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Best of 2007

By Kelly Jane Torrance
December 28, 2007

This was a particularly tough year to single out 10 movies from the hundreds released. Two of our greatest directors released masterful films that didn't even make my cut — David Lynch with "Inland Empire" and David Cronenberg with "Eastern Promises." As with most Top 10 lists, this is a varied group of films. But I noticed one theme this year: The best filmmakers, particularly the Europeans, grappled with their countries' sometimes complicated histories, including two that almost made my list: Englishman Ken Loach's "The Wind That Shakes the Barley" and Romanian Cristian Mungiu's "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days" ("4 luni, 3 saptamani si 2 zile").

1. Red Road — For the second year in a row, I've put a debut on the top of my list. (Last year it was the powerful German film "The Lives of Others," which also fits the theme I mention above.) English director Andrea Arnold has crafted a perfectly paced thriller, a moving drama and a profound character study, all in her very first film. Kate Dickie also makes a staggering screen debut as a woman who becomes obsessed with a man from her past she sees on one of the CCTV screens she monitors in Glasgow, Scotland. One of the many scenes from this film I'll never forget is a heartbreaking moment near the end. The woman makes a scarecrow of sorts by stuffing her dead daughter's clothes in an attempt to remember what it was like to hold her. I get chills just recalling it now.

2. After the Wedding (Efter brylluppet) — Her English-language debut, "Things We Lost in the Fire," also released this year, was pretty good, but let's hope Danish director Susanne Bier hasn't abandoned Europe — and co-writing her own films — permanently. This eloquent film, starring "Casino Royale" villain Mads Mikkelsen as a man who has his past sprung upon him when he travels from India back to Denmark in the hope of getting a rich man to donate to his orphanage, has a delicate subtlety that "Things" couldn't quite muster.

3. There Will Be Blood — Young American auteur Paul Thomas Anderson's already impressive career takes a sharp turn upward with this character study disguised as an epic that's unlike anything he's done before. Daniel Day-Lewis puts in the performance of the year as a misanthropic but magnetic California oilman in this loose adaptation of Upton Sinclair's novel "Oil!" But then, everything about this carefully made film screams "masterpiece."

4. Control — Another almost-perfect film. Why did it take rock photographer Anton Corbijn so long to make his first feature? This biopic of the late, lamented Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis is breathtaking. The look is as beautiful as any of Mr. Corbijn's photographs, and the band's striking sound is astonishingly re-created by a young and talented British cast.

5. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Le scaphandre et le papillon) — This touching and original French film made by American painter Julian Schnabel tells the true story of Jean-Dominique Bauby, a man who puts us all to shame. The editor of French Elle suffered a stroke in his 40s that left him almost completely paralyzed. Communicating by blinking his left eye — the only movement available to him — he first tells his therapist he yearns for death and then, shaking off self-pity, dictates a poetic book about the consolations of imagination and memory.

6. Lust, Caution (Se, jie) — Ang Lee continues his career-long exploration of secrets with this devastating tale of espionage set in World War II Japanese-occupied Shanghai. It still haunts me months after its release. No film this year needed so few words to tell its story; it is all in the faces and bodies of stars Tony Leung Chiu-Wai and Tang Wei. An honorable mention goes to Paul Verhoeven's first Dutch film in years, "Black Book" ("Zwartboek"), which tells a similar tale with just as much brio and almost as much emotion.

7. Away From Her — This was a good year for debuts, but Canadian indie actress Sarah Polley takes the cake for making her first masterpiece before she even turned 30, showing great intelligence in writing this moving adaptation of an Alice Munro story and great feeling in directing it. It didn't hurt that she had one of cinema's greatest actresses, Julie Christie, to bring to life the woman stricken with Alzheimer's who just might be getting revenge for past wrongs by forgetting her husband and falling in love with a fellow patient.

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