Once
I hate musicals. I hate earnest singer-songwriters with guitars. I hate indie-movies where nothing much happens but people have profoundly understated experiences. I loved this movie. —John Shelton, Prague, Czech Republic
This movie beautifully illustrates how an elegantly simple story involving real characters can always trump cinematic trickery or stylistic flourishes. I cared more for the two main characters in this film than those of any other last year. In our post-irony, postmodern, post-insert-bullshit-academic-phrase world, I think we sometimes fail to appreciate the visceral sensation of being genuinely moved by a film. Once was profoundly moving. It was also entertaining, believable, and an utter delight. —Justin Canada, Los Angeles, California
It may be that the movie musical's greatest enemies are opulent production values and megawatt star power. The film version of Phantom of the Opera was adequate at best, and even recent successes such as Chicago and this year's Sweeney Todd are liable to lose their luster after a few years. Once, on the other hand, is likely to retain its appeal for much longer, precisely because it eschews the business-as-usual pattern of exuberant musical setpieces accompanied by soaring orchestral arrangements. Even viewers who disdain musicals for their inherent artificiality can enjoy Once's lo-fi aesthetic: What other musical dares to stage one of its songs during a late-night walk down to the convenience store for Walkman batteries? Such unassuming direction gives the film an agreeable rhythm, which in turn lends the characters a spontaneity and depth not often found in the genre. When Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova start an impulsive jam session in a music store, we believe that they are discovering the music and their relationship for the very first time. —Kevin McLenithan, Wheaton, Illinois
The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford
Jesse James is the best movie of 2007 that I haven't recommended to a single person. Despite having near-perfect performances from a mega-star (Brad Pitt), a hipster darling (Sam Rockwell), and Ben Affleck's brother (Casey), the best soundtrack of the year, and the most innovative take on the genre since 1994's Dead Man, Jesse James is, for most people, "long and boring." Those who love Westerns, however, will find a film that owes more to Sergio Leone than Terrence Malick and provides one of the most character-driven experiences in the genre. —Patrick McGinn, South Philly
I can't really deny anyone's claim that it's a long, slow movie. It is, without question. It's just that I think its deliberate pace is a strength rather than a weakness, leading to a thoughtful, poetic film that somehow both invokes and deconstructs the mythology of the western outlaw. Director Andrew Dominik puts the only shootout action piece in the first act, then sets out to tell a stately epic that's a quiet reflection on the mythology surrounding the death of the outlaw Jesse James at the hands of Robert Ford. Casey Affleck's Bob Ford breaks your heart with equal parts ambition and desperation, revealing that the movie isn't so much about the exploits of America's most famous outlaw, but rather an elegiac reckoning for the man who dared kill a known murderer, one who wasn't above shooting others in the back. —Andy Sayers, Calgary, Alberta, Canada
Juno
Is it wrong to love a movie that literally everyone else loves? My sister, my boss, my grandmother, that asshole barista with the soul patch at Starbucks, they all love this damn film. Is my hipster-douchebag cred in jeopardy for admitting that I came out of the theater with a beaming smile? In a pop-culture world choking on snarky, cynical irony, Juno is a revelation. The titular character is just that—a snarky, cynical teenage girl living in the imaginary world of Quirktown, surrounded by an impossibly precious supporting cast. Juno's very first line of dialogue could have been ripped directly from Napoleon Dynamite's weird little mouth. But the film quickly proves that the walls of our fantasy worlds are no match for the wrecking ball that is reality. Even in Quirktown, getting knocked up at 16 isn't just a fun little plot device to be peppered with witticisms and one-liners. And Ellen Page. Wow. Watch Page sitting in that recliner on the lawn of perpetually terrified Michael Cera, informing him of their pregnancy, and see the birth (no pun intended) of the next great American actress. (Okay, so she's from Canada, but maybe we can trade Celine Dion back for her.) —Stephen Parkhurst
To me, the backlashers against the film's "quirk-fest" aesthetic are missing the point. Stylized dialogue and soundtrack selections are movie artifices (like period costumes and special effects) that we should have learned to accept by now. Why should the idea that I am witnessing a conversation which could never occur between two real high-schoolers detract from my enjoyment of the movie? If we care about "realism," we can find it (and pathos, too) in the honesty of the characters and their behaviors: Juno's father, who is understandably dismayed but makes it clear throughout that he supports his daughter no matter what; her stepmother, who can't disguise her prejudices but still stands up for Juno when she needs it; and her boyfriend Paulie, who feels confused and excluded but shows himself to be loyal and unashamed of his attachment. —David Rankin, Chicago, IL
Atonement
I loved practically everything about this movie: the way it makes disorienting hairpin turns from comedy of manners to personal tragedy to global carnage; the way it evokes the horrors of war without a single "we've got to take this hill/beach" scene; and the way it filters it all through the eyes of a character who feels deeply responsible for inflicting those horrors on people she loves. The ending is a bit clumsy, but in a year where a lot of great movies rejected traditional resolutions (No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood, Zodiac, Margot At The Wedding, etc.), it was great to see a passionate defense of the purpose of old-fashioned narrative. —Matt, Cleveland, Ohio
Gone Baby Gone
In a year dominated by filmmaking veterans, there were also a handful of notable films by relative newcomers. But who could have guessed that the best of them would be helmed by Hollywood's favorite affable lunkhead, Ben Affleck? Sure enough, Gone Baby Gone was a riveting drama, beginning as a crackerjack kidnapping thriller before becoming something altogether different. Based on a novel by Dennis Lehane, Gone Baby Gone delves into moral territory that's even thornier than that explored by Clint Eastwood's 2003 Lehane adaptation Mystic River. Much of the credit for the film's effectiveness has been given to Lehane and to the film's cast—especially Casey Affleck and awards-magnet Amy Ryan—but Affleck's contribution as a filmmaker should not be underestimated. A native Bostonian, Affleck isn't afraid to paint its working-class residents warts and all, because he knows (and fears) that deep down, he's one of them. —Paul Clark, Columbus, Ohio
ON THE ALSO-RANS
Richard Kelly's Pynchon-esque feat of hyper-recursive, shamelessly dense, aggressively surreal filmmaking is destined for a cult somewhere between Mulholland Dr. and The Big Lebowski. While I can agree, on one level, with the almost unanimous sentiment that Southland Tales was a mess, calling it that sells the film short by presuming it all to be indulgent and unmotivated. Yes, it takes a viewing just to figure out who everyone is; if that scares you off, then you have no shortage of other films lining up to spoon-feed you. This isn't a film for people who accept the depth of their own consumer conditioning as an irreducible fact of the filmgoing experience. If anything, it's for people who want to dismantle as many of their expectations as possible. It's a lot to demand of yourself, but the reward is unlike anything else I've ever felt from a film before. —Sam (a.k.a. "SuperUn1son")
I've never heard a boisterous and responsive festival audience have the wind sucked out of it as quickly as during the first abortion scene in Lake Of Fire. The incredible thing about Tony Kaye's documentary is not its power to shock, but its ability to use shocking footage in a constructive, even transcendent way. Out of all the films I saw this year, nothing was more visceral and enlightening; nothing made me feel so much like cinema had inspired me to a greater understanding of an essential question of human experience. For all the graphic footage of abortion, the shocks are never intended to drive home an ideology. Rather, they establish the urgency of the debate and the legitimacy of the questions surrounding abortion, however flawed the attendant rhetoric might be. This isn't a message movie. Lake Of Fire is more interested in the physical and spiritual cost of the conflict than the conflict itself; it's less about abortion than about society's tortured reaction to life's most painful and irreversible choices. It's the Hearts And Minds of the culture war. And it's by far the best film I saw all year. —Jordan Miller, Greensboro, North Carolina
I am baffled by reviewers who say that Sean Penn's Into The Wild "romanticizes" Chris McCandless's irresponsible wandering. Throughout the film, Penn underscores the degree to which McCandless was not acting entirely out of grand principle, but rather childhood trauma. He turns away from human companionship as soon as the spectre of attachment rears its head because the traumatic relationship with his parents left him unable to trust others. The tragedy of the film is his realization, in the majestic emptiness of Alaska, that his hard-won freedom was hollow in the absence of human connection. And the pain Chris inflicts on those around him is carefully emphasized, from the heartrending look on Hal Holbrook's face when he turns away from him to the scenes of his grief-stricken parents that bookend the film. —Matthew
Joshua takes the universal experiences of having a baby—the sleepless nights, the emotional ups and downs, the constant gnawing knowledge that you've been charged with protecting the defenseless—and flips it into a horror movie. That would normally be enough, but director George Ratliff takes it further, and suggests that these same babies may grow up to hate you for no good reason. We don't know what fuels Joshua's step-by-step dismantling of his nuclear family—many clues are offered, but they all feel like red herrings—but I think the key is his father, played by Sam Rockwell. Rockwell lets his natural, swinging-dick persona inflect his portrayal of an upstanding family man, letting us sense the self-involved lout underneath the caring husband. Coupled with his finance-industry job, it becomes clear that Joshua's goal isn't the destruction of his baby sister, but her salvation—from their gauche parents, the kind of people who would create someone like Joshua. —Kent Beeson (a.k.a. "kza")
Sweeney Todd: Tim Burton, whose movies are often classified as "dark" but usually traffic in a very safe, cute, quirky kind of darkness, has made a genuinely, soul-shatteringly dark picture. And it's a musical! Stephen Sondheim's brilliant songs are given cinematic life, Johnny Depp washes that icky Pirates taste out of our mouths, and buckets of stylized blood ooze out of 19th-century gentlemen's necks. With Depp providing a tangible emotional center, the juxtaposition of tender, gorgeous music and brutal violence reaches extremely powerful heights. The movie-musical, a pretty barren genre for the past 50 years or so (the South Park movie notwithstanding), is taken to new heights as well. When Depp wields his barber knives, it's enough to make me forget the cutesiness of another Burton outsider (his name rhymes with Bedward Fissurehands) forever. —Brian Wolowitz, Chicago, Illinois
It's such a perfect marriage that I wonder why it was never conjured up before: the gore film and the musical, together at last! Both genres revel in their own artificiality, and they're both similarly hyperbolic in regards to big production setpieces. What I mean to say is that it was only a matter of time before we got a film like Sweeney Todd. I know nothing of Sondheim's original stage play, but I do know that Tim Burton's adaptation of said stage play is a rip-roaring exercise in bombastic Grand Guignol. The cast doesn't have the most adept singing voices (especially you, Alan Rickman… sorry), but they sell the emotions with ease. Johnny Depp in particular gives a strange and compelling performance that engenders bits of sympathy for the psychotic Todd even as I recognize there's not much sympathetic about him. Meanwhile, Burton's tendencies toward extravagance and atmosphere at the expense of narrative are used all for good this time around; he's got existing material to work with, and instead of tinkering with the source, he merely built a world around it. The threatening vertical compositions of the sets and the grimy color scheme, all grays and blacks occasionally ripped asunder by fonts of crimson, make the London of Todd feel less like a city and more like a stopover on the way to Hell. Most important, though, is that unlike some other stage-to-screen transpositions, Todd feels like a goddamned movie. A mad, bloody, dank, funny and ferociously entertaining movie, no less. The wait? So worth it. —Steve Carlson
Why in the hell did people dislike this movie so much? The major complaint about the film seems to be "It's another Wes Anderson film. They all look alike." So? Do people look at Monet's Woman With A Parasol and say "Sure, it's pretty and all, but what's with all the impressionism? I mean, can't he just do a normal portrait?" The Darjeeling Limited is Anderson at the top of his game, finally striking the right balance between the emotional resonance of The Royal Tenenbaums and the rich, expressionist imagery of The Life Aquatic (which gets better every time I watch it). Not to mention, it's a really funny movie, easily Anderson's funniest since Rushmore. The scene in the auto-body shop is at once hilarious, painful, and surprisingly sad. If Wes Anderson wants to make a gorgeous film about dysfunctional rich people every few years for the rest of his life, I say more power to him. —Stephen Parkhurst
Visionary director Todd Haynes employs six actors in order to capture each fleeting version of Bob Dylan in this maddening, intoxicating musical/biopic. It's no wonder that, by the film's conclusion, we are no closer to knowing the man, since what Haynes is really shooting for is the myth. In fact, the only tensile thing about his film is the absolute unknowability of this country's most enduring and important pop icon. On paper, this ambitious work looks like high-minded drivel, an impossibly avant-garde approach to a genre worn tragically thin by glossy, overstated drama. But in execution, I'm Not There is a courageously inventive head trip, a musicial in all but the most conventional sense of the word. The truth of the film is that Haynes isn't showing the audience anything new about Dylan, he's just taking the strands (the images, the relationships, the rumors and stories) and tenuously linking them through the purity of the man's music. —Greg Burland
A lot of people dismissed this as "just a crime movie," but really it's "just a crime movie" in the same way that No Country For Old Men is "just a crime movie." What sets this film apart from most every other entry in the heist-film genre is that it understands and explores the essential nature of crime, which, after all, is an expression of pathology. Those pathologies can be economic or personal or familial, and in Before The Devil Knows You're Dead, all three of these brands of dysfunction are put under Sidney Lumet's microscope. The film uses fractured timelines, not to break down how the heist in question gets pulled off, but to show why. The cascade of family resentments, upper-class ennui, and wishful thinking build upon themselves to reveal the sickness of many American relationships, and the hollowness of many of our dreams. —Matthew
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