In a year for movies with little to celebrate, Scene film writers Noel Murray and Jim Ridley sifted through the past 12 months panning for gold and found a few nuggets. For more on overlooked films, performances and the year's worst movies, see a longer version online at nashvillescene.com.

The Best:
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button It's far from perfect—the final third seems particularly rushed, even if that fits a story about the inconveniences of time and aging—but David Fincher's picaresque storybook fantasy for adults was one of the only movies in 2008 that affected me as a movie. Loaded from top to bottom with piquant character performances, captivating digressions and dazzling widescreen images and unobtrusive special effects used always in service of creating a world, it's full of things only movies can do—like a simple shot of an empty room that somehow conveys the holes people leave, noticed or not, when they pass from this life. (JR)

The Dark Knight Director Christopher Nolan raises superhero realism to dizzying heights by placing Christian Bale's morally conflicted Batman and Heath Ledger's creepy Joker in a Gotham City that looks disturbingly like contemporary America, not some remote, fantastical movie set. Nolan's impressionistic images hold a lot of power, as does his gutsy choice to use iconic characters to explore—with no compromise—his usual themes of identity and lost ideals. Like the heroes of Memento and The Prestige, this Batman makes a plan, then changes with each step he takes towards his goal, such that by the end he's working for a stranger: the man he used to be. (NM)

The Exiles I put the long-delayed release of Kent Mackenzie's amazing 1961 film at the top of my list because it was there when I needed a reminder of why I love movies—and the thrill of seeing vanished locations in razor-sharp black-and-white, populated by actors with vast reserves of life to share with the camera, filled me with a joy I didn't feel often this year. The clincher: an electrifying score of honking 1960s garage-rock by Anthony Hilder & The Revels, including the same tune that blares during the big basement stand-off in Pulp Fiction. Many thanks to Milestone Films and UCLA's restoration team—if nothing else, this'll be one of 2009's coolest DVDs. (JR)

Let the Right One In Going into its second held-over month at the Belcourt, where people left hungry by Twilight keep returning with first-time viewers, this accomplished Swedish vampire movie was the kind of buried treasure I long to recommend to people—satisfying as both a gruesome, unsettling genre movie and a beautifully shot mood piece. As the mysterious heroine, forever 12 but trailing several lifetimes' depravity, little Lina Leandersson was the year's most intriguing monster. (JR)

Milk Though some have been turned off by the idea of artsy filmmaker Gus Van Sant making a conventional biopic, there's a method to Van Sant's lack of madness. This straightforward portrait of the life and times of openly gay San Francisco politician Harvey Milk fulfills one of Milk's own goals: to make straight America comfortable with their homosexual neighbors and relatives. Given the darkening climate for gay rights in '08, there were few more moving scenes in American cinema this year than Sean Penn's Milk kissing his boyfriend (played by James Franco) next to a store sign reading, "Yes, We're Open." (NM)

My Winnipeg This bizarre and singularly delightful docu-history of Guy Maddin's hometown is entangled with memories of Maddin's childhood—all simultaneously preposterous and plausible. Like Synecdoche, New York, this is another film about re-creating the past in scale-model form, from the daily, Sisyphean ordeal of straightening the rug in the Maddin family's front hallway to the piled-high snowdrifts that lead Winnipeg's perpetually sleepy citizens through an inescapable maze. (NM)

Paranoid Park and Synecdoche, New York These radically different puzzle-box films fight the reduction of movies to one-time consumables, without resorting to cheap gimmicks and gotchas. Charlie Kaufman's directorial debut expands Hamlet's life-as-play-within-a-play idea into a massive metafictional funhouse whose games with time and recombinant themes demand a second viewing. Compared to the accessibility-as-activism of Milk, Paranoid Park is the triumphant culmination of Gus Van Sant's apprenticeship in noncommercial cinema: it gathered all those experiments in looped chronology, sinuous long takes and meandering with intent into gorgeous, artfully scattered fragments of a skater boy's doomed now-is-forever youth. It contains perhaps my favorite music cue this year: skatepunks slouching shoulder to shoulder, congealing in slow-motion amber, while the wheezy organ and cascading guitar line of Billy Swan's "I Can Help" form a dirge for listless teenage beauty. (JR)

Rachel Getting Married Even more polarizing than Synecdoche or Benjamin Button, Jonathan Demme's devastating fly-on-the-wall domestic drama recognizes that people are not either-ors: they can be well-meaning and destructive, selfish and remorseful, happy in the moment and irreparably wounded, and foolish and noble even in the same disastrous gesture. No movie this year made me worry so with affection for its entire messed-up ensemble. As the absent-with-leave recovering-junkie heroine—she's not in the title, but the absence announces her—Anne Hathaway can break your heart with just the back of her downcast head. (JR)

Surfwise Some documentarians think like essayists, propagandists, abstract painters or magazine reporters. Doug Pray approaches his documentaries as though he's writing books. This film about idealist beach bum Dorian "Doc" Paskowitz and his nine children starts as an affectionate look at a family of iconoclasts, but it takes a more despairing turn as Pray examines how Doc's children have dealt with being set loose in a world they weren't fully equipped to navigate. Throughout, Pray asks a provocative question: How can a freethinking father mandate his ideals without violating them? (NM)

WALL-E From the melancholy yet hilarious dialogue-free opening to the succession of slam-bang clockwork gags that lead to the heartbreaking finale, this eye-popping tale of environmental ruin and unlikely romance offers everything a blockbuster entertainment should: laughs, thrills, heart and ambition. (NM)

Overlooked/Underrated: In a good year for documentaries—many of them about war—it's no surprise that Full Battle Rattle didn't become a smash hit, but Tony Gerber and Jesse Moss' film about a fake Iraqi village used for Army training exercise is in some ways as mindbending and heartbreaking as two of the year's other "simulacra movies," Synecdoche, New York and My Winnipeg. Greta Gerwig and Joe Swanberg's Nights And Weekends elevates "mumblecore" by revealing the difficulties inarticulate, passive-agressive hipsters have with getting what they really want. And while the shaggy, overblown action comedies The Pineapple Express and Tropic Thunder got most of the attention this year, the old-school underdogs-make-good laugher Role Models was both tighter and funnier than either, and one of the year's most welcome surprises. (NM)

In a year when decent genre movies were in short supply, I hoped more people would get to see Stuck, a smart, sick fact-based horror comedy by Re-Animator director Stuart Gordon, with Stephen Rea as the human bug squashed on a windshield while hit-and-run driver Mena Suvari wonders whether calling for help will jeopardize her new job. Let's just say that its grim mood of economic Darwinism looks downright clairvoyant now. Also, mark down these titles for Netflix: Catherine Breillat's The Last Mistress, Jeff Nichols' Shotgun Stories, the trim, nasty British thriller The Bank Job, and the terrific docs The Order of Myths, The Unforeseen and Trouble the Water. (JR)

Performances: Though 2008 had its share of bravura lead performances, some of the best work was done in ensemble. Even more than its stylish sets and high-flying superhero action, Iron Man was a success because director Jon Favreau gave his cast the freedom to interact with each other, and both Robert Downey Jr. and Gwyneth Paltrow in particular ran with it, delivering the kind of naturalistic patter and old-school Hollywood charm that big summer tentpoles have been largely lacking in recent years. And few casts played off each other better than the collection of famous faces in the Coen brothers' Burn After Reading, a movie about the modern plague of idiocy featuring crackerjack turns by Brad Pitt, George Clooney, John Malkovich, Frances McDormand, Tilda Swinton and Richard Jenkins. (NM)

Much as I'd like to dissent from the pack, Sean Penn really is marvelous as Harvey Milk—in the warmest, most scaled-down, least blustery big role of his career, he's far more commanding than he was as Willie Stark in the lifeless All the King's Men remake. And yeah, if Mickey Rourke didn't play The Wrestler with a becomingly comic lack of self-pity, the movie could have been a maudlin puddle. (It opens here later this month.) But some of the year's best performances came in movies that went relatively unseen—such as Anamaria Marinca in Cristian Mungiu's harrowing 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, where her gun-to-the-head intensity gives a real-time moral crisis an urgency seldom seen outside horror movies. And hail Asia Argento—whether in movies as superb as The Last Mistress or as deliriously awful as her father Dario's The Mother of Tears, she couldn't do anything uninteresting on screen. (JR)

The Worst: There's nothing worse than an unfunny comedy, and few comedies were more unfunny in '08 than What Happens In Vegas, with Cameron Diaz and Ashton Kutcher playing obnoxious vacationers who get married in a drunken haze, and then find themselves in joint possession of a jackpot fortune. Diaz and Kutcher are usually the broadest part of any of their star vehicles, which makes pairing them up in a slapstick-y romantic tantamount to encasing a hammer in concrete. ... As entertaining as it was to watch Morgan Spurlock eat himself sick in the McDonald's-bashing stunt-doc Super Size Me, very little in that film could pass for cogent social commentary. Yet Super Size Me is practically a George Will editorial compared to Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden?, a glib look at the culture of terrorism that sees Spurlock traveling the world to try and learn why we're all trying to kill each other. Higher production values and cutesy animation make Where in the World look even more shallow and fake, though the worst offender is Spurlock's faux-naif persona, which is condescending both to those who agree with him and those who don't. (NM)

I remember hating Disaster Movie, The Eye and In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale—movies that turned their running times into a slog through freezing molasses. But the worst movies of 2008 were the many I can't even remember, which simply drained two hours of life away into a fogbank of undistinguished mediocrity. Even a lousy movie gives you a kind of perverse enjoyment. Middling movies are just blobs that gorge on time and memory. They can't be missed—which in a way makes them even worse. (JR)

Noel Murray's List:
1. WALL-E
2. Burn After Reading
3. Synecdoche, New York
4. 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days
5. The Dark Knight
6. Surfwise
7. Rachel Getting Married
8. Paranoid Park
9. Milk
10. My Winnipeg

Jim Ridley's List:
1. The Exiles
2. Rachel Getting Married
3. In the City of Sylvia
4. Paranoid Park
5. Let the Right One In
6. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
7. Synecdoche, New York
8. The Order of Myths
9. Happy-Go-Lucky
10. the first four minutes of Mister Lonely