Annal:2008 Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture – Drama

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Results of the Golden Globe Award in the year 2008. For a ranked list of films, try an honor roll:

Atonement

Joe Wright

In England in 1935, on the hottest day of the year, in the looming shadow of World War II, Briony Tallis and her family live a life of wealth and privilege in their enormous Victorian Gothic Mansion. As the family gathers for the weekend the combination of the oppressive heat and long suppressed emotions coming to the surface create an ominous sense of threat and danger.

Briony, a fledgling writer, is a girl with a vivid imagination. Through a series of catastrophic misunderstandings she accuses Robbie Turner, the housekeeper’s son and lover of her sister Cecilia, of a crime he did not commit.

This accusation destroys Robbie and Cecilia’s new found love and dramatically alters the course of all their lives.

 

American Gangster

Ridley Scott

Nobody used to notice Frank Lucas (Washington), the quiet driver to one of the inner city's leading black crime bosses. But when his boss suddenly dies, Frank exploits the opening in the power structure to build his own empire. Lucas outplays all of the leading crime syndicates and becomes not only one of the city's mainline corrupters, but part of its circle of legit civic superstars.

Richie Roberts (Crowe) is an outcast cop close enough to the streets to feel a shift of control in the drug underworld. Roberts starts to suspect that a black power player has come from nowhere to dominate the scene. Both Lucas and Roberts share a rigorous ethical code that sets them apart from their own colleagues, making them lone figures on opposite sides of the law. The destinies of these two men will become intertwined as they approach a confrontation where only one of them can come out on top.

 

Eastern Promises

David Cronenberg

Viggo Mortensen and Academy Award® nominee Naomi Watts star in this electrifying thriller from critically acclaimed director David Cronenberg (A History of Violence). Criminal mastermind Nikolai (Mortensen) finds his ties to a notorious crime family shaken when he crosses paths with Anna (Watts), a midwife who has accidentally uncovered evidence against them. Their unusual relationship sets off an unstoppable chain of murder, mystery and deception in the explosive film critics are calling “provocative and engrossing” (Claudia Puig, USA Today).

 

The Great Debaters

Denzel Washington

Inspired by a true story, The Great Debaters chronicles the journey of Professor Melvin Tolson (Denzel Washington), a brilliant but volatile debate team coach who uses the power of words to shape a group of underdog students from a small African American college in the deep south into a historically elite debate team. A controversial figure, Professor Tolson challenged the social mores of the time and was under constant fire for his unconventional and ferocious teaching methods as well as his radical political views.

In their pursuit for excellence, Tolson’s debate team receives a groundbreaking invitation to depate Harbard University’s chanpionship team.

 

Michael Clayton

Tony Gilroy

Michael Clayton (George Clooney) is an in-house "fixer" at one of the largest corporate law firms in New York. At the behest of the firm's co-founder Marty Bach (Sydney Pollack), Clayton takes care of Kenner, Bach & Ledeen's dirtiest work. Though burned out and discontented in his job, Clayton is inextricably tied to the firm.

At the agrochemical company U/North, the career of in-house chief counsel Karen Crowder (Tilda Swinton) rests on the settlement of the suit that Kenner, Bach & Ledeen is leading to a seemingly successful conclusion. When the firm's top litigator, the brilliant Arthur Edens (Tom Wilkinson), has an apparent breakdown and tries to sabotage the entire case, Marty Bach sends Michael Clayton to tackle this unprecedented disaster and, in doing so, Clayton comes face to face with the reality of who he has become.

 

No Country for Old Men

Joel Coen, Ethan Coen

The story begins when Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) finds a pickup truck surrounded by a sentry of dead men. A load of heroin and two million dollars in cash are still in the back. When Moss takes the money, he sets off a chain reaction of catastrophic violence that not even the law—in the person of aging, disillusioned Sheriff Bell (Tommy Lee Jones)—can contain. As Moss tries to evade his pursuers—in particular a mysterious mastermind who flips coins for human lives (Javier Bardem)—the film simultaneously strips down the American crime drama and broadens its concerns to encompass themes as ancient as the Bible and as bloodily contemporary as this morning’s headlines.

 

There Will Be Blood

Paul Thomas Anderson

A sprawling epic of family, faith, power and oil, There Will Be Blood is set on the incendiary frontier of California’s turn-of-the-century petroleum boom. The story chronicles the life and times of one Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis), who transforms himself from a down-and-out silver miner raising a son on his own into a self-made oil tycoon.

When Plainview gets a mysterious tip-off that there’s a little town out West where an ocean of oil is oozing out of the ground, he heads with his son, H.W. (Dillon Freasier), to take their chances in dust-worn Little Boston. In this hardscrabble town, where the main excitement centers around the holy roller church of charismatic preacher Eli Sunday (Paul Dano), Plainview and H.W. make their lucky strike. But even as the well raises all of their fortunes, nothing will remain the same as conflicts escalate and every human value—love, hope, community, belief, ambition and even the bond between father and son—is imperiled by corruption, deception and the flow of oil.

 
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