Now that all the films that make up my 2008 ten best list have been released on Region 1 DVDs, it’s a good time to take another look at those films.

It used to be that films made from proven works, major novels and play, and films from A-list directors and stars, were highly anticipated by film critics and audiences alike. In today’s more cynical world, however, the bigger the property, the more likely it is that critics will go gunning for it and audiences will, to coin a phrase, “stay away in droves”. How pleasant it was, then, to discover that the films made from last year’s five most talked about properties, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Milk, The Reader, Frost/Nixon and Doubt, turned out to be five of the year’s six best films. All five figured heavily in this year’s Oscar nominations. Four of them were nominated for Best Picture and the fifth held the record for the most nominated performances of the year – four.

It’s rare for me to agree with all five of Oscar’s Best Picture nominees, but this year I did so for the first time in fifteen years.

1. Releasing this week on Blu-ray and standard DVD, David Fincher’s superb version of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button gets the deluxe treatment from Criterion complete with a four-part documentary and other extras.

Taken from a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, this unusual film tells the tale of a baby born with the body of an old man who proceeds to age backwards over the course of his life. Oscar nominee Brad Pitt, that most laid back of actors, is perfect for the part of the man to whom things happen rather than a man who affects the things that happen in his life. Cate Blanchett, who usually acts as though she is projecting to the third balcony, nicely reigns in those tendencies to overact as the woman he meets “in the middle”. Tilda Swinton also does well in what could have been the clichéd role of an older woman who seduces a younger man. Best of all, however, is Pitt’s fellow Oscar nominee Taraji P. Henson who plays his surrogate mother, a ferociously life-affirming woman who loves him unconditionally. She is such a driving force in the film that you miss her for large periods when she’s not on screen.

The special effects are so skillfully blended into the film that you don’t even think about them.

2. Already in release and previously reviewed by me, this year’s Oscar winner, Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire is a genuine sleeper – a film no one anticipated to be in the running for anything. It was almost going to be released straight to DVD without a theatrical showing in the U.S., which would have kept it out of the running for this year’s Oscars. Thankfully that didn’t happen.

Whether it was the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, the collapsing world economy or the prospects of a new beginning with a new U.S. president, it was the right film at the right time, splendidly acted by Dev Patel and a cast of mostly unknown Indian actors.

3. Another film already in release and previously reviewed by me, Gus Van Sant’s Milk was the year’s best political film and the best biography. Sean Penn richly deserved his Oscar as Harvey Milk, the first openly gay American politician who was assassinated by a fellow San Francisco supervisor. Josh Brolin, James Franco and Emile Hirsch are all so good it’s a shame that only one of them (Brolin) was nominated in support.

4. The year’s most controversial film, Stephen Daldry’s The Reader, was released on standard DVD in mid-April and on Blu-ray last week.

Of the many controversies surrounding the film, the most controversial was the decision by Harvey Weinstein whose Weinstein Company released the film, to insist the film be made ready for theatrical showings by the end of 2008 when it was questionable whether the film could be properly edited and scored in little over a month. Miraculously it was.

The rush to release the film obscures the fact that it actually had a long gestation period. Bernhard Schlink’s worldwide best seller was optioned by writer/director/producer Anthony Minghella ten years ago, but after not having gotten around to it for eight of those years, he passed the reigns to Daldry and screenwriter David Hare. The film was in pre-production for a year after that and in actual production for another year.

Another controversy surrounding the film in puritanical America is the seduction of the film’s 15-year-old protagonist by a 36-year-old woman with whom he has a torrid affair in 1958. No such controversy surrounded the film in Germany or the rest of Europe, where the film, like the book, was understood to be about the guilt his generation had over the previous generation’s involvement in the Third Reich from 1933 to 1945. Schlink could have made the character with whom the protagonist becomes disillusioned a platonic friend, family member or teacher rather than someone with whom he has a sexual relationship, but it probably wouldn’t have had the same impact.

David Kross, in only his third film, his first in English, is amazing as both the 15year-old boy and the 22-year-old university student he becomes. He’s so good, in fact, that the usually charismatic Ralph Fiennes who plays him as an older man, seems like a stick in the mud in comparison.

Even better, though, is Kate Winslet as the middle-aged tram conductor who seduces the boy and then disappears after their summer of love only to turn up seven years later on trial as a Nazi war criminal. Winslet, long one of our most interesting actresses, becomes a great one with this performance in which she ages convincingly from 36 to 68.

Yet another of the film’s controversies was the placement of Winslet in this year’s Oscar sweepstakes. Weinstein campaigned her for Supporting Actress so that her anticipated Best Actress nod for Revolutionary Road would not rob her of a nomination for The Reader. In truth, Winslet’s screen time is relatively short, but she makes such an impact that she is constantly on your mind throughout the film. Early in awards season Winslet was nominated for and won both Lead and Supporting Actress Golden Globes for the two films. She also won several other awards in the supporting category for The Reader, but Oscar wasn’t buying it. In a year of many outstanding lead actress performances, Winslet was nominated for and won the Lead Actress Oscar, as well she should have for this wondrous performance.

5. Now out on Blu-ray and standard DVD as well, Ron Howard’s Frost/Nixon nicely opens up the stage play about David Frost’s famed 1977 four-part TV interview of Richard Nixon.

Frost, the affable British TV host came as close as anyone in getting a confession and apology from the former president about his involvement in the Watergate scandal that brought down his presidency. Michael Sheen provides the same uncanny resemblance to Frost in this film as he did to British Prime Minister Tony Blair in 2006’s The Queen. As Nixon, Oscar nominee Frank Langella brings a lifetime of great acting to its zenith as he conveys the authority of a lion very much in his winter of discontent. It’s an actor’s showcase, but also an interesting re-enactment of recent American history.

6. Another actors’ showcase taken from a Broadway play, John Patrick Shanley’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Doubt was directed by the author and reviewed in my last DVD report. Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams and Viola Davis all excel in their Oscar-nominated performances.

7. Also now out on Blu-ray and standard DVD, Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler re-establishes Mickey Rourke as an acting force to be reckoned with.

Playing a washed up wrestler who is no good at anything else, Rourke inhabits the role as though he is playing his own real life story, and maybe he is. The brutal wrestling matches, staged though they may be, are wince-inducing and the scenes between Rourke and his estranged daughter, played by Evan Rachel Ward are almost as hard to watch. Much easier to take is Rourke’s mostly one-sided romance with pole dancer Marisa Tomei, an eyeful in her early 40s.

Both Rourke and Tomei richly deserved their Oscar nominations.

8. German-Turkish director Fatih Akin’s previously released and reviewed The Edge of Heaven is a compelling study of interconnecting characters who go back and forth between the two countries he knows best, Germany and Turkey. Legendary German actress Hanna Schygulla is a treasure to behold as an estranged mother who comes to understand her daughter too late.

9. Also previously released and reviewed, Guillaume Canet’s Tell No One is a deliriously delicious murder mystery that I’ve watched now both in its original subtitled French version and its expertly English-dubbed version. A second viewing is essential for picking up the clues you may have missed the first time around.

10. A compelling character study, Thomas McCarthy’s The Visitor provides Oscar nominated character actor Richard Jenkins with the role of his career as an emotionally closed off man who invites an illegal alien couple to stay in his New York City apartment after he finds they have been duped into paying rent to his agent while he was away. Jenkins’ relationship with the couple, and later the young man’s mother, beautifully played by Hiam Abbas, gives him a means of connecting to the world once again.

Other 2008 films released on DVD worth seeking out include Last Chance Harvey (releasing this week), Nothing But the Truth (released last week), The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, Frozen River, I’ve Loved You So Long, Marley & Me, Kit Kittredge: An American Girl, The Fall and a couple you might have heard about, The Dark Knight and WALL-E.

I don’t do a ten worst list mainly because I tend to stay away from films I know I’ll loathe. Despite that, there are films that I do see but wish I hadn’t. Three such 2008 films were Rachel Getting Married, Happy-Go-Lucky and Vicky Cristina Barcelona.

If you’ve ever had to sit through long, boring speeches at a wedding rehearsal dinner or reception, you’ll groan through Rachel Getting Married despite its capable star performance by Anne Hathaway and a couple of good supporting turns by Rosemarie DeWitt and Debra Winger. The protagonist in Happy-Go-Lucky is so infernally sappy that you keep wishing she’d straighten up and fly right. Unfortunately she never does. Of the three title characters in Vicky Cristina Barcelona inexplicably not separated by a comma, only the last named, the beautiful Spanish city, manages to come to life allowing supporting players Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz to steal the film, which would be a good thing except that there is little for them to steal.

-Peter J. Patrick (May 5, 2009)