is Slumdog Millionaire the best movie of the past year?

[Truth and Beauty]

I thought it was the best movie I've seen in a while. Great story, great love story, great music and dancing. What's your favorite movie of the past 12 months?

[hatesfreedom]

I don't know, but I loved Children of Men. It was just a fabulously shot movie for me. And those long shots without any takes such as the cab scene and the apartment scene, I mean holy fuck.

[jali]

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button didn't feel like 3 hours to me at all. I wanted more. Brad Pitt is amazing.

[Harlequin]

It's damn good, yes. The best movie of last year, I think not. I try to let movies percolate in my head for a while after watching them. If I need to watch them again or find myself thinking about them over and over again, that's the mark of a great movie. I saw In Bruges just the other day and have already thought more about it than about Slumdog Millionaire that I saw weeks ago, even though the latter film affected me much more deeply while I was watching it.

I'm going to be a clichéd stereotypical geek and say Dark Knight was the best movie of 2008. After five or six viewings I am no less enthusiastic about it than I was after the first.

[Hi, Neighbor!]

While Slumdog was indeed a very good film, there are just too many others to consider, i.e. anything with Larry the Cable Guy.

[Harlequin]

I think what bothers me a bit about Slumdog Millionaire is the ending.[spoiler:wcj7ko1m]The rest of the movie makes sense. It is a bit strange that he learned the answers in the same order as the questions came, but I can ignore that. The movie kind of flows organically and then in the end he chooses to go for the one-in-four chance and it's just magically correct because that's destiny.[/spoiler:wcj7ko1m]I don't know, maybe it's me.

[parzival]

Slumdog Millionaire is absolutely brilliant for about an hour and then gets much weaker in the middle to end. When it was primarily about the 'slumdog'(s) it was doing great. But the story starts to focus in on just a few characters later in life, with a love story, etc. and it's far less interesting. On the whole, I feel it comes out as a good movie.

Whether that makes it stand out ahead of the rest of the year's films, I don't know. If it had truly held up throughout, it'd be no contest. If it's graded by its weakest parts, it's just moderately good.

I can say I didn't see a better movie from last year but I saw very few films that came out.