Best Movies of 2007 (That I Saw)

I'd give it all back just for a crack at a spot on this list

This year the movies came covered in blood; apparently, last year was different somehow, though I'm still trying to blink the brain fragments out of my eyelids from Oscar winner The Departed's triage center finally. Here's ten flickers that made 2007 a great year to be a filmgoer. Transformers emphatically not included. Note: For those of you who have already read this, yes, I changed it around (slightly) already. Honesty is the best policy, as they say.

10. Charlie Wilson's War (dir. Mike Nichols)

An Aaron Sorkin movie all the way, Charlie Wilson's War glides where others would plod, condensing the story of America's surreptitious financing and arming of the Afghan mujahideen against the invading Soviet arming into a fleet-footed hour-and-a-half of boozing, womanizing quippery. Tom Hanks, as the inveterate congressman (having been appointed to the ethics committee to cover another member, Wilson notes that he's "on the other side of the issue"), proves yet again why he remains America's favorite movie star, transforming vices into virtues with a twinkle in his eye. An oddly timed picture, as it seems to lionize American interventionism at a time when it is most out of vogue; perhaps, though, it is comment about our flip attitude when it comes to mucking about in other parts of the world.

9. The Savages (dir. Tamara Jenkins)

They aren't savages exactly; brought together by their father's dementia, John and Wendy do what any of us presumably would - they deal with it. Thankfully writer/director Tamara Jenkins sees fit to skip the pop psychology - the dad was a miserable prick, we get it - and instead focus on the intense pull that family exerts even when the loosest of definitions is applied. Linney and Hoffman are magnificent, but at this point we wouldn't expect any less. Not the feel bad movie of the winter that you've been fearing.

8. Black Book (dir. Paul Verhoeven)

Dutch director Paul Verhoeven's milieu is shock: his three best known features in this country are Robocop, Basic Instinct, and Starship Troopers. Black Book, too, refuses to cater to standard notions of good taste, indulging in pulpy violence and white hot sexuality all while weaving a web of resistance intrigue. Verhoeven's movie is messily alive in all the ways that most "period" films seem hermetic, and all the more entertaining, and engrossing, for it.

7. Inland Empire (dir. David Lynch)

Personally, I think this film comments on the importance of monogamy and the surreality of cinema, but what the fuck do I know, there's a goddamned sitcom staring anthropomorphized rabbits dropped in halfway through. David Lynch has said that he likes to preserve a sense of mystery to his movies, but here there is more than a mere mystery - it's a morass. Laura Dern is "a woman in trouble" according to the poster, forced to act her way through the live-action equivalent of "Duck Amuck". There is the avant-garde, and then there is whatever Mr. Lynch is up to.

6. Superbad (dir. Greg Mottola)

If you had loser friends and were ever in high school, this movie is basically your fantasy. Perhaps the best film yet loosed upon audiences by the omnipresent Apatow hit factory, Superbad is crass and affectionate in equal measure, refusing to descend into cartoonish shorthand, a la American Pie a decade earlier. Riotous; check Seth Rogen and Bill Hader as Keystone Kops wrecking their cruiser to the strains of Van Halen's epic "Panama."

5. Eastern Promises (dir. David Cronenberg)

Eastern Promises is of a piece with Cronenberg's late (or mid?) career renaissance. His stylized ultraviolence has been placed with a nauseating realism, but he has turned away from the conceptualism of 2005's A History of Violence, instead spinning a simple yarn about an English nurse and a Russian gangster struggling to protect an abandoned child that also turns out to be a damning piece of evidence. The kind of film that connects the criminal underworld with the mythical Underworld, shut out completely from the daylight.

4. No Country For Old Men (dir. Joel and Ethan Coen)

If it really were about a man on the run with $2 million and the psychopath hot on his trail, it would still be a great movie; perhaps, even, a greater one, at least in the eyes of its intended audience. But No Country For Old Men is far more than a potboiler: it is an unsparing meditation on the inexorable nature (and intertwining) of violence and fate. Who lives and dies seems less a function of preordained storytelling and more and more like a flip of a coin.

3. Zodiac (dir. David Fincher)

Zodiac has often been referred to as a "procedural," and that it is: we follow our principles - Jake Gylenhall, Mark Ruffalo, and Robert Downey, Jr. - down the rabbit hole of poison pen letters, anonymous phone calls, even hand-lettered movie posters - a never-ending series of blind alleys in pursuit of northern California's infamous Zodiac killer. David Fincher returns here with a subtler flourish, mostly eschewing the digitally-enhanced camera trickery of previous efforts Fight Club and Panic Room for shots that take you deeper into the story instead of distracting you from it. In the end the movie makes its stab at the Zodiac's true identity, but in truth the murderer is more construct that actual human being - an object of obsession.

2. Control (dir. Anton Corbijn)

Here are the young men: three would go on to form New Order, one of the most artistically and commercially successful bands of the 1980s; the other hanged himself at the age of 23, leaving behind a wife and daughter. Together, for a brief time, they were Joy Division. Director Anton Corbijn doesn't make his personal connection to the story explicit - he emigrated to England from Holland, drawn by the band's music - but his photographs form a seminal part of Joy Division's posthumous iconography, and rather than distancing them from their legend, he frames them in it. Control is an act of love, simultaneously a telling of Ian Curtis' story through the prism of his art and an appreciation of it.

1. There Will Be Blood (dir. Paul Thomas Anderson)

A week removed I still consider this a modern American masterpiece; perhaps the impression the movie made in my mind is greater than the film itself. Is it P.T. Anderson's Citizen Kane? Such a sentiment is reductive, I think, condescending to Anderson, who has created something profoundly original here - a vision of the black entrepreneurial heart that built this country atop the slag heap of its bastard ideals. Daniel Day-Lewis wears the facts on his face: we have no need to see the common man beneath his jackboot of treachery and exploitation. There is no God but money, and this is His gospel.

Honorable mentions: I'm Not There (dir. Todd Haynes), The Lives of Others (dir. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck), The Wind That Shakes the Barley (dir. Ken Loach), The Simpsons Movie (dir. David Goldman), Rescue Dawn (dir. Werner Herzog), Hot Fuzz (dir. Edgar Wright)