To add one more Top 10 style list, you have to add many. And in the case of Ramin Bahrani’s 2008 movie “Chop Shop”, there are definitely many! For those who have followed my blog, you know Ramin is not only an internationally award winning film maker, but also is my brother. All three of his films “Man Push Cart” “Chop Shop” and his latest “Goodbye Solo” have always premiered at the world’s top film festivals of Cannes, Venice, and Toronto. And they have always made Top 10 lists by major publications and critics.

Chop Shop is no different. Considered a 2008 film, it has reached the Top 10 lists of almost every major newspaper/critic and countless independent blogs and sources and along side other mainstream top 10 movies like Batman: Dark Knight, Wall-E, Iron Man, Man on Wire, and Milk.

They include Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun Times: The great emerging American director Ramin Bahrani finds a story worthy of “City of God” in a no-man’s land in the shadow of Shea Stadium, where a young boy and his sister support themselves in a sprawling, off-the-books auto repair and scrap district. Alejandro Polanco and Isamar Gonzales seem to live their roles, in a masterpiece that intimately knows its world, its people and their survival tactics. It will be featured at Ebertfest 2009.

Leonard Martin, from many places including TV Guide and Entertainment Tonight had this video below

Salon.com had this to say listing Chop Shop in its Top 10: My top American film of the year is from New York no-budget director Ramin Bahrani, who followed up his much-acclaimed but little-seen “Man Push Cart” with an even more wrenching and absorbing neorealist saga, following two abandoned kids through the unpaved streets and sketchy auto-body shops of Willets Point in Queens, N.Y., a neighborhood so dire it’s hard to believe it’s in North America. But the North Carolina-born…Bahrani is more than a documentary-style realist. He’s also got a wonderful eye for visual poetry even in these bleak surroundings, and depicts its people without a hint of pity or judgment.

Indiewire, along with Variety, are the top two film publications in the US, polled all the top critics and found Chop Shop listed in the Top 10 here.This is the latest ballot in indieWIRE’s 2008 Critics Poll, continuing the tradition of a national survey of critics by calling attention to the year’s best — and, in many cases, most overlooked — films, providing a meaningful counterpoint to much of the year-end hoopla. Note that some lists are unranked at the discretion of the critic.

Las Vegas Weekly: Ramin Bahrani’s small-scale naturalist drama about a New York City street orphan and his efforts to build a better life for himself and his sister consistently finds hope amid squalor, while shining a light on the kind of matter-of-fact urban poverty that’s rarely depicted in American cinema. It also features the best kid performance of the year, from Alejandro Polanco.

Nerve.com: Writer-director Ramin Bahrani, who also made Man Push Cart and the forthcoming Goodbye Solo, makes movies about people different from those at the center of mainstream movie culture, hard-edged but sympathetic explorations of what it means to be economically shut out and culturally isolated. This is real Neo-Realism for our times, and it makes something like Wendy and Lucy look like the overpraised, pity-the-poor-waif hankie movie it is.

Anyway, you get the point – I’m bragging a bit, lol, and promoting – so, if you haven’t seen it, see it!
You can rent from Netflix, Blockbuster, or buy from Amazon or anywhere else that has movies. And start looking for Goodbye Solo in 2009 – major city distribution in theaters begins around March 2009….

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