys in the early 1980s who discover the power of the camera to defeat bullies, self-doubt, and interfering French twerps.

Cloverfield
Given how reviewers focused on the promotional hype (approaching Snakes on a Plane levels) and the 9/11 resonances, DVD is probably the best way to appreciate this harrowing Godzilla variant’s deliberately crude and intimate style, posing as camcorder footage recovered from the area previously known as Central Park.

Speed Racer
Given the production detail, character service, and intricate plotting on display, the Wachowski brothers clearly love the 1960s anime (unwatched by me) on which this is based. They also still love cinematographic innovation and wordy, cynical speeches by corrupt dogmatists. Radioactively fluorescent, infinitely corny: totally awesome.

Kit Kittredge: An American Girl
I wasn’t expecting to tolerate a movie based on a doll, let alone laugh, cry, and cheer throughout. Directed by Patricia Rozema and acted by a fine ensemble featuring Abigail Breslin as Kit, intrepid girl reporter, this child’s-eye view of the Depression is funny, tightly plotted, and unsettlingly timely.

Ghost Town
Though saddled with a 1980s-style ghost-caper plot, and despite being nobody’s idea of a Hollywood leading man, Ricky Gervais pulled off being the lead—as an acidulous, vituperative dentist, no less—in a supremely satisfying romantic comedy (itself a peculiarity to me, as I am both chaste and uninterested in gross slapstick).

Redbelt
Though David Mamet examined Bushido values in Ronin, his entry into true martial-arts filmmaking is an event. Chiwetel Ejiofor is the humble master of jujitsu, drawn by fate into performing for money. His faith in traditions, himself, and his wife is shaken. But jujitsu is an art of escape.

Patty Jones

If these 10 films share something, it’s the overarching feeling that there is no such thing as life as we know it. Robots experience deep, abiding love. Fallen towers are resurrected. Vampires roam Sweden. Dead wives live again. A man, born old, grows young. On an unrelated note, you just know it’s only a matter of time before someone makes a porno called The Curious Case of Benjamin’s Button.

WALL-E
Okay, he had us without “hello”. Yes, the year’s most cosmically, comically enchanting romance is between a trash-compacting, binocular-eyed robot and his lady-love machine from space. Pixar has apocalyptic fun turning humans into tubby Big Gulpers in a movie where the first half-hour makes silent-film magic.

Frost/Nixon
What? You’ve never forgiven Ron Howard for Willow? Opie rallies with a breathlessly entertaining take on David Frost’s mano-a-mano post-Watergate interviews with Tricky Dick. No prosthetic jowls for Frank Langella, glorious as the tormented ex-president who slyly asks Frost if he’s recently done “any fornicating”.

Milk
As gay politician Harvey Milk, Sean Penn radiates a sweet ebullience not seen since his pizza-munching stoner Jeff Spicoli. In Gus Van Sant’s hands, political watersheds, boys in tiny cutoffs, and tragedy set against a charged Castro Street of ’70s San Francisco make for a fascinating, moving mashup.

Slumdog Millionaire
Leaving the zombies and heroin addicts behind in the U.K., director Danny Boyle wallops the cerebrum with a wildly immersive Mumbai-slum fusion of chilling fairy tale, gangster thriller, love story, and Bollywood music video. Gives all new meaning to that phone-a-friend option.

Man on Wire
The money shot is Philippe Petit lying joyfully supine on a cable strung between the Twin Towers as irate cops grab for him. This exhilarating doc about the Parisian wire walker who, in 1974, performed a feat of unlawful artistry 110 storeys up, is a hauntingly sweet reminder of the towers that were.

Let the Right One In
Think Carrie crossed with a mordantly funny, soulful after-school special, injected with some Bergman-esque artiness. Unpopular boy meets unpopular vampire girl and love bites as wintry Stockholm makes a painterly backdrop for smart, shocking, and gory coming-of-age tale. Bullies beware.

Tell No One
Give an American beach read to a French director and you get a modern Hitchcockian thriller so seductively puzzling you’ll hear your brain cells sizzling. The gist: a pediatrician’s murdered wife may be alive. Adding to the fun is the female assassin of your nightmares, only partly because she looks like a soulless Slavic pole-vaulter.

Happy-Go-Lucky
Sometimes you want to slap cheery people upside the head. Poppy, a schoolteacher who laughs when her bike gets stolen, seems vaguely touched. But Mike Leigh and actor Sally Hawkins create wrenching hilarity in this smarter-than-you-think woman whose driving lessons take a disturbing turn to the dark side.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona
Playing an unhinged artist, Penélope Cruz seduces everybody and the audience in Woody Allen’s Spanish-Truffaut romp. Javier Bardem nails both his role as her narcissist-artist husband and Scarlett Johansson and Rebecca Hall as his American conquests. Sorry, Manhattan: Allen’s wittiest moments are now in Spanish, between the Spaniards.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
The special effects that freakishly age and de-age Brad Pitt are a marvel. David Fincher’s magical, moody epic takes his curious character from 1918 New Orleans to mysterious, snowy Russia and places in between. The poetic sorrow of a life lived backward has a gut impact that lingers after the stunning CGI has faded from the screen.