SCOTT TOBIAS
Top 10
1. No Country For Old Men
2. There Will Be Blood
3. Zodiac
4. The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford
5. Knocked Up
6. Lake Of Fire
7. Once
8. Joshua
9. Black Book
10. Syndromes And A Century
The Next Five
Though it's tempting to imagine what Terrence Malick or Werner Herzog might have done with Chris McCandless' misadventures in untamed America, director Sean Penn's Into The Wild finds a sensible middle ground between triumph and tragedy. Nothing in Ben Affleck's career could have anticipated the mature sensibility behind his powerful adaptation of Dennis Lehane's Gone Baby Gone, which captures the grit and language of working-class Boston with far more authenticity than the overpraised Mystic River. Atonement may look like a prestige Merchant-Ivory gloss on Ian McEwan's novel, but the frilly period trappings never obscure a story that deals with uglier human impulses like jealousy, self-interest, and lies that are possibly unforgivable. As with the other movies in the Bourne trilogy, The Bourne Ultimatum provided a welcome late-summer antidote to CGI-driven blockbusters, all while upping the ante with unforgettable sequences at the Waterloo train station and across the rooftops of Algiers. With an assist from co-director Vincent Paronnaud, Marjane Satrapi has turned her autobiographical graphic novel Persepolis into an utterly winning portrait of growing up as a willful young woman in patriarchal Iran.
Performance
Carice van Houten, Black Book.
Director Paul Verhoeven has a thing for iconic blondes who gain leverage through brazen sexuality, from Renée Soutendijk in The Fourth Man to Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct. For his triumphant return to Dutch filmmaking after two decades in Hollywood, Verhoeven played starmaker again by discovering the ravishing Carice van Houten, whose brassy turn as a member of the Dutch Resistance powers Verhoeven's subversive take on the WWII adventure film. Whether seducing the Nazis through song and sass or absorbing the cruelty of a Dutch mob hellbent on punishing collaborators, Van Houten has a movie-star magnetism that's irrepressible.
Overrated
Away From Her
In many ways, Sarah Polley's adaptation of Alice Munro's short story "The Bear Came Over The Mountain" is unimpeachable: Julie Christie and Gordon Pinsent are both superb as a long-married couple shaken by the onset of Alzheimer's, and it's rare to see such a clear-eyed look at the ravages of age. But just because Polley is making a movie about senior citizens, does she have to direct like one, too? Many critics praised the 27-year-old actress-turned-director for her "maturity," but her restraint at times seems like an absence of imagination, replaced by an austerity that often dulls the volatile emotions at play.
Underrated
Hostel, Part II
The backlash against the so-called "torture porn" movement doomed Eli Roth's Hostel sequel from the start, but all those self-righteous sky-is-falling condemnations missed the sly, knowing sensibility behind all that ritualistic bloodletting. Roth could have returned to the well by simply feeding more bodies through his Slovak grinder, but by focusing as much on the torturers as the tortured, he considers the petty cost of human life and the power of money to afford experiences that are supposed to be priceless. In this world, death is made to order: Customers are even provided with beepers, as if they were waiting for a table at The Cheesecake Factory.
Most Pleasant Surprise
Before The Devil Knows You're Dead
Director Sidney Lumet has made many great films over the last half-century, but to say his career has tapered off over past two decades is putting it mildly: Few would argue that movies such as A Stranger Among Us, Guilty As Sin, Critical Care, Gloria, and Find Me Guilty are on par with the likes of 12 Angry Men, Dog Day Afternoon, and The Verdict. But the revitalized 83-year-old director officially got off the mat with Before The Devil Knows You're Dead, a crackerjack thriller that benefits from his fine touch with actors and his lifelong fascination with ordinary men who get in over their heads.
Guilty Pleasure
Music & Lyrics
Yes, it's a by-the-numbers romantic comedy, featuring the groaningly inevitable pairing of old hands Hugh Grant and Drew Barrymore. But sometimes the formula satisfies, and film's focus on a long-in-the-tooth songwriter (Grant) who's too accustomed to selling out has real poignancy and truth to it. When he and his flower-girl lyricist (Barrymore) create a song that actually means something, he's so used to picking up whatever paychecks that come his way that he isn't prepared to fight for his vision. In spite of the film's synthetic moments, it's more genuine than expected, and the fake-'80s original soundtrack (especially the Wham!-inspired "Pop! Goes My Heart") is a fizzy delight.
Future Film That Time Forgot
Primeval
A cheap, sub-Lake Placid Jaws knock-off set in war-ravaged Burundi. An unexpected and thoroughly tasteless subplot involving African genocide. Orlando Jones. It all adds up to the Blood Diamond of 25-foot killer-crocodile movies, certainly the only horror film of 2007 to evoke ongoing modern tragedies like Darfur in the name of B-movie fun. No one can say it isn't a movie of its time, but between the hilariously third-rate CGI and a C-list cast led by a formerly ubiquitous 7-Up pitchman hanging onto the bottom rung, Primeval seems destined to go from the cutout bins of today to the dustbins of tomorrow.
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