matt reeves' CLOVERFIELD (2008)

every bit as novel and clever as its pokerfaced advertising campaign, and terrific besides, Cloverfield has finally gifted American film its own Godzilla. we've had our big baddies, sure, and stolen our fair share on top of that, but it's the psychology that makes the monster; just as Godzilla sprang from the anxieties of a post-nuclear Japan, the Cloverfield monster plows through New York City with a weight far beyond its mass. the conceit of the "post-9/11 monster movie" is a reasonably obvious one, of course, nearly as obvious as the likely wrongheadedness of such a project. yet here JJ Abrams and his team bravely sell the destruction of New York with a deft intimacy, stimulating the tension with love and loss while building from their gimmick rather than around it. it's an exercise in both populist postmodernism and pure genre (the nearly-toppled building setpiece is particularly brilliant), made all the more terrifying by the all-too-real idea of an evil we have to face without any hope of understanding.