The Best 10 Movies of 1988 | Roger Ebert

"The Accidental Tourist"

In ways almost impossible to describe, this is the most delightful film of the year. It is also seemingly one of the most depressing--yet it has a current of offbeat humor that keeps bubbling to the surface. William Hurt plays a travel writer who has fallen into a deep and intractable depression. His young son was killed a year ago, and now his wife (Kathleen Turner) wants a divorce--because, she observes, he doesn't seem to be able to feel anything anymore. This is not really a new condition; in his travel books, he gives his readers hints on how to insulate themselves from their surroundings, how to travel without feeling as if you've left home. He comes from a family of homebodies, and some of the movie's funniest scenes involve his sister and two brothers, who live in a menagerie of eccentricities in the old family home. Then one day change comes into his life, in the person of a dog trainer (Geena Davis) who believes she is just exactly what he needs. He resists her. He tries to flee her. But her life force is irresistible, and tugs at him implacably, asking him to come out and play. This is one of those films where the story sounds depressing, but the experience is heartwarming and exhilarating.

"The Unbearable Lightness of Being"

Here is another almost undefinable film, set in Czechoslovakia in 1968 and centering on the complicated life of a surgeon (Daniel Day Lewis) whose wish is to float above the mundane world of responsibility and personal commitment, to practice a sex life that has no traffic with the heart, to escape untouched from the world of sensual pleasure while retaining his privacy and his precious loneliness. In the pursuit of these goals, he has the cooperation of a woman named Sabina, (cq) who also believes that she enjoys sex without commitment. Then one day the doctor goes to the country, and meets an innocent young woman named Tereza. He falls in love with her; he actually loses his heart, this man who doubted that he even had one. She follows him to Prague, and they are in love there, but the man stubbornly tries to maintain his sexual freedom, and the situation grows even more complicated when Sabina and Tereza find that they like one another. Their private turmoils take on a different meaning when the Russian tanks roll into Czechoslovakia, and they are all forced to redefine what they mean by happiness, by lightness, by being. The movie was directed by Philip Kaufman ("The Right Stuff"), based on the novel by Milan Kundera, and it is among other things the most erotic film since "Last Tango in Paris."

"Shy People"

Here is a great film that fell between the cracks. I saw it for the first time at the Cannes Film Festival in 1987, and found it a courageous mixture of vision and melodrama--a movie not afraid to go over the top in its search for emotional impact. But "Shy People" never found a successful releasing strategy in the United States, and has never even played in most cities. Now it is on video, where it has a second chance. The movie stars Jill Clayburgh as a sophisticated New York magazine writer who goes with her daughter (Martha Plimpton) to visit a long-lost cousin (Barbara Hershey) who loves in the bayous of Louisiana. The women could not possibly have less in common, and the contrast in their lifestyles almost leads to an explosion--except that at some deep, almost mystical place, these two women do share kinship. Director Andrei Konchalovsky ("Runaway Train") is uninterested in timid 1980s notions of realism; he pulls out all of the stops and lets this material go where it will.