When film historians look back at the movie year of 2008, they won't find many red letter events. Two Thousand-Eight was a lackluster year at the movies and, thinking back on it, there are only two notable events that come immediately to mind. First, was the phenomenal success of Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight, propelled, in part, by the tragic death and brilliant performance of Heath Ledger. The other was Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire, a tiny independent film that struggled to get made and then, against all odds, ended up the winner for Best Picture. As a Best Picture winner, Slumdog Millionaire was something of an enigma. Like The Last Emperor, it contained no major stars, took place in a foreign country and was about the strange journey of one man's life.

The difference is that while The Last Emperor featured a man who is unhappily trapped in his gilded cage, the subject of Slumdog is a kid who rises out of his poverty and finds wealth both financially and in his heart. The journey involves Jamal (Dev Patel), an Indian teenager who inexplicably ends up on his country's version of "Who Wants To Be a Millionaire" and is tortured by the security staff when he gets within one question of the grand prize. The staff is suspicious of how a slum kid from Mumbai could have such vast knowledge so, during his interrogation, he reveals how his life's journey has (apparently through cosmic circumstance) prepared him for the questions he has been given.

I liked Slumdog Millionaire, but I didn't feel its greatness. I was moved by the love story, about how Jamal falls in love with his childhood friend Latika (played by the stunningly beautiful Frieda Pinto) and keeps her in his heart even through their years apart. Yet, the logic center of my brain had problems accepting the idea that Jamal would be given questions on the game show that just happen to correspond with all of the red letter events in his life. I realize that this isn't the point, but it was an illogical element that I couldn't overlook. I am sort of alone in my opinion of Slumdog Millionaire, which many critics thought was one of the best films of the year. More than one critic compared Jamal's journey to that of Forrest Gump, but Forrest's journey was driven by the whim of chance, while Jamal's seemed driven by bizarre coincidence.

I think in a decade's time, Slumdog will only be remembered as a curiosity while my choice for Best Picture will certainly stand as one of Hollywood's rare homeruns. The Dark Knight is an enigma, one of those rare films like Star Wars or Forrest Gump or Titanic that employs a lot of special effects but contains a script that rises above the conventional Hollywood product and transcends its genre.

The movie was such a phenominal success that many cried foul when it didn't recieve a nomination for Best Picture. The Dark Knight is more than just a summer popcorn movie. It is a superb work of imagination, drama, character and great storytelling. It is also a breath of fresh air after having slogged through a decade of overrated, half-wit Batman pictures - first from Tim Burton and then from Joel Schumaker - so I was thrilled that someone, namely brothers Jonathan and Christopher Nolan, had the intelligence to dig keep into the Batman psychology. The Dark Knight isn't a freak show, nor an overblown toy commercial but a deep psychological drama about the nature of vigilantism and that tricky business of possessing a dual indentity.

Part of what prepared me for The Dark Knight was the work that the Nolan brothers began in their previous film Batman Begins, which threw away the laser lightshow of the earlier films and got down to the business of exploring how and why Bruce Wayne created this bat persona in the first place. That movie explored his motivation in a logical sense by returning Batman to the film noir world from which the character has his origins. The beauty of The Dark Knight is that, having already explored the origins of the Batman character, Nolan can now build a story that is free of heavy introductory elements.

Having explored Batman's personality in the previous film, The Dark Knight, for the most part, moves Batman just left of center so that the story can focus on the psychology of his chief aversary. This portrait of The Joker is more or less grounded in reality. Unlike previous incarnations of the character, in which he is an established fixture in Gotham City, this Joker seems to have no past. The film throws away the conventional approach to The Joker and attempts a new approach. We usually see him as a harlequin in clown makeup who has his own private mob of clown-faced goons and a bag of incendiary tricks.

In The Dark Knight, those elements are gone. The Joker drops into Gotham City seemingly out of nowhere. No one in Gotham City has any idea who this man is, and when the story is over we know next to nothing about him. What passes for a backstory is a running gag in which he threatens his victims with a knife while regaling various versions of the story about how he got the scars on his cheeks. Whether or not any of these stories are true hardly matters. We never find out anything about his background. We don't know why he wears makeup or why he commits atrocities. What we come to understand about these things is born from a bizarre pseudo-philosophy that has less to do with truth than from the fact that, for the most part, he's just yanking our chain.

Like Hannibal Lecter, this Joker's effectiveness lies in how little we know about him. He has no bag of tricks, he hides his face behind a gastly smear of white, black and red makeup. He speaks with an unnerving Bugs Bunny voice and informs us that "The only sensible way to live in this world is without rules". He is an anarchist. He doesn't want money, or power, or even media attention. He wants to blow stuff up - real good.

As the police and the mob figures in Gotham City try to figure out this menace, Bruce Wayne's butler Alfred (Michael Caine) offers a brilliant theory: "Some men aren't looking for anything logical, like money. They can't be bought, bullied, reasoned or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn." That line stays in our minds and what we come to learn is that The Joker's motivation is bred from the fact that he is excited to toy with Batman, whom he considers an equal. He creates a battle of good and evil with his arch nemsis because he sees the Caped Crusader as a worthy opponent. When the bat asks "Why are you trying to kill me?" the clown can't believe his ears "I'm not trying to kill you. What would I do without you? You complete me!" That has been the point of the battle between Batman and The Joker from the very beginning.

That is the film's great story arc but there is another thread brewing that is just as substantial. Commissioner James Gordon (Gary Oldman), working secretly with Batman but keeping it under wraps, helps the dark knight round up the key figures in the local mob, including an accountant that he must travel all the way to Hong Kong to retrieve. Gordon doesn't know this vigilante's identity and keeps their affiliation under wraps. He's getting the job done, so why complain? This secret alliance helps the public image of District Attorney Harvey Dent who publicly makes a stand against Gotham City's mobsters.

Dent's role in the story creates a much deeper exploration of what corrupts a man's soul. Dent is a do-gooder, a man who stands for truth and justice without ever really understanding what he is up against. When the invisible alliance between he and Gordon and Batman pin the mob to the wall, it opens the door for The Joker to begin his reign of terror. No one really understands The Joker or his motives. He is a loose cannon. He is unpredictable and when one of his bombs takes out Dent's fiance, Dent himself has his own soul corrupted, he becomes imbittered by his love's death and by his own disfigurement which seems to represent the emerging of his own dark nature. Literally two-faced.

In the late 80's when I saw Rob Epstein's documentary The Times of Harvey Milk, I didn't know much about its subject. I would have been surprised that an openly gay man could have been elected city supervisor of San Francisco if I hadn't, like the electorite, been so charmed by the force of Milk's personality. That film also helped me to understand why there was such of an outcry when he was murdered. Watching Milk in the documentary, I kind of got the feeling that a biopic was inevitable. Yet, I wouldn't have thought Sean Penn would have been the best actor to play Harvey Milk. Penn, one of the best actors of his generation, is an actor who is at his best playing paranoid, broken men in films like The Falcon and the Snowman, Carlito's Way, Dead Man Walking, Casualties of War, Mystic River and the little-seen gem The Assassination of Richard Nixon. Based on that pedigree, I just wouldn't have thought he would have been able to play the charasmatic Harvey Milk.

Yet, I underestimated Sean Penn. As with all of his performances, he puts his whole heart into the role. Here he plays a man who doesn't set out to make history but simply to change the injustices that he sees around him. He plays Milk as a man with an open heart and a bright personality but he is not saint. We see him as needy, a bit insecure and kind to a fault. Having seen The Times of Harvey Milk just before seeing this film, Penn does an amazing job recreating a man who was a pure original. Through his performance, we come to like Harvey and when he is shot we mourn the loss along with those thousands who march in candle lit vigil.

As the announcement of the nominees for the 81st Annual Academy Awards drew near, it was generally expected that Kate Winslet would get an Oscar nomination for her performance in Stephen Daldrey's The Reader. Yet there was some confusion as to whether or not she would be nominated in either the lead or supporting category. All through the award season she had consistantly been given award after award for her work in the film but while BAFTA, The London Film Critic Circle and San Diego Film Critic Society gave her awards for Best Actress in a Leading Role, organizations like The Screen Actor's Guild, The Broadcast Film Critics, The Chicago Film Critics Association and The Hollywood Foreign Press put her in their supporting category. When it came time for the Academy Awards, I think it was right to put her in the lead category because, really . . . who was she supporting?

My problem is with the film itself. When Hanna goes to trial and is accused of leading 300 Jewish women into a church that is then set on fire, she refuses to reveal that she is illiterate in order to be cleared of the charge that she falsified the report on the incident to push blame away from herself. The result is that she is given a sentence of life imprisonment. But why would she do that? Why spend your life in prison to keep from admitting that you can't read or write? This makes no sense. Daldry's film is heavy on plot but it leaves you with a lot of unanswered questions. Don't get me wrong, I usually like Daldry's work and The Reader featured the kind of somber tone that he brought to The Hours. I liked both films but I am not really willing to revisit either right away.

That is no less the case with Sally Hawkins in Happy-Go-Lucky, the story of a giddy, plucky, unendingly happy woman who only gradually reveals hidden dimensions about herself. Hawkins plays Poppy, the kind of over-joyed, curious, smiling soul for whom life is a party and the world is a curiosity shop. We enter her world, living in London and heading to a book shop on her bicycle. She has the kind of warm, sunny smile that is like watching the sun come out. She is the type that cannot tolerate a grump as in the opening scene when she meets a sullen book shop employee who refuses to speak to her. She makes jokes, small talk, side comments but he keeps bawking at her even when she makes jokes on her way out the door. We get a sense of her in the following scene when she discovers that he bike has been stolen and her only comment is "I never even got to say goodbye".

Poppy's world is simple and uncluttered. She lives in a small flat with her best friend Zoe, both are elementary school teachers, who occasionally go out at night to the club with friends. She is a slight little women, skinny with a sizable nose and a smile that stretches all the way back to her earlobes. She is pretty on the outside (with a striking resemblence to Sandra Bullock) but she also possesses a beauty that wells up from the inside. Listening to her, our initial response is to assume that she is an airhead. But as we pierce her heart-truth, as the film explores her more deeply, we see that she contains far more intelligence and far more caring dimensions than we might have initially thought. What we come to learn is that ultimately Happy-Go-Lucky is about the power of moving beyond first impressions.

Mike Leigh frees up Sally Hawkins' performance by not locking Poppy into a plot. Leigh and Hawkins worked to shape the character and then let her be led by the sheer force of her personality. What we might call of plot are the adventures she has running to various people. Poppy has a way of looking deeper into the soul of her fellow human being in cases where most of us might have a more knee-jerk reaction. One example is Jack, one her students who is always getting into fights with his classmates. Rather than jerk the kid around and scream at him, Poppy chooses a more humane approach. She calls in a counselor and the three of them calmly talk to Jack and what is revealed is that the boy has a serious problem at home.

Another comes in a curious scene in the film's center when Poppy, on her way home, hears a homeless man (Stanley Townsend) chanting to himself. Most of us would have turned and run the other way but Poppy tries to talk to him, listens to his chanting and tries to understand. He is surprised by her kindness and seems to calm himself just for a moment. She is as surprised as we when he reveals that he has too much pride to take that money she offers him.

The third takes up a little more time. After the theft of her bicycle, Poppy decides to take a driving lesson and this is where she meets Scott (Eddie Marsan), an angry little man who makes assumptions about Poppy based on her cheery attitude and "inappropriate footwear." Poppy tries to disarm this unsmiling sulk with the force of her personality, to no avail. He is a pathologically devoid of any kind of humor and, we reasonaly assume, most of us would have simply walked away but Poppy doesn't give up that easily. She knows that Scott's sorry attitude is no different than the difficult children she cares for in her classroom. He is a weird sort. He screams at her and gives her a method of remembering to check her mirrors by naming fallen angels ("Enraha!" he repeats). It would be impossible to learn from this man but Poppy sticks it out. Perhaps she can get to the root of what is wrong with him. The more lessons she takes, the more is revealed about his insecurity, his racism, his homophobia (he mistakenly thinks Poppy is a bisexual) and his paranoia filtered through bizarre theories like the one he reveals about the dimensions of The Washington Monument adding up to 666.

The final scenes between Poppy and Scott are mesmerizing as her correct reasoning about him and his misconceptions about her collide in a scene of astonishing revealation. What is amazing is that Hawkins plays the moment without ever making an attempt to step on this man's ego. All through this film, she pulls off the difficult task of playing someone who is optimistically happy and tries to help with those around her buy listening, by empathizing, not by trying to solve their problems but by simply understanding. That's a very difficult thing for any actress to pull off. We come into Happy-Go-Lucky with the assumption that we have met someone who is simply happy and nothing more. We leave the film with a profound respect for this woman who contains many more notes than we had initially thought.