TASHA ROBINSON
Top 10
1. No Country For Old Men
2. Into The Wild
3. Once
4. Atonement
5. The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford
6. Deep Water
7. The Lives Of Others
8. The Orphanage
9. Offside
10. I'm Not There
The Next Five
Paul Thomas Anderson takes his career in a new direction with the heady Upton Sinclair adaptation There Will Be Blood, which is so broad, so beautiful, and so accomplished that it suggests he should permanently leave behind modern quirk in favor of gothic historicals. Wes Anderson, by contrast, sticks to modern quirk with the distinctly odd but almost unbearably pretty The Darjeeling Limited. It could be more focused, but it's still gorgeously crafted. David Cronenberg is back on form with the impressively tight, capable Eastern Promises, starring Viggo Mortensen as a Russian mobster wannabe in London, and Naomi Watts as a woman upsetting his plans. And it was a good year for big debut features: Ben Affleck does an impressive job of directing his brother Casey in the Dennis Lehane adaptation Gone Baby Gone, while Vincent Paronnaud and Marjane Satrapi bring her autobiographical graphic novels to vivid animated life in Persepolis.
Performance
Javier Bardem, No Country For Old Men
No Country For Old Men is a performance paradise; all the significant roles work together, in a buttoned-down, straight-faced-smile sort of way, to build the film's unbearable wry country tension. If only Tommy Lee Jones, Josh Brolin, and Woody Harrelson could be awarded a single prize for best collective, unified performance of the year. But in the end, Bardem, with his purring, insinuating performance as a psychopath on a spree, edges them all out. Together, they make the movie, but he gives it all its darkness.
Overrated
Knocked Up
All the fans slavering over this standard-issue comedy from writer-director Judd Apatow seemed to miss how essentially mean-spirited and ugly it is. From Leslie Mann dismissing her babysitter as a "prissy little high-school cunt" (apparently because she doesn't like sitting after midnight while Mann is out getting drunk?) to the endless low-blow nastiness between protagonists Seth Rogen and Katherine Heigl, it's significantly more hateful and less funny than Apatow's 40-Year-Old Virgin, and it does a lot less to earn its abrupt happy ending. That is, if the reconciliation of two generally unpleasant people who never should have been together in the first place counts as a happy ending.
Underrated
Perfume: The Story Of A Murderer
Technically, Tom Tykwer's adaptation of Patrick Süskind's supposedly unfilmable novel came out in 2006, but only by two days, which means it snuck in too late for inclusion on any of last years' lists. Critics were mixed to negative, and the box-office take was pathetic, but that's to be expected for a movie this ambitious and unusual. Tykwer tackles a difficult story about a boy with no scent and an acute sense of smell by turning it into a soaring, surreal fairy tale, and embracing the dark, creepy, and off-color twists that follow. It's a gorgeous, deeply felt, unpredictable film, marred only by a weirdly off-key performance by Dustin Hoffman, who's frankly starting to rival Robin Williams as a warning sign of a problem film.
Most Pleasant Surprise
Enchanted
It isn't exactly timeless, classic cinema, but after a decade of increasingly creepy Disney princess fetishization, Enchanted is a surprisingly enjoyable spoof on the Disney-princess phenomenon. It's lively, funny, and even sweet, in spite of the knowing tongue-in-cheek humor, and the catchy musical numbers and traditional-cel-animation intro are a bonus that will remind older Disney fans of their childhoods, and let them share the magic with their kids without worrying about crotch-slam humor and off-color gags. Besides, James Marsden as the lunkheaded handsome prince is hilarious, and Amy Adams in the princess role is just adorable. And unlike her princess predecessors, Adams isn't afraid to grab a sword and defend her beloved instead of standing around squealing when villains get villainous.
Guilty Pleasure
Across The Universe
Julie Taymor's Beatles musical is uneven, sloppy, overlong, and intermittently simple-minded, especially in its generic central love story and its oh-so-literal narrative interpretation of many Beatles standards. And yet the cinematography beats just about anything that hit theaters this year, and the surreal, gorgeous production design turns familiar songs into haunting, inspired music videos. Some bits (hello, Eddie Izzard) remain skippable, but the rest turns out to be one of the year's most guiltily rewatchable films.
Future Film That Time Forgot
Perfect Stranger
This thoroughly mediocre thriller has all the good ingredients of a future FTTF: A surprisingly big-name cast (Halle Berry, poorly emoting her head off; Bruce Willis, half-asleep and smirking it in as usual; Giovanni Ribisi, awkwardly caught between the two), plus hilariously terrible dialogue, a bafflingly clumsy plot, and an idiotic Big Twist to top it all off. The twist sort of helps explain the many, many things throughout the plot that initially make no sense, but by the time the secret is revealed, it's impossible to care.
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