The top 100

Basia Bulat. All spun-gold hair and cherubic grin, the southern Ontario singer/songwriter has a way with an autoharp and a knack for inserting a quiver or a tearful hiccup into her faerie-like soul songs. The U.K.’s already mad for Bulat’s debut LP, Oh, My Darling; it’s time for Canada to catch up.

Dumbledore is gay. Uh… duh! We totally called it. It makes sense: Dumbledore is an advocate for underdogs everywhere, the so-called “champion of commoners, of mudbloods and Muggles.” This is a man whose deepest heart’s desire is socks, and about whom the head of the Wizarding Examinations Authority said: “[he’d] done things with a wand…I’d never seen before.” While it might’ve been more risky for J.K. Rowling to out the character before the series was put to bed, her matter-of-fact revelation was an act of subtle subversion.

A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila. The Bachelorette goes bisexual, in a kitschy California love nest that would make Hugh Hefner proud. In this reality series, contenders of all genders adopt microscopic swimsuits as de facto uniforms and underscore their professions of true, undying love by wrestling in soapsuds and romping in liquid chocolate. Guilty pleasures don’t come much trashier than this.

Christopher Hitchens. The English-born, D.C.-based writer is one of the most erudite yet polarizing figures in contemporary journalism. This year, the Hitch seemed on his game like never before. He continued to stump for the U.S. occupation of Iraq on Slate, but also eulogized an American soldier in one of the year’s most poignant, humbling essays. Meanwhile, his polemic god Is Not Great became a best-selling book and one of the biggest talking points in non-fiction.

Martin Amis. The English satirist had almost as big a year as his buddy Hitchens. Amis began 2007 with the release of House of Meetings, a toxic love story set in a Soviet gulag; it’s his best novel since The Information (1995). Later in the year, he did some intrepid reporting, chronicling the farewell tour of outgoing British PM Tony Blair for the Guardian.

Bye-bye to da da kamera. The little theatre company that first showcased the dark brilliance of Nova Scotia actor-playwright Daniel MacIvor bade adieu in 2007 with a final run at Toronto’s Buddies in Bad Times. MacIvor’s farewell performances of his stunning solo triptych, Here Lies Henry, Monster and House, felt like the passing of an era.

Not Just the Best of The Larry Sanders Show. At a time when you can get every episode of every sub-par television series on DVD, the unavailability of The Larry Sanders Show, TV’s greatest self-satire, was practically criminal. In 2007, star Garry Shandling finally rectified the oversight with this four-disc greatest-hits collection. At last, we can savour Shandling’s savagely funny series about an egomaniac talk-show host and his flunkies — a seminal ’90s show that begat the poker-faced comedy of The Office, Curb Your Enthusiasm et al.

The bathhouse fight scene in Eastern Promises. Naked, tattoo-scrawled Viggo Mortensen demolishes the two leather-jacketed, knife-wielding thugs attacking him using brute strength and stomach-churning acrobatics. The sound of “biffs,” “bams” and “pows” echoing off the tiled walls of the Russian baths still haunts our dreams.

Tara Rosling as Saint Joan. Recovering beautifully from last year’s critical drubbing over The Heiress, Shaw Festival star Rosling strapped on the armour and gave a dynamic performance in GBS’s revisionist drama about the Maid of Orleans.

Justice. 2007 was the year dance music began exhibiting the brawn and bravado of stadium rock, thanks in large part to the French duo of Gaspard Augé and Xavier de Rosnay, aka Justice. The duo’s lacerating debut, †, was notable for its Gothic melodies, buzz-saw rhythms and revival of the lost art of the slap bass.

Daft Punk live. No other touring act in 2007 could match Daft Punk — That Other French Electronic Duo — for sheer staging. The band’s first tour in 10 years was a state-of-the-art spectacle of sound design and visual pyrotechnics. Clad in their cyborg motorcycle helmets, Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem Cristo held forth in a mammoth, pyramid-shaped DJ booth, surveying the scene like the techno gods they are.

Alejandro Escovedo at the High Performance Rodeo. After nearly dying of hepatitis C a few years ago, the now-recovered Tex-Mex singer-songwriter proved as feisty as ever at this Calgary show in support of his new album, The Boxing Mirror. Like John Cale, ex-punk Escovedo blends rock and strings to exquisite effect; his cover of Ian Hunter’s I Wish I Was Your Mother is still a heartbreaker.

Cookie Party on The Sarah Silverman Program. In the gospel according to Silverman, nothing is sacred — the Holocaust, AIDS and incest are all fair game for her outrageously offensive humour. And sure, her shock tactics sometimes make us cringe. But Cookie Party, the fake reality show in which diverse biscuits compete for viewers’ votes, is beyond reproach. This American Idol-in-a-bakery beloved of Silverman’s fictional character is absurd satire at its best.

The Sopranos finale. How do you ice a landmark television drama after six seasons? The finale found Jersey kingpin Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini), wife Carm (Edie Falco) and kids A.J. (Robert Iler) and Meadow (Jamie-Lynn Sigler) gathered in a diner for a meal. It looked like the setup for a classic, Joey Gallo-style hit; would Tony “push the table over to protect his family”? Would anyone survive the foreshadowed shootout? Instead, we got… nothing. Bada blank. Was this cut to black a copout, or yet another curveball from a series that was anything but predictable?

Elijah Kelley in Hairspray. The fun film version of the Broadway musical was busting its seams with big new talents, from bouncy star Nikki Blonsky to that blue-eyed dreamboat, Zac Efron. Kelley was the kid who really blew us away, though, with an acrobatic song-and-dance showstopper that had you thinking “young Sammy Davis Jr.” (Maybe it was an audition piece: Kelley has since signed on to play Davis in a biopic.)

Cormac McCarthy. After a five-decade career sculpting bleak visions with beautifully chiselled prose, the reclusive American novelist flew down from his literary aerie for a rare (and underwhelming) interview with talk-show goddess Oprah Winfrey. Ms. O’s book-club endorsement of McCarthy’s grim, Pulitzer Prize-winning The Road may have boosted his popularity, but it was the Coen brothers who showed a real appreciation for his work with their gripping film adaptation of No Country for Old Men. For that matter…

The return of the Coen Brothers. An abysmal retread of the classic Ealing comedy The Ladykillers (2004) suggested that Joel and Ethan Coen had hit a creative wall. But after their masterful handling of No Country for Old Men, the Coens look damn near invincible.

The White Stripes’ Canadian tour. Hands down, the coolest tour of the year. Setting out to flog their sixth album, Icky Thump, U.S. rock duo Jack and Meg White decided to really tour Canada, playing all the provinces and territories they hadn’t visited before. They not only traversed the map from Burnaby to St. John’s, they brought their music to the unsuspecting masses, via impromptu gigs in such unlikely venues as a Halifax pool hall and a Winnipeg city bus.

Flight of the Conchords.Sneaking up on us in the sleepy summer months, this inspired little HBO series mashed together a sitcom scenario — two struggling immigrant musicians trying to make it in New York — with deliriously funny music-video spoofs you want to watch over and over again. New Zealand duo Jemaine Clement and Bret McKenzie are not only deft parodists, but endearingly daffy as a pair of innocents subsisting on muesli and dreams.

Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad onstage. Although she hadn’t written a play since college, the Queen of CanLit proved a skilled adaptor in reshaping her clever 2005 novel for the theatre. Unlike most novice playwrights, she also got a dream production, a history-making co-pro between Canada’s National Arts Centre and the U.K.’s Royal Shakespeare Company.

Joni Mitchell goes to the ballet. The iconic Mitchell was honoured by the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame in January, but she’s hardly resting on her laurels. The following month saw the premiere of The Fiddle and the Drum at Alberta Ballet, a striking new dance work conceived by Mitchell and the ballet’s artistic director, Jean Grand-Maître. Using her songs and paintings to pursue themes of war and environmental devastation, Mitchell’s first foray into ballet was typical of a socially conscious artist who has never been afraid to experiment. 

Musicians Joni Mitchell, left, and Herbie Hancock. (Jim Cooper/Associated Press)

Herbie Hancock live. The indomitable jazz pianist does hundreds of shows a year, but a July concert at Toronto’s Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts demonstrated not only Hancock’s improvisational brilliance but his unflappable enthusiasm.

Bjork live at V Fest. It takes a special artist to make standing in a field with thousands on Toronto’s Olympic Island feel intimate. It takes a possessed savant from the planet Genius to do this while backed by a chorale of brightly coloured Icelandic elves and dressed like something akin to a giant popcorn kernel. Seriously transcendental.

Musical theatre geekiness. From Ugly Betty’s lovable Justin (Mark Indelicato) swapping vintage Playbill programs with his pals to the surprise High School Musical phenom, the musical was suddenly hip in 2007. Why the cultural sea change? Maybe Family Guy kick-started the trend, with its irreverent but affectionate parodies of Broadway classics. (Who could forget Peter Griffin’s rewrite of The King and I as soft-porn sci-fi?) It might just be a phase, but until it passes, I’ll trade you an Ethel Merman Gypsy for a Robert Preston Music Man.

Tell Me You Love Me. The pilot of this TV series, directed by Canadian filmmaker Patricia Rozema, had everyone talking about the graphic sex — especially that I-can’t-believe-I’m-seeing-this-on-TV hand job. But the gist of this barrier-pushing HBO drama was the way unhappy couples behave — intimate, painful scenes that at their best recalled the films of Bergman and Cassavetes. While it didn't live up to its early promise, the 10-part series injected a dose of uncomfortable reality to TV’s soap-opera view of relationships.

Man from Plains. What could have been just a homespun hagiography of former U.S. president Jimmy Carter takes on a sense of burning urgency when director Jonathan Demme tracks Carter on tour, promoting and defending his controversial book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. Although Demme’s documentary casts the difficult Carter presidency in the kindest of lights, his picture of the genial yet still passionate Nobel Peace Prize winner leaves you with a feeling that’s increasingly rare when it comes to politicians: unqualified admiration.

Bill Shatner on Boston Legal. OK, Denny Crane will never oust Capt. James T. Kirk in the hearts of Shatner fans. But his late-career role as the addle-pated senior partner on David E. Kelley’s legal series makes perfect use of the Montreal-born actor’s penchant for self-mockery. Just when you’re about to dismiss Denny as an overstuffed Republican buffoon, he shows you a glimmer of the fire that once made him an unbeatable lawyer — and one heckuva starship commander, too.

Exit Ghost by Philip Roth. Few authors have been so unsparing (or so funny) in detailing the infirmities of the flesh. In Roth’s final novel of the Zuckerman series, elderly writer Nathan Zuckerman endures the twin afflictions of impotence and incontinence, but discovers that his obsession with women persists. Although it’s not quite the virtuoso performance of The Ghost Writer, the first Zuckerman book, Exit Ghost brings Roth’s remarkable cycle to a wry conclusion.

Doris Lessing’s well-deserved Nobel Prize. In a year when 74-year-old Philip Roth was the odds-on favourite for the most prestigious of literary awards, the 87-year-old Lessing beat him to it. “They were probably thinking they had better give it to me now before I popped off,” she told the BBC. Lessing also weighed in controversially on what she saw as the insignificance of 9-11. Anyone who doubts her insight into political violence should read her brilliant 1985 satire, The Good Terrorist.

Roisin Murphy, Overpowered. The ex-singer for British trip-hop group Moloko is a grade-A kook, and God love her for it. Her latest record is a lustrous yet cheeky disco romp that should set a few New Year’s Eve parties ablaze.

The One That Got Away by Electric Company and The Only Animal. First presented in Vancouver in 2002, this odd, wonderful little play (set entirely in a swimming pool) finally made its debut outside Vancouver at the 2007 Magnetic North Theatre Festival in Ottawa. Directed by Kim Collier with a witty resourcefulness to rival Robert Lepage, this tale of a womanizing Jewish impresario is part touching Holocaust story and part Esther Williams aquatic musical as reconceived by Fellini.

Judd Apatow. The indefatigable writer-director-producer created and/or enabled three of the funniest films of 2007: Knocked Up, Superbad and Walk Hard. In the process, he may have invented a whole new comedy genre: smart raunch.

Michael Cera — our favourite cuddly toy. After playing the teenage straight man to a family of wackos on Arrested Development, the Brampton, Ont.-born actor had his feature-film breakout in 2007 with the hit comedies Superbad and Juno. The soft-spoken, soft-featured Cera wafts through his scenes like a warm breeze — smart, ingenuous and utterly charming. (And he’s also adept at self-parody — check out the Clark and Michael web series.)

Arlington Park by Rachel Cusk. If Virginia Woolf were alive in 2007, this is what she would be writing. Why isn’t Cusk the most famous novelist in England?

Radiant City. After the lousy A Problem with Fear, Calgary filmmaker Gary Burns redeemed himself with this clever take on the suburbs, a lovely hybrid of documentary and fiction, co-created with CBC journalist Jim Brown.

Greg Girard. The Canadian photographer’s Phantom Shanghai is a gorgeous, finely detailed record of the Chinese city’s fast-disappearing past — an elegy to the destruction of character at the expense of soulless progress (read: concrete condos).

Margot at the Wedding. Nicole Kidman’s Margot is a viper-tongued writer who arrives to witness the nuptials of her flaky sister (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and sis’s slacker fiancé (Jack Black). There will be blood. No, sorry, wrong picture — but Noah Baumbach’s latest film about family dysfunction is just as psychologically brutal. The great thing is, it’s also hilarious.

My Humps, Alanis Morrisette. The Black Eyed Peas’ celebration of all things lumpy and ladyish is one of the greatest atrocities committed in the name of pop music in the last decade. Alanis’s video piss-take almost justifies its existence. In her hands, the manic My Humps becomes an angst-ridden dirge that simultaneously sends up the Peas’ lyrical inanity and her own super-serious persona.

My Dumps, Peaches. Technically, this scatological parody by electroclash minx Peaches predates Alanis’s send-up. (Peaches performed a sweaty live version during the 2006 South By Southwest festival in Austin, Texas.) But Peaches’s decision to revisit her pro-poo spin as Alanis is so hilariously meta it blows our minds.

Ellen Page. Every critic from here to Antarctica is praising the Halifax-bred actor for sharp performances in Juno and The Tracey Fragments. The kid’s understated talent is terrifying, but her freakishly grounded nature and selectivity when it comes to roles in a sea of druggie, pregnant, crotch-flashing peers might ensure Page becomes an It Girl For Life.

A view of the Royal Ontario Museum's latest addition, the Lee-Chin Crystal. (Adrian Wyld/Canadian Press)

The debut of the ROM’s Crystal. It looks like an enormous white quartz emerging from a brown rock — or, as our film critic put it, a spaceship that’s crashed into an old building. However you look at it, the Royal Ontario Museum’s $270-million addition, the Daniel Libeskind-designed Michael Lee-Chin Crystal, has had Torontonians talking since its unveiling last spring. For a city still wrapping its head around the kind of creative architecture that’s commonplace in Paris and Barcelona, the Crystal is a bold step into the 21st century.

Tegan & Sara, The Con. The meticulous production of Death Cab For Cutie’s Chris Walla on the latest album by Tegan & Sara makes the Quin sisters’ insanely hooky ruminations on love feel like arena-ready anthems.

Top Girls at Soulpepper. An apt title. The Toronto theatre company’s engrossing revival of Caryl Churchill’s still-potent 1982 feminist play boasted an all-star cast of some of Canada’s top female actors. They included ex-Anne of Green Gables star (and now Soulpepper fave) Megan Follows, and actress-turned-best-selling author Ann-Marie MacDonald. But if we had to pick a favourite performance, it was Kelli Fox in the pointed final scenes, as a working-class woman challenging the Margaret Thatcher model of female achievement.

Into the Wild. The true story of Chris McCandless, the idealistic 24-year-old who abandoned a privileged middle-class life for one of reckless adventure — and starved to death in the Alaskan wilderness — could have been a huge downer. But Sean Penn’s poignant film turned it into a heartfelt paean to freedom.

The Lives of Others. The 2007 Oscar winner for best foreign film, writer-director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s drama about the government surveillance of a famous writer in 1980s East Germany is a quietly devastating look at the state abuses of the Communist era and the toll it took on victims and perpetrators alike.

You Turn My Head Around, Dean & Britta. Dean Wareham and Britta Philips — former members of Luna and the couple that composed the score to Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale — didn’t get enough attention for the shimmering pop on their 2007 disc Back Numbers. The album is a stellar mix of originals alongside Troggs and Donovan covers; their version of You Turn My Head Around, by the late, great Lee Hazlewood, is the standout.

Stars live. Selling out four straight nights at Toronto’s Phoenix is more than most bands can boast. On the final night, looking out at a hometown crowd of more than a thousand rapt fans, dream-pop revolutionaries Stars seemed to realize the momentousness of their accomplishment. Wide-eyed, the quintet delivered an ecstatic musical thank you.

The Drowsy Chaperone comes home. Canada’s biggest Broadway success, which won five Tony Awards and will have played 674 performances when it closes Dec. 30, returned triumphantly to the city of its birth — Toronto — in September to launch its North American tour. This funny valentine to 1920s musicals is thoroughly Canadian: modest, self-deprecating and blissfully good-natured.

Britney’s OMG performance at the MTV awards. Another lowlight in Spears’ annus horribilis, her lacklustre number on the MTV Video Music Awards inspired all kinds of derision and speculation. In the spirit of seeing the glass half-full, we’d suggest that the pop queen’s “living dead” walk-through of Gimme More wasn’t another act of career suicide but a glimpse at a promising future in George A. Romero zombie flicks.

Apostle of Hustle, National Anthem Of Nowhere. Andrew Whiteman is a cultural magpie, seizing on shiny bits of sonic exotica and lacing them together into shimmering pop songs. On this sophomore LP, Whiteman builds from a base of lithe percussion and layers on everything from baile funk and surf guitars to kitschy theme songs and bossa nova. Gorgeously trippy.

Amy Adams in Enchanted. Though the dizzy princess cast from Once Upon A Timeland onto the mean streets of NYC in this uncritical celebration of all things Disney could’ve been a vapid googly-eyed airhead, Adams brought the same vulnerability and naive intensity to the role that she demonstrated in her stunning turn in Junebug. Few of her peers could’ve pulled the role with this much elegance — especially while singing chirpy duets with cartoon squirrels.

What’s a Girl to Do by Bat for Lashes. The Shangri-Las meet Tori Amos — and get along famously. One of the most haunting tunes of 2007.

Akon’s fan-toss. While performing at an open-air concert, soul singer Akon is pelted with an unidentified object. Akon identifies the offender and then beckons him on-stage. After helping him up, the singer exacts revenge by hurling the dude back into the crowd. We shouldn’t laugh but — OK, we should.

The Way I Are, Timbaland (feat. Keri Hilson). Timbaland can’t sing worth a damn, but it hardly matters when he’s also manning the console. Title aside, this was one of the sexiest, most radiant dance tracks of ’07.

So You Think You Can Dance? The second season of SYTYCD had better dancers, better music and more crowd-pleasing drama. This electrifying and thoroughly good-hearted series presents the very best face of reality television.

Beverly Hills 90210 and Melrose Place on DVD. After nearly a decade, the Aaron Spelling empire finally blasts open the vaults. See Emily Valentine spike Brandon’s drink! See conniving trollop Amanda come between Billy and Allison! See Shannen Doherty pout and whine in poor facsimiles of real human emotion! Between the shudder-worthy fashions, the sight of thirty-something actors faking teen anomie and the Very Special nature of each episode, this is pure camp gold.

The return of the girl group. From Amy Winehouse’s raspy R&B to cartoonish doo-wop trio the Pipettes to the return of a Shangri-La (Mary Weiss), soul sisters with tear-smeared mascara were back with a vengeance.

Fabienne DelSol, Between You and Me. The former singer for London garage rockers the Bristols makes a killer comeback with a flirty, jangly gem that’s all white vinyl go-go boots and false eyelashes. It’s impossible to believe Between You and Me wasn’t recorded in a haze of Gauloise smoke in 1969.

My Moon My Man, Feist. Simple, seductive, insistent: Leslie Feist gives us a lesson in pop songcraft.

Him Her Him Again The End of Him by Patricia Marx. This slim, sardonic, not entirely fictional novel details a hilariously destructive romance. Marx has plenty of fun at her own expense, particularly her (brief) stint as a writer for Saturday Night Live. (See also…)

Alec Baldwin, far left, Tina Fey and Tracy Morgan star in the hit TV series 30 Rock. (NBC/CTV)

The lovely and talented Tina Fey. Forget Will Ferrell. The brightest talent to come out of the new-millennium SNL is writer-actor Fey. After suffering the ingratiating Jimmy Fallon on the Weekend Update desk and scripting Lindsay Lohan in the film Mean Girls, Fey has found the ideal showcase with 30 Rock, her laugh-a-second send-up of network television.

Heather O’Neill. Her stunning coming-of-age tale Lullabies for Little Criminals may have been released in ’06, but ’07 was O’Neill’s year. In March, Lullabies won top prize in the Canada Reads contest (after a strong defence by Canadian indie rock poet laureate John K. Samson of the Weakerthans). Lullabies then scored everything from GG shortlist honours to Quebec’s Hugh McLennan Prize for Best Novel. The gifted chronicler of druggies, lost girls and dreamers could conquer the world with her next book.

MIA, Kala. Dangerous enough to get bleeped on network television, wicked-smart enough to provide fodder for a generation of doctoral thesis deconstructions, the Brit singer/MC’s second album takes postcolonial discourse to the dancefloor.

Miranda July. July was awarded the Frank O’Connor Award for her 2007 collection of short stories, Nobody Belongs Here More Than You; she also released a book based on her Learning to Love You More website, a collaboration with artist Harrell Fletcher that asks visitors to post responses to quirky “art assignments.” (Sample: “Reread your favourite book from fifth grade.”) July’s work follows a beautifully simple mandate — create connections —  and her wide-eyed philosophy is a lovely respite from the neurotic cleverness of so much contemporary art.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid. A terribly weighty book despite its physical slimness, the Booker-nominated second novel by Hamid tells the tale of a Pakistani man who attains the American Dream only to rebuke it. The conflict mooted in the title haunts the book to its nail-biting end.

Paris. The city, that is, not the decadent celebutante. The French capital played its gorgeous, dreamy self in the films Paris je t’aime, 2 Days in Paris, Broken English and the documentary Forever.

Killer of Sheep. It took 30 years for a sharp, enterprising distributor to re-release director Charles Burnett’s brilliant tale of working-class anxiety and frustrated desire in south-central Los Angeles. The wait was miserable, but the payoff was absolutely worth it.

LCD Soundsystem, Sound of Silver. The second full-length disc by producer/label honcho James Murphy is one of those rare albums that makes a profound emotional connection while satisfying all your dancefloor requirements. Murphy keeps the beats fresh and challenging while agonizing over lost friends and the effects of aging on the unyielding hipster.

Tenderoni, Chromeo. The members of Montreal electro duo Chromeo are unabashed ’80s worshippers, but they’re also discriminating craftsmen, a fact born out by this wickedly bouncy track from their 2007 album Fancy Footwork.

Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name by Vendela Vida. Vida’s prose is as glittering and spare as the icy Lapland landscape that frames the protagonist’s quest in this devastating examination of abandonment, betrayal and the complications of grief.

Saskatchewan. It’s now the home of two hit Canadian sitcoms, Corner Gas and Little Mosque on the Prairie, but what really clinched the province's cultural significance was when Saskatoon's Evan Biddell won the Canadian edition of Project Runway. Even sweeter, the self-taught, self-assured fashion designer (who looks like he's been attacked by razor-wielding thugs) beat out finalists from chi-chi Montreal and oh-so-trendy Toronto. Woo-hoo!

Vanessa Beecroft. The Italian-born, U.S.-based conceptual artist came up with one of the year’s most chilling works of political protest. VB61: Still Death! Darfur Still Deaf?, Beecroft’s contribution to the Venice Biennale, consisted of 30 Sudanese women lying corpse-like on a white canvas while the artist splashed their bodies with blood-red paint.

Umbrella, Rihanna. A set of nonsense syllables (“Ella, ella, ella, eh, eh, eh”) stood in for an entire emotional spectrum, spanning joy, sentimentality, even melancholy in this year’s winner of the Hey Ya award for official mainstream mega-hit. Overplayed? Maybe, but the gloss has yet to wear off. A tumultuous pop gem.

Simian Mobile Disco. SMD is comprised of two clever Brits named James Ford and Jas Shaw, who were responsible for one of the most raucous dance records of ’07: Attack Decay Sustain Release.

The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon. Hardboiled mystery. Alternate history of the Jews. Yiddish-laced family drama. The latest novel from Michael Chabon somehow makes these disparate angles work. Chabon has no time for clichéd, straightforward narratives, and contemporary fiction is richer for it.

Marion Cotillard as Edith Piaf in La vie en rose. Marion Cotillard’s evocation of the iconic French singer was more than just great mimicry; it was a feat of physical contortion. A breathtaking performance that demands to be rewarded with an Oscar.

Atlas, Battles. The first emission from indie supergroup Battles has got to be one of the strangest singles in pop history. Built on a primal, almost simian groove, the song features clanging guitars and unintelligible chipmunk vocals. At first listen, Atlas is strange, anti-climactic, ever so slightly silly. After the third listen, you wish it would never stop.

Option$ by Fake Steve Jobs. A satirical novel written entirely in the voice of Apple honcho Steve Jobs, Option$ grew out of a side-splitting blog created by Forbes magazine editor Daniel Lyons, who seems to regard Jobs as a spiteful megalomaniac. Huh.

Linda Thompson, Versatile Heart. Veteran British folkie Linda Thompson has a warm, expressive voice and sophisticated roots tunes. After a 17-year hiatus between her debut album and sophomore follow-up, we’re glad she only made us wait half a decade for Versatile Heart.

Ron Mueck at the National Gallery. Mueck, a British-based sculptor, likes to play with scale. Fascinated with the human body, Mueck’s repertoire includes a blood-spattered, elephant-sized baby and tiny couples spooning. A spring exhibition at the National Gallery in Ottawa was a stunning showcase for Mueck’s bold vision and unfathomable attention to detail.

(HarperCollins Canada)

The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill. A magnum opus by one of Canada’s most underrated novelists, The Book of Negroes is an unflinching yet poetic look at the gruelling odyssey of one African slave. The fact that this book didn’t walk away with either the Giller Prize or the Governor General’s Award continues to baffle us.

“Aunt Jackie.” Back in January, a wannabe hiphop producer/MC from Harlem named Jason Fox posted a homemade video on the internet. In the lo-fi clip, Fox and his grinning, toque-wearing crew bust out a local dance craze (the “Aunt Jackie”) to accompany his bubbly, old-school hip-hop track. After the original video got emailed and YouTubed like wildfire, Fox and co. put together a slicker revamp. The Aunt Jackie is an obvious inspiration for the unofficial clip for the tune Us Placers by rap supergroup CRS (featuring Lupe Fiasco, Kanye West and Pharrell), where mini-versions of the mega-MCs rhyme like hip-hop Muppet Babies.

Lars and the Real Girl. The premise behind Craig Gillespie’s film — social misfit falls for life-size doll — could easily have veered toward broad, juvenile comedy. Instead, Lars and the Real Girl is a tender romance that shifts between sharp humour and breathtaking pathos. Credit the gifted cast, which includes a collection of Toronto stage actors, as well as Hollywood golden boy Ryan Gosling.

Maxwell McCabe-Lokos. In 2007, this Toronto actor-slash-rock god (he was a core member of the late, lamented Deadly Snakes) created a pair of awkward nuanced characters. In The Tracey Fragments, McCabe-Lokos played the oily predator Lance, who pounces on Ellen Page’s teen runaway; and in Lars and the Real Girl, he was the puerile office lech Kurt, whose idea of conflict resolution was assassinating a cubicle-mate’s teddy bear.

Klaxons. Like so many British bands, the debut album by these London upstarts (Myths of the Near Future) arrived with fulsome praise, largely generated by NME magazine. For once, the hype was warranted. Klaxons combine the high-mindedness of prog-rock, the scrappiness of post-punk and the day-glo wardrobe of the raver set. The heady mix gels marvellously — just ask the jury for the Mercury Prize.

The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett. Britain’s foremost playwright pens a story about the Queen’s reading habits. The novel is as thin as a razor, and about as lacerating.

Arcade Fire live at Massey Hall. Even if you weren’t sold on Neon Bible, you couldn’t help falling for the hype after watching Montreal’s orchestral pop crusaders twitch, howl and sweat through their triumphant anthems. The stage set-up, an eerie mass of surveillance cameras, fuzzy black-and-white films and flashing lights, was as crucial to their assault as frontman Win Butler’s frayed-vocal-cord wail.

Crave at Nightwood Theatre. Crave is a difficult play to watch. The fragmented script, by late UK playwright Sarah Kane (who took her own life in 1999), is a devastating document of mental illness and trauma. You meet loosely connected characters — an abuse survivor, a calculating seductress, a too-sympathetic pedophile, an amphetamine-sweaty Casanova — who may or may not be disjointed reflections of one person’s psyche. Staging such an abstract, relentlessly intense piece is tricky, but Jennifer Tarver’s delicate, perfectly paced direction helped make this production devastatingly good.

Okkervil River, The Stage Names. In anyone else’s hands, a concept album about the woes of a touring indie rocker would have been a self-indulgent wank. But Will Sheff of Okkervil River is a master of language: his lines sting your gums and pummel your heart. Even when the dude wallows in his own misery, he’s always armed with the perfect comeback to kick his own ass. This guitar-driven collection of drug-blurred, groupie-shagging road stories may be the year’s best rock ’n’ roll album.

The Sanchez brothers. The photographs of Montreal siblings Jason and Carlos Sanchez are mini-narratives, by turns shocking, brooding, insightful, creepy and endlessly fascinating.

He Hit Me (And It Felt Like a Kiss), Grizzly Bear. Brooklyn art-folkies Grizzly Bear take the Crystals’ tragic ballad about battered love and jack up the tension. A chillingly beautiful cover full of kick drums and a thundering bass you feel deep in your gut.

The Acorn, Glory Hope Mountain. Ottawa singer/songwriter Rolf Klausener decided to turn his band’s second full-length release into a celebration of the tumultuous life of his Honduran-born mother. A pulse-racing cascade of polyrhythmic percussion and fingerpicked guitar, Glory Hope Mountain couches her stranger-than-fiction biography in hyperdetailed narratives that verge on magic realism.

Season 2 of Extras. Ricky Gervais’s post-Office career has been fertile, as evidenced by his showbiz satire Extras. The second season featured uproarious cameos from Orlando Bloom, Robert DeNiro and a now-classic bar scene with David Bowie.

All-star cameos in Walk Hard. With its manic puns and broad one-liners, Walk Hard feels a bit too much like that sweaty, wasted dude at a party who tries to cover up his social anxiety by repeating lewd punchlines at top volume. The film is still worth seeing, however, for its goldmine of hysterical cameos. Harold Ramis does a boffo, beard-stroking Semitic mogul and a heavy-lidded Jack White karate chops his way through a manic Elvis. But the real treat is Walk Hard’s fictional Lifetime Achievement Award ceremony, in which Lyle Lovett, Jewel, Jackson Browne and Ghostface Killah pay tribute to the film’s fictional hero, Dewey Cox, by covering his biggest hit.

The video for Kiss by Scout Niblett (feat. Will Oldham). You’ve got skeleton costumes, Skee-ball, a soft-serve ice cream moustache, a fright wig and creepy folk kingpin Will Oldham — all the ingredients for a charming gothic date. This lovely clip for the heartbreaking single off Scout Niblett’s album This Fool Can Die Now proves you don’t need a major-label budget to pull off one of the year’s best videos.

Houndstooth EP, Woodpigeon. Calgary collective Woodpigeon is destined to be one of the next great Canadian indie-rock success stories, and this great six-song EP is available free for download on their website. Listen for the wry lyrics and hesitant, cracking vocals of Mark Hamilton, whose wistful sonic postcards float on gently unravelling arrangements of warm acoustic guitar, glockenspiel and backing choirs.

Shortcomings by Adrian Tomine. “Cinematic” may be an overused adjective, but Adrian Tomine’s comics play out like beautifully restrained movies. That’s particularly true of his first expanded work, the graphic novel Shortcomings. Like Douglas Coupland, Tomine skewers sentimentality as he sketches out neurotic slackers paralysed by the weight of personal crises. Shortcomings explores the psychic struggles of misanthropic Ben Tanaka, whose aimlessness and penchant for white porn stars leads to the collapse of his relationship with his Asian-American girlfriend.

Cynthia Nixon on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. If her role as neurotically uptight Miranda Hobbes on Sex & the City made you dismiss Cynthia Nixon as an antsy kvetch, the actor’s guest turn as a woman supposedly suffering from dissociative personality disorder on Law & Order: SVU gave you not one but five different reasons to change your mind.

The Good, the Bad & the Queen. Damon Albarn corrals together a true all-star band (the Verve’s Simon Tong, the Clash’s Paul Simenon and Afrobeat legend Tony Allen), but instead of giving us an album of impressive but empty virtuosity, Albarn delivers his most gripping collection of songs since Blur’s Think Tank.

The Harry Potter series. Did you hear? It ended — brilliantly.

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