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The Best Films of 2007
by Brian Tallerico
Great movies should be able to come from any genre, any director, or any country. When film gets turned into a sum game - add the Oscar nomination total of the cast to the filmography of the crew to the popularity of the source material to the respectability of the subject matter - it becomes repetitive and dull. Think about all the wonderful experiences you've had in a movie theater. Nine out of ten times, you never saw it coming. Remember the way your favorite movie sparked your imagination? Lingered in your memory for days to follow? How you talked about it with your friends and quoted your favorite lines? That's not a factor of anything predictable or anything that can be produced by a formula. It is, for lack of a better phrase, the magic of movies.
 As someone who sees over 200 movies a year, you would think it would be hard to recapture that magic. Not this year. More often than most years in recent memory, the unpredictable power of film found its way beyond my critical faculties in 2007. And that's what determined the list below. Quite simply, I asked myself - What films made me forget about the review that had to be written while watching them? What films transported me through laughter, drama, horror, or any other tricks it had up its sleeve? Films that I admired as technical exercises like There Will Be Blood and Zodiac, two of the most undeniably well-made films of the year, didn't make the top ten simply because, while I respected them, I never felt that elusive, intangible, non-intellectual response as I sat there in the darkened theatre. Every film in the top ten hung with me for days, sometimes weeks and months, after I saw them, and that's what we really go to the movies for. We all want movies that transcend language and haunt us like a melody or a beautiful passage from our favorite novel.
There were a shocking number of films this year that fit the criteria I’ve described above, and it was amazing to see the variety of genres they came from. If you were a moviegoer who only stuck with one genre or always opted for arthouse over blockbuster, you really missed out this year. It was the variety of product that was the most wonderful aspect of this year in film, with a few of the best comedies in recent memory, a pair of brilliant horror movies from overseas, some of the finest foreign language fare in years, and at least one animated masterpiece. It was a year that saw a wide mix of established directors, like the Coen brothers and Paul Verhoeven, deliver outstanding films alongside an amazing selection of new filmmaking talent. My personal top ten saw three directorial debuts and a number of films made by relatively new voices to the cinematic form. After thousands of movies, the medium shows no sign of failing in its ability to move me. And that's why I love doing what I do. And these are the movies that I loved in 2007.
(Note: This was a great year for documentaries, but they have not been included on the list below. They will be mentioned in a separate feature. These are fictional films only.)
Honorable Mentions: 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, Eastern Promises, Exiled, Grindhouse, Hairspray, The Kite Runner, Ocean's 13, Paprika, and There Will Be Blood.
RUNNER-UPS:
20. Red Road
19. Gone Baby Gone
18. Zodiac
17. Lars and the Real Girl
16. Knocked Up
15. The Simpsons Movie
14. Hot Fuzz
13. Black Book
12. A Mighty Heart
11. Superbad
Top Ten:
10. The Host
 Talk about a four-star film that came out of nowhere. The monster genre has been dead for years. Leave it to a Korean to bring it back to life kicking and screaming. Pulling from his own childhood imagination about what might live in Seoul’s Han River, writer/director Bong Joon-Ho (who made the equally great and criminally under-seen Memories of Murder) created one of the most purely enjoyable horror films in years with The Host. It's one of those rare films that completely transcends its genre and becomes a great movie, period, regardless of categorization. The Host draws on all of our lazy-day imaginations, when we gazed out the window and hoped for something to come out of the boredom and create total chaos. And it does so with such amazing style, mixing horror, comedy, family drama, and political and social satire to create something wholly new. The Host is the kind of grin-inducing fun that we've rarely seen since the heydays of John Carpenter, Peter Jackson, or Sam Raimi. Being scared hasn’t been this enjoyable in years.
The Best Films of 2007 Page 2
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