This week, a handful of the most acclaimed films of 2008, and an animated classic gets released from the Disney vaults again.

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The results if the Village Voice/L.A. Weekly year-end critics' poll are in. The snarling, pointy-headed elitists who make up the core voting bloc went with a kiddie cartoon and box-office smash, Andrew Stanton's Pixar instant classic WALL-E, a choice that meets with the Screengrab's hearty approval. "Sometimes", writes Voice Grand Poo-bah J. Hoberman, "the movies really are universal." However, Jonathan Demme's Rachel Getting Married, which finished out of the Top Ten at #12, deserves recognition as the year's "prize critical cult film...Despite generally mixed reviews, Demme’s independent feature received a higher percentage of first- and second-place votes than even WALL-E, meaning that the people who liked it really liked it." Hoberman detected an optimistic strain in many of this year's top films, not just WALL-E and Rachel but also such favorites as Happy-Go-Lucky and (its ending aside) Milk, extending even to Let the Right One In, "an unexpectedly touching treatment of child vampirism", and his own choice for best film of the year, "the relatively cheerful" Flight of the Red Balloon. Maybe if this optimistic vibe can be fully tapped, the Voice itself will be able to last another year.

One last, must-see on-line portal for tributes to the year past: "Moments of 2008", parts one and two, at the Museum of the Moving Image's "Moving Image Source" site.

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5. WALL*E (Andrew Stanton, dir.)



Pixar has been on such a roll of late that if they were a single director, they’d be getting mention in the same breath as the golden age greats.  But they’re not; they’re an aggregate of many clever, talented folks who make computer-generated cartoons that are at least partly intended for children.  I’m not going to argue that this isn’t sometimes a weakness; in WALL*E, the environmental message only seems fitting and appropriate because I happen to agree with it, and the crypto-Objectivism in The Incredibles only bothered me because I don’t.  But regardless of the heavy-handedness of the moral, it can’t be denied that WALL*E is flat out the most wonderful film of the year, hopeful and funny and romantic and bittersweet all at the same time, and wrapped up in a package so beautiful to look at you wonder why anyone ever questions the potential of CGI.   And if this astounding motion picture spawned an obnoxious marketing empire, one can only shake one’s head and say “Damn kids don’t know how good they’ve got it.”

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SAN FRANCISCO: The annual "Shock It to Me" horror film festival--or, as its promoters prefer to call it, "a bonafide Horror Convention in a theater setting"--is running at the Castro Theater this weekend, today through Sunday. The special guests scheduled to be in attendance include Sid Haig, a favorite actor of Quentin Tarantino and Rob Zombie, who co-starred with Lon Chaney, Jr. in Friday night's big feature, Jack Hill's 1964 Spider Baby. The movie itself is an unclassifiable blend of spook show, camp comedy, and homegrown American low-budget weird; it opens with Lon, Jr. singing the title song and just rolls on from there. Also on hand: Kathryn Leigh Scott and Lara Paker, stars of the late-'60s "gothic" daytime soap opera Dark Shadows, which made a sex symbol of Barnabas Collins (Jonathan Frid), a lovesick 175-year-old vampire in a Beatles wig that had been through the wash a few too many times. The festival will be showing both the movie spin-offs from the Dark Shadows TV series, as well as the original Night of the Living Dead and the first of Hammer Film's revivals of the classic Universal movie monsters, Horror of Dracula and Curse of Frankenstein. Plus the fest's "infamous Zombie-Eating Contest" and the promised giveaway of "a real dead body to a 'lucky' member of the audience each night." We don't know the details, but if this were a movie, it would probably mean that somebody was going to get to drive home with Sid Haig in the trunk of their car.

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Ah, Sweden. Renowned worldwide for its health care system, its meatballs, its bikini team, its Ingmar Bergman, and... its vampires?

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Look, we know lots of movie blogs out there on the webbing paid tribute to Paul Newman this week, and rightly so. But you’re never going to have closure until you’ve read Phil Nugent’s obituary, our Paul Newman Top 10 (Parts One, Two and Three) and Paul Clark’s look back at Exodus. That’s simply a fact. And while you’re at it, you might as well check out these other highlights from the week that was:

Reviews galore: Religulous, Ballast, Choke, Let the Right One In and Wild Man of the Navidad

Movies you may have missed: Getting to Know You, War of the Gargantuas, Jail Bait

People we love: Kat Dennings, The Angry Police Captain

People we can probably do without: Sharon Stone, David Spade, Lee Atwater

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For a movie I’d never heard of before Fantastic Fest started, Let the Right One In could not have been more overhyped by the time I got to see it. Badgeholders were giving excited testimonials in the Alamo Drafthouse lobby, bloggers were threatening to beat people about the head with broken beer bottles unless they attended the screening, and even the Fantastic Fest representative who introduced the film gushed at embarrassing length about the mind-blowing wondrousness of the movie we were about to see. It’s nice to see the geek crowd expend so much enthusiasm on a low-budget film with subtitles rather than a $200 million superhero epic, but raising expectations to an unrealistic level doesn’t do the movie any favors. At the risk of sounding like the voice of reason, Let the Right One In is a good movie, but a modest one, not the next evolutionary leap forward in cinema.

So what is it?

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