The best films of 2008... and there were a lot of them | Roger Ebert

"W." To general surprise, Oliver Stone's biography of George W. Bush is empathetic and understanding, perhaps because Stone himself is a blueblood Ivy League graduate who could never quite win his father's approval. Josh Brolin gives a nuanced portrayal that seems based on the known facts, showing the president as subservient to Vice President Cheney and haunted by old demons.

"Wall-E" The best science-fiction movie in years was an animated family film. WALL-E is a solar-powered trash compacting robot, left behind to clean up the waste after Man flees into orbit. Hugely entertaining, wonderfully well drawn, and, if you think about it, merciless in its critique of a global consumer culture that obsesses on intake and disregards the consequences of output.

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Every year I name a winner of my Special Jury Prize, so named in honor of the "alternative first prize" given by juries at many festivals. This year (roll of the drums) the honored film is:

"My Winnipeg" Guy Maddin's latest dispatch from inside his imagination is a "history" of his home town, which becomes a mixture of the very slightly plausible, the convincing but unlikely, the fantastical, the fevered, the absurd, the preposterous, and the nostalgic. Oddly enough, when it's over, you have a deeper and, in a crazy way, more "real" portrait of Winnipeg than a conventional doc might have provided--and certainly a far more entertaining one. Will be at Ebertfest 2009.

Five documentaries in equal first place:

"Encounters at the End of the World" Werner Herzog moseys around to see who he will meet and what he will see at the South Pole. The population here seems made of travelers beyond our realm, all with amazing personal histories. In a spellbinding film, Herzog finds a great deal of humor, astonishing underwater creatures, permanent occupants such as seals and penguins and the possibility of a bleak global future.

"I.O.U.S.A." A film to make sense of the current economic crisis. The U.S. national debt has doubled in the last eight years, we can't make the payments, the world holds our mortgage, and it can't afford for us to default. So the same unsupported currency seems to circulate one step ahead of disaster. Not a partisan film. Experts of all political persuasions look at our bookkeeping and agree it is insane.