Best Movies of 2008: Great Expectations

Glimmers of hope in concentration camps, industrialized ghettos and the refuse of a barren planet

A A A Comments By Ella Taylor Wednesday, Dec 31 2008

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8. The Counterfeiters 2008 may go down as the year of tacky made-in-America Holocaust movies. Yet out of Austria, of all countries, came a strange but more or less true tale of an ignoble Jew, masterfully played by the hatchet-faced Karl Marcovics, who parlays his money-forging skills into saving his own skin, several others’ and the entire British currency system from the inside of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Stefan Ruzowitzky’s filmmaking is more capable than distinguished, but alone of this year’s otherwise rubbishy World War II movies, The Counterfeiters is bold enough to consider the fuzzy line between altruism and self-interest in the camps.

9. Moving Midway and The Order of Myths Two docs, by Godfrey Cheshire and Margaret Brown respectively, chisel away delicately but with resolve at the ambiguities of race past and present in the American South. Moving Midway uncovers mixed emotions about mixed race in Cheshire’s own sprawling family as a cousin quite literally moves his North Carolina house. In The Order of Myths, a tradition of segregated Mardi Gras kings and queens in Alabama is tentatively, painfully brought into a more integrated future. In a year when we elected a President born of a white mother and a black father, we have earned the right, at last, to entertain such cautionary tales of hope.

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10. $9.99 This has to be the first year that three animated movies make it into my top 10, but “animated” is an elastic definition that also covers the stop-go figures in Tatia Rosenthal’s feature debut, which transposes short stories by po-mo Israeli writer Etgar Keret into a Sydney apartment building filled with lost souls looking for fulfillment, parental attention or just sexual bliss with a smooth-skinned man. Like Keret’s stories, $9.99 hovers dangerously around whimsy, then veers into the depths of benighted souls, and bestows on them the moments of grace that may be the best we can hope for. Unless, of course, you’re Poppy.