The Best Movie Of Each Year From 1925-2025

18. 2008 - WALL-E

Wall-E Rubiks Cube
Pixar

Honourable Mentions: The Dark Knight, The Hurt Locker, The Wrestler

2008 turned about to be a transformative year for cinema (one where the comic book movie went into overdrive with the critical and box office successes of The Dark Knight and Marvel Studios' Iron Man), but also one of familiar trends - hence another Pixar classic, WALL-E, topping the year's best on this list.

While the Disney-owned animation studio has achieved more revolutionary and indeed influential feats in the years both before and since WALL-E's release, it will perhaps remain its most prescient and affecting - an animated family film about humanity's self-inflicted destruction where the protagonist communicates in electronic inflections and robotic expressions.

Like the best Pixar films, it's a production of real conscience, as well as one whose salience only increases with each subsequent decade.

 
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WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.