For a movie freak who devours Something Weird special-edition DVDs, Grindhouse was three hours of nirvana, a movie that just made me happy to be alive. People complained that Death Proof was too talky and not a real grindhouse picture at all. To them, I'd say that: 1) real low-budget horror movies feature plenty of talk, since dialogue is cheap to film and pads the running time, and 2) the talk here is prime. I loved spending time with the women in this film. It was like finally getting to hang out with the cool girls in high school. But more than that, Death Proof is about the utter destruction of the American male macho archetype, as represented by Stuntman Mike with his big hair and his Icy Hot jacket. It's like demolishing Mount Rushmore and then spitting on the rubble. Considering the macho posturing that continues to dominate world politics, this is 2007's most radical movie by far. —Joe Blevins
Separately, maybe, Planet Terror and Death Proof aren't spectacular , and at times, they edge on forgettable (though Tarantino's deconstruction of the slasher movie, complete with wicked awesome car chase, was underrated on this side of the Atlantic), but the Grindhouse package was a marvel. The fake trailers, the aesthetic, the adrenaline-fueled mayhem of the thing transformed going to the movies into a fuel-blown cinema experience. With the right audience, this was the most fun you could have in a theatre in 2007, and made the price of admission, for the first time in a long time, seem like a bargain. —Greg Carere, Toronto, Ontario
We witness a kind of apocalypse in Superbad, but it's a quiet, invisible one. Seth and Evan's world is a self-contained bubble, where life is an ongoing conversation, moving from phone to car to high school with the fluidity and weightlessness of a dream, and not even soccer balls are allowed to impinge on it. While there have been accusations of misogyny, they don't belong to the film—Seth and Evan's world ends, not because of some tantalizing siren tearing them apart, but because their dreamworld dissipates on contact with the real thing. All that's left is to step onto the escalator and go down, down, down into the deep dark waters of commitment. Welcome to adulthood, guys. Go buy something. —Kent Beeson (a.k.a. "kza")
Am I the only person under the age of 50 who thought [Away From Her] was the best movie of the year? Maybe it's because it's the first movie I cried in since Harry And the Hendersons when I was 7, when the dad punches Harry in the face and tells him he doesn't love him. Maybe because now at the ripe old age of 26, I feel like I am finally more impressed with amazing acting and a well-crafted story than novelty and general oddness. Maybe because after watching my grandparents fade away in a nursing home a few years ago, I was blown away by how realistic and accurate it seemed. Either everyone will watch this 30 years from now and realize what a gem it was, or I'll watch it 30 years from now and wonder what the hell I was thinking. —Andy O., Chicago, Illinois
Few filmmakers are as eager to muddy the moral waters as Paul Verhoeven, the impish provocateur behind the twisted political allegory Starship Troopers and such monuments to chauvinism as Hollow Man and Basic Instinct. But with Black Book, Verhoven has finally struck the perfect balance between the puerile and the profound. Carice van Houten spends much of the film topless (it could have just as easily been called Shadows And Fog… And Tits), and inevitably suffers a series of lurid onscreen defilements. Yet as her seduction of the head Nazi officer deepens into a genuine emotional attachment, the film cannily raises the stakes of Starship Troopers' unsettling embrace of totalitarianism by making him a sympathetic—even heroic—figure. Verhoeven has produced a remarkably satisfying, visceral thriller that also raises troubling questions about who and what audiences really cheer for. —Jason Persse, Brooklyn, New York
Is it fair to love a movie, even call it one of the best things you saw all year, when you don't quite understand it? There's no small amount of mastery in the way Syndromes And A Century makes a satisfying and hauntingly beautiful film about characters we see only glimpses of, in narratives that meander aimlessly before they disappear completely. Telling the same story, with much of the same dialogue, twice in two different settings sounds forced and film-schoolish. Yet the resulting storylines feel so natural in each environment that the structure becomes just another story element floating in and out of the audience's consciousness. It's not hard to make a confusing, opaque narrative (right, Richard Kelly?), but it takes a truly special film to command a viewer's attention for days even as it continues to perplex him. —Jordan Miller
At first, I didn't like this even as much as A History of Violence, and I liked that movie somewhat less than everybody else seemed to. But it stayed with me for days, and eventually I decided that I didn't see a better movie last year. The deceptively direct narrative is dripping with ambiguity, erotic tension, shifting morality and an almost supernatural danger. It's also as technically impressive as the much more hyped No Country for Old Men or There Will Be Blood, though subtler and more elegant in its craft. It reminds me most of the great B-thrillers of the post-war period, which were frequently bold and perverse underneath their simple genre surfaces. In my head I can even imagine a version of Eastern Promises from back then, directed by Fritz Lang and with Richard Widmark as Nikolai, and I mean that as the highest compliment. —Marc Jozefowicz, Los Angeles, California
More than any other writer or director working today, Judd Apatow knows how men talk to each other. He has also surrounded himself with a stable of incredible actors who can execute his ideas perfectly. Because of this dedication to realism in his characters, his movies make an impression on me that goes beyond the subject matter. Knocked Up came at a time that made it very relevant to me. Not so much the actual pregnancy part, but the themes of life after college, male friendship, dating, marriage, having kids, growing up, and responsibility that the movie explores are all things that are on the minds of guys my age. Apatow handles these subjects with a reverence and humor that I haven't seen since, well, The 40-Year-Old Virgin. —Austin, Searcy, Arkansas
The best part of The Bourne Ultimatum is that it provides a recent example that proves the lie that action blockbusters need to be mindless popcorn fun to be entertaining. I run across this all the time, with people cutting some brainless flicks full of explosions some slack because they think quality and excitement are mutually exclusive propositions. Well, I defy you to find another movie out there as exciting as this one, or one as expertly made. I only worry now that it has ruined all other action movies for me, but hope that it has succeeded in raising the bar for all to come. —Andy Sayers
Persepolis can't help but be viewed through the lens of our current political reality, but it's not burdened by it. As charming and funny as it is moving and thought-provoking, this animated film shows one little girl's personal experience of a changing world that we as adults have yet to fully understand. Marjane is one of the strongest characters of the year, made stronger by the fact that she has personal flaws and is often unsure of herself. The film doesn't provide solutions or great revelations, only the struggles of individuals facing difficult situations and their own personal discovery and acceptance. —Chris Fredda, Brooklyn, New York
Much has been written about the film's melding of the personal and the political, but what really astounds is just how accessible Persepolis is. Never playing to arthouse pretense, the immense power of Marjane Satrapi's film is in its artlessness and vulnerability. The pain that Satrapi has for the loss of her country is so direct, so palpable, that it demands a type of empathy for Iran and Iranians that only a monster or a Bushie would deny. —Jeremy Cohen, Los Angeles, California
Okay, say what you will about its naive plot, its unfair ethnic depictions, its lowest of lowbrow violence and honestly abhorrent moral message. It's still very pretty. 300 joins the ranks of Robert Rodriguez's Sin City and the Japanese "live-action anime" film Casshern in a growing category of "digital backlot" movies that not only blur the line between live-action and animation to the point that they are indiscernible, but demonstrate a filmmaker's immense potential to control every aspect of the frame. Ignore the words coming out of their mouths on this one and just concentrate on the pure style. —Kris Ligman, Los Angeles, California
Forget Spider-Man versus Venom or John McClane versus a friggin' helicopter—the biggest show-down this year came from an endearingly nerdy documentary. The essence of geekdom is an inordinate passion for something that most people are indifferent to, and [King Of Kong] takes what appears from the outside to be a low-stakes competition and reveals that, when viewed from within its own subculture, it becomes an epic struggle between good and evil, or at least the status quo and the new guard. Bonus points for being a documentary where the personalities are in front of the camera instead of behind it. —John Shelton
One could argue that Charles Ferguson's gripping account of what went wrong in Iraq following the fall of Saddam Hussein doesn't offer any facts that haven't already been reported in the newspapers or on television. But I would counter that we've never seen all these pieces of information assembled in such a complete and clear-eyed fashion. Director Charles Ferguson walks us through every decision that was made from the day U.S. troops assumed control of Baghdad, and how those choices wound up costing us the peace we swore we were going to bring to the region. I would love to have one of those talking heads that still blindly support the war watch No End In Sight and attempt to offer a point-by-point refutation of the film's arguments. They won't, of course, because it's easier to just dismiss the film as another Bush-bashing documentary and therefore not worthy of serious discussion. It's possible that No End In Sight won't stand the test of time, but right now it's arguably 2007's most vital movie. —Ethan Alter, Brooklyn, New York
MISCELLANEOUS KISSES AND DISSES
I never realized I liked Westerns before this year. Sure, I liked The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, but saying that you like Westerns because of that movie is akin to saying you like gases because of oxygen. This year, two Westerns managed to make it onto my personal top five, albeit for very different reasons. The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford is long, slow, and has every indication of being in existence solely to fulfill Brad Pitt's childhood dream of being Jesse James. But it was my favorite movie of the year due almost entirely to Casey Affleck's Robert Ford. He goes from sniveling fanboy to disillusioned killer to resigned old man, and makes it all work. 3:10 To Yuma, my number five, was enjoyable for almost the opposite reason: sure, it has pretensions to being a study on how a man needs to prove himself, but really, it's about Christian Bale becoming a badass with Russell Crowe's help. A lot of people I know claimed not to understand the ending, but it was the best possible conclusion; Crowe may have had a fleeting aspiration to decency, but in the end, he's still a ruthless asshole. —Bill, Phoenix, Arizona
Michael Bay is an avant-gardist in our midst. Transformers gives us giant robots fighting, yes, but whose nervous systems was this film intended for? Frame after frame of whip-cut close-ups of abstract CG; don't let the vaguely racist undertones of the pig-trough characters and dialogue fool you, this film was made by a man as enthralled by his hang-ups as David Lynch. And oh yeah, black robot dies first. Sorry, yo. —Jack Monahan
If 300 is meant purely as mindless visual, I can only assume we're meant to ogle the near-naked beefcake bodies. But then they go accusing the villains, whose leader is depicted as effeminately as possible, of being "boy-lovers," and filming a sex scene that seems to go out of its way to avoid showing anything related to the usually-abundant beefcake male body. It's the only movie I have ever seen that is simultaneously homoerotic and homophobic, making for a very sexually confusing viewing experience. —Jon Marquis, Rochester, New York
There's a lot to admire about Todd Haynes' I'm Not There, but the level of enthusiasm for it is a mystery to me. Why take such a radical approach to a figure that's been dissected for decades? Why not someone you could say something new about? It would be one thing if I'm Not There exploded or transcended all the layers of critical sediment Bob Dylan has gathered through the years, but it seems content to coexist with them within one of the safest movie concepts of our time: the Revolutionary '60s. Does anyone else see the irony in Dylan calling out "Mr. Jones" for having "been through all of F. Scott Fitzgerald's books," an artist then 40 years past his prime—in a movie about an artist now 40 years past his prime? Did anyone think that one of the most lauded movies of 2007 would score footage of Vietnam with "All Along The Watchtower," even ironically? Did anyone else balk at the cinematic cannibalism of "Don't Look Back," a film that ably explored Dylan's shifting personas without the benefit of 40 years of hindsight? And why did the over-literal interpretations and thudding puns of Across The Universe raise critics' hackles, while Cate Blanchett's Dylan smirks "Just like a woman," with no objections? Trying to reinterpret a figure as old as Dylan risks detouring into cliché or empty conceptualism, each of which I'm Not There suffers from a little more than critics would like to have acknowledged. —Jordan Miller
2007 is a great example of how it's a great time to be a cinema lover. Some movie buffs refuse to see anything made before their birth, and often we overreact and shout, "Everything worth seeing was made in the '60s. Today's movies are crap!" But we do a disservice to contemporary cinema. Every major studio now has an indie label. The niche for the art film and the independent film is only getting bigger. Foreign films from places like Mexico, Romania, and Korea are breaking new ground and breaking through to bigger audiences. I'd say we're in a Renaissance for documentaries, but that would have to mean that there was some past time when they were this good. It's a great time to love the movies, and I have only higher and higher hopes for cinema. —Robert Anton
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