As I hinted at a bit yesterday when I posted about some of the best undistributed films of the year, I have a love/hate relationship with the idea of movie ranking. The idea that any of us––critic, blogger, professional, amateur…to the extent that any of those words mean anything anymore––could be indisputably “correct” in our individual execution of such an activity is insane; and of course, any attempt to draw each of our subjective takes on The Year in Movies into a consensus waters down everything that makes an individual list idiosyncratic and thus interesting. But in the end, I do believe that what’s valuable about these activities is valuable enough to outweigh what’s annoying: if you read this blog regularly and have come to draw a bead on my tastes in relation to your own, maybe seeing a list of my favorite New York theatrical releases of 2008 will help jog your memory about films you meant to see (or avoid), and now that many of these are available on DVD, maybe you’ll make it happen (or not).

My full ballot is posted at indieWIRE now. I chose not to rank the titles from 1-10, but they did reel out of my brain in a particular order, and that has to mean something. Below the jump, my theatrical favorites, with links back to previous coverage, and notes on where/how each film can currently be seen.

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Guy Maddin’s version of his hometown of Winnipeg is a dreamland patchwork of half truths and exaggerations, a standard-issue suburban incubator carved into blank screen fields of snow so blinding white they seem almost hot, on which Maddin has projected a secret life. He was commissioned to make My Winnipeg, an ostensible non-fiction portrait of this birthplace, by The Documentary Channel, but the city itself is only of concern to him insofar as it’s an extension of and metaphor for his psyche. He casts the project as his attempt to come to terms once and for all with his fever stream of memories, real and fabricated, inextricably intertwined with the places and spaces where he grew up. The question of “real” doesn’t matter. While Darcy Fehr, the actor hired to be his (younger, improbably attractive) stand-in, nods off next to a bottle on a moving train, the real Maddin, our narrator, informs us of his designs on Winnipeg: “I must leave it! I’ll film my way out!”

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Two films, two days, two revered European filmmakers presenting work that, in one way or another, reps a return. Olivier Assayas’ Summer Hours screened in the market without the Cannes Film Festival’s official kiss on the cheek, but even without that critical imprimatur, it’s nonetheless one the finest features I’ve seen this year, a return to classicism of a sort for Assayas (in the press notes, he admits that he sought to return to the stylistic concerns and working method of his Late August, Early September era) and the kind of thoughtful French film designed for adults for which there seems to longer be a U.S. market (IFC bought it anyway). Of Time and the City, Terrence Davies’ first film in eight years after the commercially unsuccessful artistic triumph of The House of Mirth, is a plain return to work. Both movies are about memory, about place, and a taking stock of the relationship between the two that happens in mid-life.

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• Jurgen Fauth twitters: “Highlight of my day: Paul Thomas Anderson telling me he loves idrinkyourmilkshake.com and Daniel-Day Lewis giving me two thumbs up. Yay!”
• Shane Danielson’s Shine a Light review at indieWIRE focuses mainly on how the Rolling Stones concert doc completely fails at relevancy. But if the film itself represents “a sixtysomething non-Berliner’s idea of cool” complete with “a cameo from guest-star Jack White, to drag the show all the way into 1937!”, as a red carpet spectacle it seems to have been a success.
• When asked at a Berlin press conference to diagnose what’s “wrong” with George W. Bush, Neil Young declined on the grounds that “it would take too long.” Instead, he struggled to come up with something “right about Bush,” and eventually concluded, “Well, he’s a good physical specimen.”
• In a single paragraph on Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg, David Hudson not only notes that he had “a marvelous time,” he also manages to get Freudian: “Two rivers form ‘the Forks,’ lines directly paralleled with ‘the Lap’ - his mother’s. The pull is inescapable.”

• Oh, the perils of being an organization built on starfucking: if the Hollywood Foreign Press Association can’t get the WGA to issue a waiver to allow writers to pen lame banter for the Golden Globes, then there’s a strong chance that most stars will refuse to cross the (real or theoretical) picket line to attend the ceremony. No stars=no photo ops=virtually no point in going through with the awards. Variety says the HFPA’s chances at landing a waver look slim, although the WGA just issued a similar pass to the SAG awards.
• In other awards news: Juno and Into the Wild lead the nominations for the Critics Choice Awards; Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg, one of my favorite films of this year, and Bruce Greenwood McDonald’s The Tracey Fragments made the Toronto International Film Festival Group’s list of the Top 10 Canadian Films of the Year. Winnipeg will also open the Forum sidebar at the Berlin Film Festival in February. It’s screen alongside Green Porno, a collection of three short films by Isabella Rosselini about the sex lives of insects.
• This story is days old, but I missed it: a German producer has acquired the remake rights to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.