The Dark Knight
Directed by Christopher Nolan
2008
Adults started arguing about superhero films because of this one: Ledger's Joker is so unnerving that the Academy gave a posthumous Oscar to a man in clown makeup.
★ 9.2
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2008
Showing 105 works across all media from 2008
Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)
2008
Beyonce found Bob Fosse's Mexican Breakfast on YouTube; three Grammys and a decade of wedding receptions followed.
★ 8.6
WALL-E
Directed by Andrew Stanton
2008
Pixar's bravest film: the first forty minutes have almost no dialogue at all, and a robot with two expressions carries more feeling than most live actors manage.
★ 8.5
Paper Planes
2008 · From Kala
Gunshots and a cash register over a Clash loop, with Brixton kids singing a hook about immigrant stereotypes.
★ 7.8
Poker Face
2008
RedOne produced it at Record Plant, Gaga's mum-mum-mum-mah hook nodding to Boney M, and 2009's best-selling single worldwide.
★ 7.5
Heartless
2008 · From 808s & Heartbreak
Auto-Tune, a TR-808, No I.D. co-producing, and Kid Cudi writing the hook: rap learned to sing from this.
★ 7.5
Love Story
2008 · From Fearless
Swift wrote it in twenty minutes on her bedroom floor, gave Romeo and Juliet a happy ending, banjo included.
★ 7.3
Viva La Vida
2008 · From Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends
Eno producing, Davide Rossi's looping strings, a deposed king narrating, and Coldplay's first number one in Britain and America.
★ 7.1
Man on Wire
Directed by James Marsh
2008
Petit walked a wire between the Twin Towers in 1974 and Marsh tells it as a heist: the planning, the break-in, and forty-five minutes in the air.
★ 7.0
Day 'n' Nite
2008
Cut in Dot da Genius's home studio in East New York, using a Geto Boys favorite as its blueprint.
★ 7.0
Taken · 2008
Skinny Love
2008 · From For Emma, Forever Ago
Vernon cut it alone in his father's Wisconsin hunting cabin over a winter, and the falsetto still sounds snowbound.
★ 6.9
Love Lockdown
2008 · From 808s & Heartbreak
Taiko drums against an 808 heartbeat, Auto-Tune everywhere, and a version West scrapped and recut after the fan backlash.
★ 6.7
Kids
2008 · From Oracular Spectacular
Goldwasser wrote the music at nineteen in a dorm room, an exercise in stereotypical pop that outgrew itself.
★ 6.7
Time to Pretend
2008 · From Oracular Spectacular
The praying mantis in their house inspired the music, by the band's account; the words satirize rock-star excess.
★ 6.6
Electric Feel
2008 · From Oracular Spectacular
A 6/4 groove where pop usually sits in 4/4, and Fridmann's production turns silvery synths into a slow strut.
★ 6.6
The Wrestler
Directed by Darren Aronofsky
2008
Mickey Rourke had been out of serious work for fifteen years and walked straight back into this: a broken-down wrestler working autograph shows in New Jersey, filmed like a documentary from behind.
★ 6.5
Fleet Foxes
2008
The singer Robin Pecknold layers the harmonies so thickly, and drowns them in so much reverb, that it sounds recorded in a stone church.
★ 6.4
For Emma, Forever Ago
2008
Justin Vernon spent three winter months alone in his father's hunting cabin, recovering from a breakup and glandular fever, stacking his falsetto in layers.
★ 6.4
Slumdog Millionaire
Directed by Danny Boyle and Loveleen Tandan
2008 · United Kingdom
Boyle shot Mumbai on small digital cameras in real streets and Rahman's score carried it around the world: a contestant from the slums is detained for cheating, and each question opens a memory.
★ 6.4
Flume
2008 · From For Emma, Forever Ago
Three months alone in his father's Wisconsin hunting cabin, and falsetto stacked until one voice becomes a choir.
★ 6.4
White Winter Hymnal
2008 · From Fleet Foxes
A round about snow that the band never once played together, its voices stacked from first takes in production.
★ 6.4
Mykonos
2008 · From Sun Giant
Pecknold rebuilt a piano soul demo with Phil Ek at Bear Creek, and the harmonies own the second half.
★ 6.2
Just Dance
2008
Twenty-two weeks crawling up the Hot 100 before number one, RedOne's synths announcing the pop decade ahead.
★ 6.2
Oxford Comma
2008 · From Vampire Weekend
Koenig found the punctuation via a Columbia Facebook group, then wrote a song about not caring at all.
★ 6.0
Gomorrah
Directed by Matteo Garrone
2008 · Italy
Garrone filmed the Camorra with no glamour, no arc and mostly non-actors from the neighborhood: five strands in a Naples housing block, and organized crime looks like a bad job.
★ 5.9
Gran Torino
Directed by Clint Eastwood
2008
Clint Eastwood cast Hmong non-actors from open auditions across the country and put his own screen history on trial: a widowed Korean War veteran hates his new neighbors and runs out of reasons.
★ 5.9
Dear Science
2008
Guitarist and producer Dave Sitek moved the band out of Brooklyn to a house in Malibu, and the record came back funkier and less claustrophobic.
★ 5.7
Milk
Directed by Gus Van Sant
2008
Van Sant shot in the actual Castro Street storefront where Harvey Milk ran his campaigns: Sean Penn plays the first openly gay man elected to major office in California, and plays him delighted.
★ 5.7
Use Somebody
2008 · From Only by the Night
Recorded at Blackbird Studio in Nashville, it spent fifty-seven weeks on the Hot 100 and won Record of the Year.
★ 5.7
Tha Carter III
2008
So much of it leaked in advance that he recorded a second album's worth. The A Milli beat is one chopped-up vocal repeated endlessly.
★ 5.7
Help I'm Alive
2008
Haines wrote it on piano in Buenos Aires as a ballad; the tempo went up and panic became a hook.
★ 5.6
Re: Stacks
2008 · From For Emma, Forever Ago
In his father's Wisconsin hunting cabin, Vernon shaped the melody wordlessly, then wrote his gambling losses into it.
★ 5.6
Blue Ridge MountainsFleet Foxes
Blue Ridge Mountains
2008 · From Fleet Foxes
Homesick for his brother Sean, Pecknold buried the vocals in reverb and block harmony that swells like Sacred Harp singing.
★ 5.5
Ip Man
Directed by Wilson Yip
2008
Donnie Yen plays Bruce Lee's future teacher and does his own fighting throughout: Wing Chun filmed at full speed with long takes, in a Foshan under Japanese occupation.
★ 5.4
Hitler
A Biography
2008 · 1030 pages
Hitler kept lazy hours and rarely issued a written order. Kershaw explains the machine anyway: officials across Germany competing to anticipate what the Führer wanted, radicalizing policy from below into genocide.
★ 5.4
Vampire Weekend
2008
Four Columbia students made it in dorm rooms and a church basement, and spent years answering for borrowing from African guitar records.
★ 5.4
This Republic of Suffering
2008 · 368 pages
Faust shows a country improvising the machinery of mass death: embalming, identifying bodies, burying the unknown at federal expense. Six hundred twenty thousand men died between 1861 and 1865, most among strangers.
★ 5.3
L.E.S. Artistes
2008
Billed as Santogold then, White aimed it at Lower East Side poseurs; Rolling Stone called it 2008's second best single.
★ 5.3
I'm Yours
2008
A demo on a 2005 EP that fans wore out live, then spent seventy-six weeks on the Hot 100.
★ 5.0
The Patience Stone
2008 · 141 pages
A woman tends her comatose husband, a bullet in his neck, and tells him everything Afghanistan never let her say. In Persian legend the patience stone absorbs every confession until it shatters.
★ 5.0
Disturbia
2008
Four writers including Chris Brown, a reissue bonus track, and two weeks at number one on anxiety alone.
★ 4.8
Oracular Spectacular
2008
They wrote the hits partly as a joke about wanting to be famous, and then the joke worked and made them famous.
★ 4.3
Everyday Drinking
The Distilled Kingsley Amis
2008 · 336 pages
Nobody has written funnier prose about drink. Kingsley Amis separates the physical hangover from the metaphysical one, calculates what a party will actually consume, and hands down recipes he plainly tested.
★ 4.3
Take a Bow
2008
StarGate and Ne-Yo tracked the ballad in three studios on two continents, and it vaulted from fifty-three to number one.
★ 4.3
Furr
2008
A four-track cassette machine in the rehearsal space Earley half lived in, and a boy who runs with wolves.
★ 4.2
Circus
2008
Claude Kelly's ringleader conceit, a Dr. Luke stomp, and Spears back on top of the spectacle that swallowed her.
★ 4.2
We Own The Sky
2008
Gonzalez wrote it with his brother Yann, and Ken Thomas produced an album that worships John Hughes and eighties synths.
★ 4.1
Rockin' that Thang
2008
Los Da Mystro's synths and a title the radio had to clean up; The-Dream made desire sound weightless.
★ 4.1
Love in This Club
2008
Three weeks at number one, built on synth loops Polow da Don pulled from a GarageBand pack.
★ 4.1
Hot N Cold
2008
Max Martin and Dr. Luke's pop machine at full tilt, a runaway-groom video, and 39 weeks on the Hot 100.
★ 4.0
Live Your Life
2008
Eighty to number one in a single week, on a hook lifted from the Moldovan pop song behind Numa Numa.
★ 4.0