Date: January 9
Location: Clifton Living Room

A sharp, downbeat little film that features two of the best actors working today, The Savages is easy to appreciate but hard to love. Phillip Seymour Hoffman turns in his third award-worthy performance of 2008 as a son dealing with his father’s deteriorating mental health. Laura Linney, as his sister, is equally good in the showier role. These two should be in every movie released — they’re that good. As for the film itself, I respected what it was doing and I found it very real and often quite powerful. But I can’t imagine ever popping it into my DVD player again, and that hurts it a bit in my rankings.

Date: December 17
Location: Clifton Living Room

An extremely creepy exploration of loneliness and paranoia, Bug is the opposite of a feel-good movie. The film is based on a stage play (and obviously so, as it is dialogue-heavy and takes place almost entirely in a motel room) about a beaten-down (literally and figuratively) woman who finds comfort in the arms of a paranoid schizophrenic and eventually comes to share his obsessions. It really is quite fascinating, despite the grisly subject matter, and features an outstanding performance by Ashley Judd. Judd started out with such promise a dozen or so years ago but chose to pursue a career in TV-worthy crime flicks. Here, she reminds us what a raw, vital actress she really is, delivering one of the best performances (male or female) I’ve seen all year. It’s a pity she’s being ignored by the award shows.

Date: December 13
Location: Clifton Living Room

Here’s a case where the real-life story is so compelling that it would have been nearly impossible to make a bad movie about it. The fact that Clifford Irving got away with such an outlandish scheme for so long and in such a public manner is extraordinary. Richard Gere is in fine form as Irving, and Alfred Molina is note-perfect (as always) in the sidekick role. This is another film, like Breach, that was lost in the early part of the year — why haven’t Gere and Chris Cooper been mentioned once in any awards talk? Overall, this film doesn’t reach the heights of Breach, but I’m very glad I saw it.

Date: December 11
Location: Clifton Living Room

I realize Michael Moore is an entertainer and propagandist first and documentary filmmaker second, but he should watch this powerful film for a lesson on how to level an utterly devastating attack on a corrupt administration without once veering from the hard, cold facts. The material covered in this documentary isn’t new — it’s made up the front pages (and regrettably, many inside pages) of newspapers for the past four years — but seeing it all laid out, and dissected by people who were in the middle of it and trying hard to make it work, the outrage feels utterly fresh. The fact that an incompetent president and his band of chickenhawk advisers could so badly botch such an important mission is unforgivable. This film is a must-see for every American citizen, regardless of their position on the war.

So how do you rank something like this against something like, say, Knocked Up? It’s tough… it is certainly more important than anything else on my list, but also far less entertaining. Ultimately, I rank the film high for the skill with which it was made, but not so high as the very different, but equally skillful, films that I can see myself returning to again and again.

Date: December 4
Location: Clifton Living Room

The biggest surprise in this biopic about famed DJ Petey Green is that it’s not really a biopic about famed DJ Petey Green. It’s a story about a friendship between two very different men and how it helped each of them navigate and shape a very turbulent time in American history. Don Cheadle (as always) delivers an excellent performance as the brash, vulgar Green but for my money, the real star of the show is Chiwetel Ejiofor. He has the “Tom Cruise in Rain Man” role here — the straight man playing off a very showy partner — but he anchors the movie’s heart and soul. Ejiofor is one of the most gifted actors working today but he has yet to land a true lead part. With Talk to Me, it’s nice to see him finally get a role that’s as big as his talent.