The Flight of the Red Balloon Tops IndieWire's 2008 Critics Poll
Hou Hsiao-hsien's Flight of the Red Balloon, starring Juliette Binoche, emerged as the critics' favorite in the 2008 edition of indieWire's annual poll of over 100 North American film critics.
Lance Hammer's Ballast was named best first feature of the year, and Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York emerged as the year's best screenplay. Mickey Rourke (The Wrestler) and Heath Ledger (The Dark Knight) were singled out as best performance and best supporting performance. Arnaud Desplechin's A Christmas Tale made it to second place in both film and screenplay categories. Lucrecia Martel's The Headless Woman, Hong Sang-Soo's Night and Day, and Pablo Larrain's Tony Manero topped the list of favorite unreleased films.
indieWire has the overview, complete results, and individual critics' lists, including Jürgen and Marcy's ballots.
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Comments
Pretty surprising considering that the film has won almost no awards, didn’t get *great* reviews (only a 79% at RT), and barely registers on the Movie City News Scoreboard.
It’s definitely surprising. Here are two interesting takes on the discrepancy and the film itself:
Alternative Film Guide:
I can understand discrepancies due to different ways of weighing each vote and because the survey surely includes critics that don’t belong to any of the various groups and associations, but a chasm that wide between the indieWIRE best film list and the critics’ own award lists is mind-boggling. Perhaps when handing out awards, critics feel that if they select little-known, foreign films — six and a half of the top-ten films in the indieWIRE list are non-American (Paranoid Park is a France/US co-production) — their choices would be deemed irrelevant, since all people (and the media) seem to care about is which groups’ choices will most accurately predict Hollywood’s Academy Awards.
….and Andrew O’Hehir:
I get it: Taiwanese master Hou Hsiao-hsien’s first Western-made film, a loving, leisurely comedy about the domestic life of overwrought Parisian puppeteer mom Juliette Binoche and her dreamy kid, has a small and discrete audience. You need to be a film buff, a Francophile, probably a parent, and equally enamored of Albert Lamorisse’s classic “Red Balloon” (which inspired this film) and Hou’s ultra-long takes with their moments of accident and improvisation. If that’s you, then you won’t love any other film this year quite the way you love this one. If it’s not, give it a miss.