Tuesday, January 08, 2008

The Best of 2008: #1


I should have known it. You draft your top ten, start the posts... and then finally get round to seeing Cristian Mungiu's 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, which clearly belongs way in the upper reaches of anyone's list. Technically, the film's UK release date is the 11th Jan, so I could fudge it and wait till next year, or bump another entry to #11, I guess... But it will be easier, I propose, to hold on to a film which isn't scheduled to come out anywhere for a good few months yet -- Tarsem's wonderful The Fall, which I caught last February at the Berlin film festival -- and reshuffle the list to accommodate Mungiu's masterly abortion drama. Consider The Fall a ghostly presence in the backdrop of this top ten: it was way, way up there at #3, and there's no film I'm looking forward to revisiting more in the coming months. In truth, my memory of this haunting fantasy metanarrative could do with a refresh anyway. Let's just say that, for the time being, it occupies my number one slot for the best films officially being distributed in 2008, and it will be a damn fine spring for the movies if it's dislodged any time soon.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

This film intrigues me so much it hurts. I cannot wait.