Gary Dretzka
Noah Forrest
Leonard Klady
David Poland
Douglas Pratt
Ray Pride

2007 ...

When movies I really, really liked wind up thirtieth or fortieth on my year-end list, it's been a good year. 2007 was Good.

1. (tie) There Will Be Blood, Once

There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson. "I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed. I hate most people. There are times when I look at people and I see nothing worth liking. I see the worst in people. I don't need to look past seeing them to get all I need. I want to rule and never, ever explain myself."

Once, John Carney. Love and love, truly love. I still wish I could see Once again for the first time; and the look on The Guy's face when he catches the disappointment on the Girl's face after a clumsy, presumptuous pass.

3. The Diving Bell and The Butterfly, Julian Schnabel. A man tells the story of his life with the flutters of his eyelid: Schnabel's extravagant movie flutters like a hummingbird's heart. Oh… And Max von Sydow.

4. Ratatouille, Brad Bird. There are cooking scenes that frame for frame and beat for beat that match the final scene of the great Big Night and there is a moment of revelation-Rosebud, meet madeleine-involving the first taste of something great that is the one of they year's best scenes.

5. Zodiac, David Fincher. Not to be overlooked: the great John Carroll Lynch. Holy shit. Do not give this man an Oscar. Give him work, cast him week-in, week-out in anything and everything.

6. Away From Her, Sarah Polley. So measured, so tender, so kind, so very, very good.

7. 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days, Cristian Mungiu. The specific suggests the universal: terrors are evoked with the alacrity of splendid prose.

8. The Savages, Tamara Jenkins. Witty about neurosis and unblinking about mortality, Jenkins' long-in-coming second feature is an unlikely fusion of the comedic precision of Annie Hall and the melancholy humanism The Death of Mr. Lazarescu. (And that's a good thing.) Plus, nice Chris Ware-drawn typefaces and key art.

9. Assassination of Jesse James by The Coward Robert Ford, Andrew Dominik. Moody, broody, ponderous and beautiful.

10. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street, Tim Burton. Not despair, not evil: chronic depression. Johnny Depp's performance is rooted entirely in the condition.

11. Silent Light, Carlos Reygadas. The opening shot… transcendent.

12. Day Night Day Night, Julia Loktev. When you realize where the protagonist is and what she intends to do, all you can do is watch her face and what Loktev gives you is her character's face: sharp-featured, haunted, beautiful, lost, ready to die, ready to kill. Leslie Schatz's imaginative sound design is a glossary of how to create imagery without visuals, another part of Loktev's clinical intimacy.

13. The Host, Bong Joon-ho. Sophisticated and populist, thrilling and goofy, this is the proletarian Spielberg movie we'll never get from a U.S. director.

14. No Country For Old Men, Joel Coen, Ethan Coen. The ending.

15. Control, Anton Corbijn. "It could be worse, you could be the lead singer of The Fall."

16. Regular Lovers, Philippe Garrel. Everything, actually, in this three-hour ground-level Paris 1968 black-and-white romance, but especially the dance scene to the Kinks' "This Time Tomorrow." (And the 90-degree whip pans left that resemble a tic in Wes Anderson's kit bag.)

17. Syndromes and A Century, Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Another bifurcated narrative from the terrific Thai, yet one that is sweet and playful and poetic.

18. Climates, Nuri Bilge Ceylan. Gorgeously made portrait of the dissolution of a marriage weds landscape to behavior, and ably depicts passive-aggressive male behavior like few other movies.

19. Romance & Cigarettes, John Turturro. A rich and ribald and raw working class musical? A glimpse: two men are working high steel on of the spans across the rivers that divide Manhattan from the boroughs, and Steve Buscemi, perched on the edge of air in protective goggles and an armful of bolting machine, power-tightening a lug or two, suddenly feels compelled to confess, and with the blue sky behind him, observes simply, in a vulgar, beautifully cadenced line, lovingly delivered, "I like to fuck a woman with a backside the size of the world." In that moment, he is God's honest man.

20. I'm Not There, Todd Haynes. "I may be jumping the gun, but if Cate Blanchett doesn't get nominated, I'll shoot myself."

21. Private Fears in Public Places, Alain Resnais. Alain, it's snowing.

22. Dance Party USA/Quiet City, Aaron Katz. Katz may of the most promising of the "new talkies" bunch; I go on at length in the DVD liner notes for Dance Party USA.

23. The Darjeeling Limited, Wes Anderson. Three brothers bicker. The world is beautiful and strange and three brothers bicker. Lives are transformed and three brothers bicker.

24. Southland Tales, Richard Kelly. So very wrong yet there are some things so very right.

25. Offside, Jafar Panahi. Panahi's sarcastic gem about four girls who want to see a forbidden soccer match in Azadi (freedom) Stadium, for all its beauty, generosity and intelligence, also boasts the best final shot I've seen in an Iranian movie since Mohsen Makhmahlbaf's Afghan Alphabet, in a crowd, stopped as if in the middle of a breath.

Documentaries

1. No End in Sight, Charles Ferguson
2. Heavy Metal in Baghdad, Suroosh Alvi, Eddy Moretti
3. Lake of Fire, Tony Kaye
4. Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie?, Pedro Costa
5. Scott Walker: 30 Century Man, Stephen Kijak
6. The Prisoner, Or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair. Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker
7. Sicko, Michael Moore.
8. Into Great Silence, Philip Gröning
9. Manufactured Landscapes, Jennifer Baichwal
10. My Kid Could Paint That, Amir Bar-Lev

Five Restorations or Limited Runs

Out One, Jacques Rivette
Regular Lovers, Philippe Garrel
Killer of Sheep, Charles Burnett
Blade Runner: The Final Cut, Ridley Scott
The Whole Shooting Match, Eagle Pennell

Five Endings

There Will Be Blood
No Country For Old Men
Once
Silent Light
Michael Clayton

More movies with moments...

Alpha Dog, Nick Cassavetes. Ben Foster needs this job: "Pete, I swear to God. Dude, dude! It's… Ssst! I feel you! I'm right here! Don't look at me that way! I'm telling you the FUCKING truth. I'm totally fucking STRAIGHT, man! Pete! Pete. I swear to fucking God. Pete, c'mon. I need this job, I need this job, I really need this job. I need this fucking job! ... I WILL take you down to hell with me!"

Atonement, Joe Wright. The second sequence shot, of a female face, as sustained as the long take on the beach at Dunkirk. Oh… And Saoirse Ronan.

Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, Sidney Lumet. It is a kind of termite masterpiece: sweaty, jangled, vulgar, mean and with very little vanity.

The Boss of It All, Lars von Trier. Self-portrait much?

The Bourne Ultimatum, Paul Greengrass. The speed and wit of it all; the final shot.

Brand Upon the Brain!, Guy Maddin. Let the boy alone!

The Brave One, Neil Jordan. I love the look of this implausible New York.

Bug, William Friedkin. Directing opera has reinvigorated Friedkin's interest in storytelling through sound; the sound design, which includes nearly silent passages, the whoosh of ceiling fans and helicopter blades (real or imagined). These are the wings of dark angels, as in Douglas Sirk's final masterpiece, the equally claustrophobic Talk To Me Like The Rain.

Charlie Wilson's War, Mike Nichols. Eighty-two and forty-four one-hundredths percent good, 76-year-old Nichols' twenty-second feature is a genial, cosmopolitan oddity most memorable for the passages where Philip Seymour Hoffman's gruff CIA undercover guy Gust Avrakotos gets to ventilate.

Death Proof, Quentin Tarantino. Barefoot women in daisy dukes gas on and on: a simulacrum of the 1970s movies Tarantino loved, without the overlay of battering the image.

Eastern Promises, David Cronenberg. Terse, obstinate, and often quite beautiful: Cronenberg does not fear the display of blood: he's more concerned with evoking the fear of the susceptibility and defenselessness of the human body against intrusion.

Flanders, Bruno Dumont. Feral. Why yes, men are dumb beasts.

The GoodTimesKid, Azazel Jacobs. A little-seen lark with a genuine spark all its won.

Hannah Takes The Stairs, Joe Swanberg. Greta Gerwig: a magnitude of twerpitude you cannot steer your eyes from.

I Want Someone To Eat Cheese With, Jeff Garlin. Genial.

In Between Days. So Yong Kim. A gem of mood in wintry GTA: teen confusion is matched by a mute metropolis.

Inland Empire, David Lynch. Where do you go from here?

Into the Wild, Sean Penn. Emile Hirsch's aggravating young romantic is a tremendous performance: check Supertramp's reactions to the forwardness of an underage hoper bursting for him, played by Kristin Stewart. Oh… And Hal Holbrook.

Juno, Diablo… um… Jason Reitman. Ellen Page: getting better all the time.

Knocked Up, Judd Apatow. Leslie Mann rocks. "Mommy, I Googled murder."

The Lives Of Others, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. This belongs up in the top twenty-five, but Oscar's consolation for the confusion on a lot of year end lists.

Lust, Caution, Ang Lee. There is an explosive moment that follows the key, definitive decision of one of the characters, that all the talk and fuss (and mah-jongg games) add up to: I will simply say it is like the launch of a rocket and is the most masterful instant of a well-observed, luxuriously mounted, languorous movie.

Margot at the Wedding, Noah Baumbach. Jean Eustache (The Mother and the Whore) as farce, treading on the potential for intelligent people to crush one another with the ponderousness of their concerns, thoughts outweighing the concern for actions.

Michael Clayton, Tony Gilroy. Sleek and satisfying. Sleep-deprived and money-relieved and lost amid horses: otherworldly, regnant symbols, gorgeous furies, and just… horses in dawn mist. Oh… And Tom Wilkinson.

The Namesake, Mira Nair. The Pearl Jam scene. Nair's admiration for fine arts photography infusing her compositions. Nair's view of the human body is serenely sensual, including the first lovemaking of the young Ashoke and Ashima, a scene in which hands and bodies twine, and Ashima's feet are seen not curled against his, but against each other: a private self-pleasuring within the shared consummation.

Planet Terror, Robert Rodriquez. So many ways to melt!

Poison Friends, Emmanuel Bourdieu. Much self-defeating pseudo's chat from the co-writer of My Sex Life… Or How I Got Into An Argument.

Red Road, Andrea Arnold. Contemporary paranoia and potential for violence, sexual and otherwise, simmers throughout Arnold's taut, tense and starkly beautifully film: Arnold's keen eye is complemented by the film's digital palette.

Redacted, Brian DePalma. Financier Mark Cuban's reaction to being baited by bullyboy factors: "And to anyone who has ever questioned my patriotism or love for this country, fuck you."

Reign Over Me. The deserted streets of Manhattan, rivering between canyons, near dawn: a great, lonesome urban motif.

Smiley Face, Gregg Araki. Anna Faris: the Falconetti of weed.

Sunshine, Danny Boyle. Danny Boyle and Alex Garland's space-spotting trip-and-a-half. Sound and image trump script?

Superbad, Greg Mottola. McLovin much?

The Taste of Tea. Katsuhito Ishii. More Japanese surrealist sugar-pop.

Tears of the Black Tiger, Wisit Sasanatieng's 2000 feature, finally loosed from the Miramax vaults by Magnolia, is a sui generis mashup, a "Raiders of the Lost Archive," a strange, fevered, delirious, 1950s-styled Thai western-romance melodrama and a singularity of the highest order.

This Is England. Shane Meadows dons the Docs again.

300, Zack Snyder. Pixel power.

3:10 to Yuma, James Mangold. Ben Foster again: "I watched a lot of David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust. And a lot of documentaries on wildcats."

Triad Election, Johnny To. More immaculate geometry from an offhanded action mathematician.

12:08 East of Bucharest, Corneliu Porumboiu. Small bits of characterization are immaculate: watch the mother serving breakfast to her grown son, the talk show host and station owner. And the ending: snow falls, streetlights flicker to life. The night is damp and cool.

28 Weeks Later, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo. There is a slow wipe to the left across the screen when a major character realizes all hell has broken loose that is mere genius.

Two Days In Paris, Julie Delpy. It would be less than disturbing if either of Delpy's thirtysomething, cross-cultural couple were to turn to the other and murder them suddenly, so vivid, vital, draining, exhilarating is their sustained comic contumely across a long weekend two years into a relationship.

La Vie en Rose, Olivier Dahan. Marion Cottilard… ce'st bonne.

We Own the Night, James Gray. The impossible chase scene by brightest day in sluicing rain: a fine feat of digital imagination accompanied only by the whoosh of windshield wipers.

January 1, 2008

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