The world's bestselling novelist and resident EW culture critic today unveiled his 10 Best Movies of 2008, featuring typically abstract list-blurb boilerplate for top three The Dark Knight, Slumdog Millionaire and WALL-E. But it's his lower five that remind us how rare — and refreshing — a non-ironic taste for sheer junk can be this time of year:

6. THE BANK JOB
Any doubts that Jason Statham is more than a muscle boy are set to rest in this rich (and often amusing) story of one of the biggest bank robberies in British history. High-tension cerebral thrills.

8. THE RUINS
The film version brings the novel's bleak theme to the screen intact. Terrible things happen by accident, and when they do, folks are usually on their own. Like all the best horror movies, the premise is simple: Five young people are trapped on top of a pyramid, surrounded by carnivorous plants. It could have been ludicrous. Instead, it's unrelenting.

10. DEATH RACE
This loose remake of Death Race 2000 features the redoubtable Statham as an unjustly convicted (in this sort of movie they always are) felon doing long time in a near-future prison. The canny female warden (brilliantly played by Joan Allen) sets up a series of pay-per-view ''death races'' that are huge ratings successes. Death Race is filled with laconic violence and blasting muscle cars, but just beneath the surface is a biting satire of reality TV.

No one can blame chain-novelist King for forgetting his own TV allegory The Running Man predated Race by about 25 years, but who cares? He also wants an Oscar nod for Sam Jackson in Lakeview Terrace! Such a maverick! And then, as if to invalidate the whole exercise, he ranks Funny Games at number five. Sucker move, King — everybody knows friends don't let friends sit through that crap.

• Stephen King: 10 Best Movies of 2008 [EW]

For starters, outgoing Picturehouse president Bob Berney told Variety that Warners' abdication of the art house is purely philosophical:

"Their decision was not to be in this business," he said. "It's not a reflection on me or Picturehouse. It's not their world."

Berney has no specific plans for a new job. "A lot of people want to do something — companies, investors. I am confident at the end of the day I will find something, but it needs to be a place that fits," he said. Berney added that he and several others from Picturehouse will be in Cannes as scheduled. WIP is sending a smaller contingent than originally planned.

[A]m I genuinely sad for the good people of these two companies? Yes. Will I make some phone calls for a few of them when they write, looking for new jobs? Yes. But is losing two companies that put out less than 10 films a year and grossed less than $50 million a year total each on average, even with the financial backing - however lame - of major studios? Not a tragedy... just a reasonable business choice from businessmen who were not terribly smart or reasonable when they launched these divisions in the first place.

In other words: We may mourn, but the numbers don't. That's entertainment.

And yet, even when staring down the barrel of a loaded microphone, he refused to capitulate to Ryan Seacrest's sadistic mind games, staging an heroic protest sit-in that instantly called to mind similar triumphs of the human spirit throughout history, from Tiananmen Square to the legendary Big Brother 5 slop strike.

• American Idol

Finally when it was over and my "friend" looked like a deer in the headlights — I was physically sick. I demanded my money back from the box office only to have the girl laugh at me — at first. I threw up on the floor right in front of her — and it splattered.

She gave me the money, helped me clean up and actually cried. My "friend" was embarrassed by my behavior — and therefore has lost my friendship. This whole last scene (starring me, my friend, the cashier at the box office), seemed a sequel to the movie.

• "Funny Games" spills out into the lobby [RogerEbert.com]

While won't put on a front and pretend that we have seen Haneke's 1997 original (we wonder what percentage of critics who have claimed to see this movie in their reviews actually did), we are big fans of both The Piano Teacher and Caché. And when you combine our appreciation for Haneke with a terrific cast (featuring Naomi Watts — easily one of the finest and most underrated actresses working today — Tim Roth and Michael Pitt), we have a must-see movie on our hands, despite what some of the critics have to say. Here's a quick sampling of some of the critics pre-reviews, none of which can dull our anticipation for Friday's release:
· "A highly, if grotesquely, skilled exercise in Snuff Guignol, Funny Games doesn't come out of nowhere. It has many antecedents, from the mocking cool sadism of A Clockwork Orange to the pressure-cooker intensity of Peckinpah's Straw Dogs to the house-party torture games of Roman Polanski's 1966 classic, Cul-de-Sac." [EW]
· "it was only a matter of time before the cinema of sadism would seek a new, virtually untapped market among the egghead arthouse crowd." [News Blaze]
· "There's disturbing, there's scary, there's terrifying. And then there's this movie." [Kyle Smith]
· "Shocking and deliberately manipulative." [Variety]
· "The most perverse movie ever released by a major American studio." [Esquire]

• Funny Games [Warner Independent Pictures]