Panopticon Blog

2007 Film: The Top Ten

After a few off years, it seems cinema has finally rebounded, offering high quality in everything from no-budget indies to family friendly animation to big-budget action. And at the fringes – from reissues to short films – there were many gems worth seeking. Before getting to the top ten of 2007, here’s a few films that, while not technically 2007 theatrical feature releases, are as strong as the very best mainstream films of the year:

Blade Runner: The Final Cut

After seemingly endless revisions, Sir Ridley Scott has finally declared his 1980 masterpiece “complete.” This cut incorporates some key deleted scenes and features a stunning visual and audio transfer worthy of the film’s landmark status.

Everything Will Be OK

Don Hertzfeldt, the cult animator behind “Rejected,” weaves a gruesome, troubling, hilarious, existential and ultimately moving story about human mortality. All in 14 minutes. With crude black and white stick figures. A must-see for animation fans.

Heima

Never released theatrically, this documentary following Icelandic band Sigur Ros nonetheless features transcendent moments of music and image. Hearing the band’s epic music against the visual backdrop of their native land yields transcendent moments of pure experience.

 

The Top Ten of 2007:

10.            Michael Clayton

            A Grisham-esque thriller by way of Network, rookie director Tony Gilroy elicits three terrific performances: Tom Wilkinson’s conscience-afflicted lawyer, Tilda Swinton’s sweaty corporate drone, and especially George Clooney’s shabby, disappointed legal “fixer.” 

9.         Eastern Promises 

            Viggo Mortensen gives the performance of a lifetime in David Cronenberg’s more conventional but still fascinating companion piece to A History of Violence. Playing a low-rung Russian mobster in London, Mortensen anchors the director’s exploration of moral rot just beneath the surface in contemporary London.

8.         The Bourne Ultimatum

Free from the middle-child syndrome that derailed The Bourne Supremacy, director Paul Greengrass’ latest Bourne film goes for broke and delivers three all-time classic action scenes. Between rooftop leaping and car chases, the film even manages to deliver some sly political commentary.

7.         Zodiac

An abrupt left turn from one of our most formally gifted directors comes this long-winded procedural following the Zodiac killings in 1970s San Francisco. But look closer – after a couple of brutal, terrifyingly depicted murders in the film’s first hour, David Fincher takes us down a rabbit hole of paranoia and formless terror that echoes modern society.

6.            Ratatouille

After their first miscue, the generic Cars, Pixar rebounds in a big way with the Brad Bird helmed Ratatouille. A success almost in spite of itself – its lead character is a rat… who loves to cook… in France… — Bird’s follow-up to his acclaimed The Incredibles is even more visually and narratively inventive, and maturely addresses the sacrifices of following artistic ambition. 

5.         I’m Not There

Todd Haynes’ fractal explosion of biopic conventions, I’m Not There explores the Bob Dylan mystique rather than the nuts and bolts of the artist’s life. With an exemplary cast – especially Cate Blanchett and Ben Whipshaw – inhabiting various Dylan-esque avatars, Haynes’ collage of a film is a rollicking, intellectual prism – a filmic complement to Bob Dylan’s music style.

4.         There Will Be Blood

Daniel Day Lewis is spectacular, no doubt about it. But unlike Gangs of New York, where the actor buoys the entire film, Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood enables and matches the actor’s most outrageous whims. Beautifully and classically composed, but narratively and tonally bizarre, Anderson’s allegory of oil-mad Capitalism and fervent religious Evangalism at the heart of America’s development is intense, farcical, quiet, explosive, sometimes jarring but never anything less than invigorating.

3.         No Country For Old Men

Recalling their earliest roots, the classic Texan potboiler Blood Simple, but with more than a little of their current work’s existential dread, No Country For Old Men joins Fargo and The Big Lebowski as a seminal Coen Brother’s classic. The three actors at the heart of this cat-cat-and-mouse chase – Josh Brolin, Tommy Lee Jones and Javier Bardem – are all brilliant, as is Roger Deakins’ creepily empty cinematography. The audacious third-act stylistic inversion may be dividing audiences, but I’m convinced film-school eggheads will study it for decades to come.

2.            Manufactured Landscapes

The great undiscovered film of 2007 is this meditative Canadian documentary on photographer and environmental activist Edward Burtynsky. Burtynsky’s work renders large-scale industrial waste in Ansel Adams-esque landscape clarity. The power of the film, rather than just being a portrait of a man and his work, is that it doesn’t allow contradiction of the photographer’s profit from human and environmental misery pass. Instead, we hear Burtynsky’s introspection and discomfort with his role in the environmental catastrophes he photographs, and director Jennifer Barchwal finds the personal stories within the photographer’s impersonal landscapes. The opening scene, a 10-minute plus tracking shot through a Chinese factory, is the most chilling cinematic sequence of the year.

1.         Once

This year has been exemplary for structurally inventive, formally daring and narratively subversive film – from Zodiac’s information inundation to There Will Be Blood’s audience-baiting stylization to No Country For Old Men’s existential drift. But when compiling this year’s top ten list, no film felt more perfect, more complete, than John Carney’s no-budget Irish musical Once. The story is simple – guy meets girl, guy and girl record an album. But the music, written by stars Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova, is so powerful in its simplicity and the emotion so true in its shading that the brief film achieves rhapsody so often missing from even the best “prestige” films. No film I can think of more accurately captures the thrill of artistic creation – that moment when ideas become tangible. This is the musical answer to Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise/Before Sunset, and a brilliant achievement in minimalist drama.