KEITH PHIPPS
Top 10
1. There Will Be Blood
2. No Country For Old Men
3. Sweeney Todd
4. Once
5. The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford
6. Before The Devil Knows You're Dead
7. Zodiac
8. Atonement
9. Gone Baby Gone
10. I'm Not There
The Next Five
From the cradle to the grave, 2007 had you covered. Ellen Page delivered a star-making performance in Juno; the way she let fear and vulnerability show behind her cynical demeanor jibed perfectly with a film that was as much about shedding a protective layer of irony as about being pregnant at 16. It would nicely fill out a birth-and-death double feature with The Savages, in which the brother-and-sister act of Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney set about the business of living in the face of death and disappointment. It's a theme shared by The Diving Bell And The Butterfly, Julian Schnabel's visually stunning film about a man expressing himself using nothing more than a single eyelid, and This Is England, Shane Meadows' coming-of-age-in-Thatcher's-Britain story of a boy who falls in with a bad element after losing his father in the Falklands War. Meanwhile, in the real world, the documentary The King Of Kong spun a story of would-be video-game champs into a miniature portrait of what it takes to make it in America.
Performance
Philip Seymour Hoffman
Before The Devil Knows You're Dead
Hoffman owned the back half of the year. He delivered stellar performances as a constricted theater professor in The Savages and as a disheveled CIA mastermind in Charlie Wilson's War. But the best Hoffman performance of the year—his best ever, really—can be found in Sidney Lumet's Before The Devil Knows You're Dead. Hoffman plays a drug-addicted part-time criminal whose plan for one last score drags him and everyone around him to depths they never thought they'd see. It's as unnervingly raw piece of acting as you'll ever see.
Overrated
1408
Somehow, this Stephen King adaptation scored decent reviews and attracted a scare-hungry audience. But why? Star John Cusack overacts wildly as a paranormal investigator who loses his shit in a haunted New York hotel room, and the Repulsion-for-the-multiplex plot rolls out against a stylistic background that can best be called direct-to-DVD-esque.
Underrated
The Darjeeling Limited
The lukewarm response to Anderson's latest owed a lot to its familiarity. The setting was India, but it really took place deep in Wes Anderson territory, where melancholy emotions duke it out with hard-won hopefulness as different generations come to understand each other. Maybe a little predictability isn't such a bad thing when it insures an emotionally affecting feast for the eyes every few years.
Most Pleasant Surprise
Dan In Real Life
This lightweight comedy had all the elements of a dreadful romantic farce, but only the tacky happy ending lived up to the low expectations. The rest of Peter Hedges' film, anchored by Steve Carell's soulful performance, emphasized subtlety and lived-in characters in the service of a story about a family get-together that takes an unexpectedly life-changing turn. Any film that makes Dane Cook seem tolerable has some powerful magic on its side.
Guilty Pleasure
Hot Rod
The starring debut of Andy Samberg and the Lonely Island crew that's helped liven up Saturday Night Live via their SNL Digital Shorts series, this unapologetically dumb comedy has a few long laughless stretches. But the good bits—the training montages and Chris Parnell's obsessive AM radio station owner—and a disarming sweetness suggest a cult following might await it someday.
Future Film That Time Forgot
Blood And Chocolate
An acclaimed young-adult novel about werewolves got turned into this dumb horror movie about werewolves, memorable for its waste of a good lead (Agnes Bruckner, why?), budget-friendly Romanian location shooting, and the use of real wolves in place of special effects. Anyone unlucky enough to get stuck seeing it couldn't be blamed for worrying more about the animals' safety than any sort of tension the plot was supposed to create.
- Comments