Three times through, sounds like an annual tradition to me!  Hang the ornaments, trim the tree, it's time for that most criticy of activities, the annual Lamar's Movie Palace Ten Best List!  Topped by a movie I'd anticipated for three years and one that jumped me like a bandit in the night on the next-to-last day of the year, this eclectic list once again celebrates the fact that until you see them, you just never know what movies will sing to you.  This, as I'm fond of saying, is why we play 'em.  And who'd have guessed that after two years of siding with low-grossing, unheralded contrarian picks as the year's best film, this year I'd be on the bandwagon with the highest grossing film of the year.  Looks like you guys get it right once in a while.  Or something like that...

Without further ado, offered with the caveat that as an unpaid citizen, I have not yet seen many of the movies on the pros' Top 10 Lists, placed there only to tease us mortals who'll have to create a separate list for them next year should they live up to the hype:

1.The Dark Knight-Was anybody shouldering a bigger burden of expectation than Christopher Nolan in making his infinitely hyped sequel to Batman Begins?  Didn't matter:  he actually exceeded the original by leaps and bounds, his third writing collaboration with his brother Jonathan in three tries (the others being Memento and The Prestige) to rank among my top three movies of the year.  In a year when popcorn blockbusters have never been taken more seriously, Knight managed to put Batman and the Joker squarely at the center of a richly nuanced meditation on whether good and evil are truly quaint in a modern world of 24/7 news cycle fear.  The late Heath Ledger's parting gift to the world was an instantly immortal performance unlike any supervillain before him, and Christian Bale continued his evolution into one of our top leading men.  Nolan and company will have quite a challenge before them to top this, and I can't wait to see them try.
2.Doubt-Full service playwright/screenwriter/director John Patrick Shanley brought his Pulitzer Prize-winning play to electrifying life with the year's best ensemble acting.  Meryl Streep led the way with one of her best performances as an unyielding nun who suspects the parish Priest (Phillip Seymour Hoffman, perfectly pitched between decent and creepy) of molestation.  Amy Adams and Viola Davis added their own dramatic fireworks to help prove that you can actually make a thriller of ethics even more gripping than one about life and death.
3.Horton Hears a Who-At last, after some truly horrifying attempts, the pure childlike joy AND thoughtful adult messages of the work of "Dr. Seuss" Theodore Geisel came to the screen in the format where they always should have been:  animation.  Jim Carrey proved the perfect man to voice the elephant who's faithful 100% (perhaps the most delightfully big-hearted character in movie history) in a story with resonance to anyone who dares to buck the conventional wisdom.  I smiled pretty much the entire time, except when I was crying.
4.Swing Vote-In an age when an increasingly dumbed-down society has turned its' back on civics and old fashioned moviemaking, Kevin Costner made yet another stand for both in this engaging, funny and smart Summer comedy.  Sure, you've got to go with its' impossible concept to believe two Presidential candidates would have to campaign for a single man to choose the next Leader of the Free World, but once you do so, the political satire (love those campaign commercials!) and honest assessment of our woefully underinformed electorate was spot-on.
5.Iron Man-No movie changed more this year, from the careers of newly minted superstar Robert Downey Jr. and Swingers slacker-turned-auteur Jon Favreau to the perception that a superhero movie can't be fun, smart and wonderfully acted all at the same time.  Striding right off the comic book page, Downey's Tony Stark was everything you could ask for in a movie hero:  virtuous, brilliant, funny and loads of fun to be around even while he's doing the right thing.  The science that allowed him to turn himself into a flying man in armor felt so fascinatingly real, and Jeff Bridges turned in an altogether different kind of villain for the ages as his Obediah Stane (aka the Iron Monger) seemed like he really would don an evil supersuit just to keep the stock price up.  Plus, the whole Avengers thing started here, and how can you not love that? 
6.W.-An Oliver Stone biopic of George W. Bush released while the man was still in office?  Man, how many ways could THAT have gone wrong...  But to the amazement of many, Stone delivered not a conspiratorial hatchet job, but a surprisingly sympathetic and thoughtful story of a man who should NEVER have been President and the forces that swept him into office.  Josh Brolin took his game to previously unknown levels, inhabiting the President so totally there were times when I forgot who I was watching.  Those looking for payback weren't totally disappointed:  Richard Dreyfus' Dick Cheney held court for a mesmerizing, diabolical presentation of his plans for Iraq that was probably never written down anywhere...
7.U2 3D-Yeah, I know, it's not a story, it's just a concert, but my ongoing love affair with the new digital 3D technology peaked with this amazing trip down onto the stage with the world's biggest rock band.  Their energy was as infectious as the visuals were stunning.  And by this time next year, we'll REALLY have something to talk about where 3D is concerned!
8.Get Smart-Steve Carrell continued to build on his remarkable resume as an actor who can deliver both the comic and dramatic goods by turning iconic TV clutz Maxwell Smart into a genuine three-dimensional character without losing a bit of his zip.  Overall, Peter Segal's comedy with the Summer's most pleasant surprise, turning the 60's comedy into a real, live action spectacular that just happened to have a hero who occasionally misses by THAT much...
9.Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay-How crazy is it that this list includes two movies in which George W. Bush plays a central role?  Seeking to top their cult classic debut, the iconic pothead geniuses played by Kal Penn and John Cho are sent on another mad road trip, this time on the run from an amazingly incompetent Homeland Security department that believes them to be terrorist masterminds.  While there's hilarious comic idiocy and Neil Patrick Harris to spare, what makes the movie special is its' State of the Union portrait of a country that spends so much time afraid of its' neighbors when we have so much in common (not all of which we'd like to admit to).  Plus, perhaps the year's best romance between Penn and Danneel Harris.  When a Harold & Kumar movie makes me cry, you know they're in business.
10.The Spiderwick Chronicles-Warner Bros. chose to play hard to get with their next Harry Potter flick, but this delightful February surprise filled the year's kidlit fantasy/horror quota admirably.  Freddie Highmore continued his recent string of strong performances in a dual role as twin brothers battling strange creatures (none scarier than the one played by Nick Nolte) around their Mom's new house.  A lot scarier and more dramatically potent than one might expect, harkening back to the salad days of the Amblin Entertainment machine.

But wait, there's more!

BEST 2007 MOVIE THAT DIDN'T REACH HARRISBURG UNTIL 2008:  Atonement-Joe Wright's brilliant meditation on guilt brought the M. Night Shayamalan revolution to the Art House crowd with a twist that's been hiding in plain sound all along.  Played such fascinating games with our expectations of a Proper British Oscar Movie, becoming more and more surreal and bizarre until it all made sense.  The best movie of last year's awards season.

BEST MOVIE WITH NO ENTERTAINMENT VALUE:  Stop-Loss-Kimberly Peirce smacked me upside the head, kicked me in the stomach and shoved my face into a tombstone to bring home the horror of our policy of keeping soldiers who've completed their tours of duty in Iraq whether they want to stay or not.  Gut-wrenching, searing filmmaking that made me feel like crap for weeks afterwards, but should have been required viewing for an entire country happy to look the other way on the issue.

BEST MOVIES YOU WERE ALL WRONG ABOUT:  The Happening and Deception-The aforementioned Shayamalan returned to scary form with a gruesome new bag of tricks for his E.C. Horror Comic about the Environment Striking Back against an engagingly unlikely set of characters (Mark Wahlberg showed great range as a comic dork with the backbone of a hero).  Brilliantly balancing the funny and the horrific to make both pop, this was a really great time at the movies whose studio probably should have been more upfront with audiences about the plot.  At least people saw it before they hated it:  the Hugh Jackman/Ewan McGregor thriller Deception came and went in April to one of the worst opening weekends in history, but it's a little gem about a shy auditor with no friends and the showy con man who takes advantage of him before their identities begin to blur.  Forget the fairly obvious thriller mechanics:  as a character study, it's nothing short of brilliant.

BEST 3D MOVIE WITH A PLOT:  Bolt-3D movies are still just trickling into theaters, but here was one with spunk and a brain, a wacky canine Truman Show about a dog (voiced wonderfully by John Travolta) whose entire life was staged for TV cameras on the loose in a real world where his "superpowers" have mysteriously abandoned him (must be those foam packing peanuts!).  Sweet, funny, and more importantly, multi-dimensional.  Don't forget to sit in the middle of the theater for best results.

OTHER GREAT FLICKS:  Eagle Eye, The Incredible Hulk, Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, Role Models, Tropic Thunder, 27 Dresses.

THINGS WORTH REMEMBERING ABOUT THE REST OF 2008'S MOVIES
-The oh, so realistic Western world of Appaloosa
-The amazing true stories of The Bank Job and Valkyrie
-The coming-out party of Mark Strong, who commanded the screen in Body of Lies and RockNRolla
-Speaking of RockNRolla, the slow dancing scene
-The heartbreaking Coney Island footage Cloverfield was taped over 
-Doomsday's Road Warrior-stolen climax (steal from the best, as they say)
-Johann Kruss, the real star of Hellboy 2:  The Golden Army
-Colin Farrell's glorious comeback performance in In Bruges ("They're filmin' midgets!")
-Speaking of comebacks and amazing performances, one word:  JCVD
-How great Lakeview Terrace was when it was working
-"This is the Beatdown!"  The familiar pleasures of Never Back Down
-How Rambo can still single-handedly win any war you ask by disemboweling the right people
-The crackerjack twists that end Righteous Kill and Traitor
-Those final 20 minutes when Slumdog Millionaire is as good as everyone says it is
-Speaking of great endings and everyone's favorite homicidal Vietnam vet, how about the movie-within-a-movie that concludes Son of Rambow
-That fun couple The Octopus (Samuel L. Jackson) and Silken Floss (Scarlett Johannson), who put the paddles to The Spirit whenever they could
-Richard Jenkins' amazing year:  the endlessly subtle performance in The Visitor setting us up for his Tyrannosaurus Rex speech in Step Brothers
-The Shelby Forthright (Fred Willard) recordings that were the unsung highlight of WALL*E
-The bold (though not commercially wise) return of Mulder and Scully in The X-Files:  I Want to Believe

As you can tell, it was another great year at the movies.  What do you say we do this again next year around this same time.  Well, maybe not around 10:45 PM on New Year's Eve, when I'm typing this, but I'm pretty sure I have some kind of resolution about being more organized buried under my notes someplace.  Happy New Year to all!