With the Oscars behind us now, I thought it would be time, finally, to reveal my picks for the top ten films of 2007, along with some other choices, even an honorable mention.

1. Into the Wild

Every year there are typically a select few films that I unabashedly love. Last year there were three, with United 93, Little Children, and Children of Men. This year, there was one. Into the Wild. Sean Penn’s glorious, emotionally wrenching tale takes us all around the country with 23-year-old Christopher McCandless (Emile Hirsch, in a star-making turn), who decides to abandon his family, his belongings, everything, so that he can live a life free of consumerism and redundancy. The film features a lot of great performances, particularly by Catherine Keener, William Hurt, and Marcia Gay Harden, but it’s Hal Halbrook who delivers my favorite performance of the year. As an aging patriarchal figure to the young Christopher, he becomes the heart and center of the film, especially in one brief, heart-wrenching scene, where he makes an offer that the young boy may or may not refuse . Into the Wild is an extraordinary piece of work that I will carry with me for a long time to come. (more…)

Atonement is a very well made, if a little bit underwhelming, film that features a handful of good performances, gorgeous cinematagraphy, and a twist ending that makes up for a lot of the third-act story problems I had. I liked it a whole lot more than I thought I would. I’ve never been a big fan of period romance movies, but this one gets a whole lot right.

It all starts with the casting. James McAvoy is for sure one of the most exciting new faces in the movies. All the attention last year was paid to Forest Whitaker’s commanding, Oscar-winning performance in The Last King of Scotland, but the question I kept asking myself while watching the movie was, what about this other guy? He’s fantastic in that film, and he’s excellent here. Keira Knightley, who is doing her best work under the guidance of Joe Wright, who directed her in this and the better 2005 version of Pride & Prejudice, shows not just how beautiful she can be but also how she can act far better than (more…)

To this day I am amazed at movies that have everything going for it and still manage to disappoint. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is the perfect example of a movie that shouldn’t be a letdown, that shouldn’t be mundane, slow, pointless. I mean, this film has a ton of great facets. Tim Burton. Johnny Depp. Helena Bonham Carter. Alan Rickman. There’s singing. There’s brooding. There’s bloodshed. And there are pies… delicious meat-filled pies. I was expecting one of the five best films of the year. And that’s on top of this film being recognized by critics as one of Burton’s best movies in years, and it just won the Golden Globe for Best Musical or Comedy, over Hairspray and Juno. What do I say to that? Blasphemy!

Sweeney Todd marks Burton’s fifth disappointment in a row, following Planet of the Apes (which shall forever be his worst and only truly bad film), Big Fish (his best film this decade but still not great), Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (a sad experience for major fans of the Gene Wilder original), and the Corpse Bride (a pale imitation of Nightmare Before Christmas). Burton seems to be becoming the new Rob Reiner (more…)

I’ve learned over the past decade to expect the unexpected from Paul Thomas Anderson, one of the most exciting and talented filmmakers working today. But nothing could’ve prepared us for There Will Be Blood. Where did this film come from inside of him? It’s as if after Punch Drunk Love he decided to take the biggest 180 he could and come up with something nobody would expect from him. While this is a superb film, beautifully shot, memorably scored, with one of the most commanding performances of the year by Daniel Day Lewis, it didn’t affect me on an emotional level like Boogie Nights, Magnolia, and Punch Drunk Love did. In essence, I admired There Will Be Blood more than I loved it. But it’s an astonishing film nonetheless with an especially engrossing first hour.

Director Anderson’s first film was the promising Sydney (retitled Hard Eight by the studio and taken out of his hands for a different version that Anderson didn’t approve of) in 1996, and he followed that up a year later with the electric Boogie Nights, a movie that never (more…)

 I need to start giving up hope for movies that have long been delayed for a theatrical release. In November I walked into Southland Tales trying to be as optimistic as possible, ignoring the bad buzz and the 18-month delay, but was ultimately let down by the final product. And now there’s another long-delayed film, also starring Mandy Moore even (who had quite the busy year in 2007, 5 films and not a single good one), entitled Romance & Cigarettes, finally making a limited run around the country. I remember reading about this movie my freshman… year… of… college, almost four years ago. Kate Winslet is one of my favorites, and I always like to keep up on her new films (although All the King’s Men and Flushed Away have strangely passed me by…). This film was shot in the Spring of 2004, and I remember when the first pictures of her appeared on the Internet. Wow, I thought. This movie is going to be fantastic.

Then three and a half years went by and I kind of forgot about the movie. I’ve looked it up every once in awhile on IMDB, but I assumed by the end of 2006 that the movie would eventually just be released to DVD, if that. The funny thing is that throughout this whole period I was always interested (more…)

There’s a lot that’s right and there’s a lot that’s wrong about this third try in translating Richard Matheson’s sensational 1954 novel for the big screen, but one of the masterstrokes of this version was casting Will Smith in the lead role of Robert Neville. He overcomes a lot of the script problems to make this work fairly well for the first two-thirds of the running time. The movie gets away from him in the last half-hour or so with an ending that doesn’t really satisfy. Aall the material with just Robert and his dog walking around desolate New York City is sensational. But when the movie resorts to CGI monsters and special effects, the enjoyment level just drains away.

The premise is chilling and honestly feels like something that could happen in the near future if we aren’t careful. A cure for cancer has apparently been found, but the formula backfires, killing most of New York City’s residents and zombie-fying (is that a word?) the undead into creepy creatures that lurk in the darkness. Robert Neville is apparently the only one in the state to be immune to the disease, yet he searches every day for others (more…)

These National Treasure movies are pure fun. I remember I walked into the first one back in 2004 expecting another dull unimaginative Disney-Bruckheimer flick but was pleasantly surprised. The original became one of my favorite mainstream popcorn flicks of the year. While the sequel isn’t quite up to par with the first one, especially in the tired third act, National Treasure: Book of Secrets still has enough entertainment value to fill two movies. For my money, these two movies are better than most of the summer blockbusters that studios are churning out these days. They’re adventure movies for the whole family, and they are stupid and ridiculous movies that set out to do exactly what they’re supposed to do. Entertain.

The whole thing starts not with a Disney logo, but with a Disney cartoon. Part of the fun of seeing this in the theatre was being treated to a new Goofy cartoon! Huh?? What?? I haven’t seen a cartoon before a movie since I was, oh, 5 or 6. This was a practice used in the 20’s and 30’s when audience members would get a couple shorts and a couple cartoons before the feature film. I figured we wouldn’t really see anything like this again. At least we still get some movie trailers, right? Well, I really enjoyed (more…)

I saw a movie this week that’s worse than Alvin and the Chipmunks. And it stars three Oscar winners and is directed by an Oscar winner. What movie is this? The shockingly dull Charlie Wilson’s War. I haven’t struggled so much to get through a movie since M. Night Shymalan’s Lady in the Water, which came out way back in July of 2006. This is an awful, tired, bore of a movie. Thankfully it has a running time of about 90 minutes. If this movie had been Lord of the Rings length, I would’ve tried to hang myself from the theatre balcony.

I could try to explain the plot of the movie, but honestly, it will put you to sleep. I spent the first half hour watching this movie trying to figure out what was happening and also trying to find something to care about up there on the screen. It’s all based on a true story and it’s set in the 1980’s. Tom Hanks, who hits his third strike here after 2004’s creepy The Polar Express and 2006’s godawful The Da Vinci Code, is well-respected congressmen Charlie Wilson (more…)

Yeah, it’s pretty much as bad as you’d expect. I came across a four-star review of this movie a few days ago and thought that maybe there could be an element of this movie that could work, that it could be surprisingly entertaining and fun. There’s one 20-minute section toward the beginning of the movie that is surprisingly tolerable, and I thought that it was possible the movie could redeem itself from months of astonishingly horrible, bang-your-head-against-the-door-until-you-die kind of advertising that only a blind man and his deaf younger sister could love. Alas, a stupid “crisis” occurs and the movie becomes as headache-inducing as the ads promised. This movie made me ache with pain by the final half-hour.

So we learn in the beginning that the three chipmunks spend their days in a forest singing contemporary tunes like Daniel Powter’s “Bad Day,” and stuffing acorns in tall trees.One of the trees they’re dancing around in gets cut down suddenly and sent into downtown L.A. to be put up as a Christmas tree. The three chipmunks escape and find themselves in the bag (or muffin basket, don’t ask) of Dave (Jason Lee), whose newest demo track has been turned down yet again by a millionaire producer (a really annoying David Cross). Lo and behold, the chipmunks can sing! Yay! They can help Dave make it big. But first, of course, Dave has to discover that these three chipmunks talk, which surprisingly doesn’t weird him out as much as you might think (more…)

The Coen Brothers’ incredible new movie No Country for Old Men is one of the most memorable films of the year. It has lingered in mind each and every day since seeing it two weeks ago. It is a purely entertaining class act of drama, action, and suspense, and it features the most dynamic performance of the year by Javiar Bardem, playing one of the most ruthless, scary, and believable villains I’ve ever seen in a movie. This guy is terrifying. There is one major character and subplot of the movie, unfortunately, that didn’t really work for me, that seemed appropriate for a different kind of film but not for this movie. Maybe I expected too much. This film is so good on so many levels that my minor problems with it shouldn’t be taken too seriously. This is, in essence, a movie not to be missed.

The less you know about the movie, the better it is. I avoided all the reviews, all the plot summaries, all the trailers. I think all I had seen before I saw the film were some TV spots, most of which featured that amazing shot of Javiar Bardem walking away from an exploding car. All you need to know going into this film is that it is about one man named Llewelyn (Josh Brolin) and his botched attempt to steal some cash in Texas, 1980. There’s a killer Anton (Bardem) hot on his trail, who is willing to murder anyone his path to get between him and the retrieval of the money. And then there’s the old town Sherrif Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) who is investigating the trail that Anton has set for himself. That’s it. That’s all you need to know. The delight of the movie is in the not knowing where it’s going to go next. The Coen Brothers always keep the audience guessing from beginning to end. I was shocked a lot at certain developments, and I was never spoon-fed a single plot twist. This is a real-deal thriller.

And that’s all I want to say for those of you who haven’t seen the movie. If you haven’t seen it yet, go. Don’t walk. Run. The rest of my review is only for those who have seen it, because I want to talk about the problems I had with the third act of the film, as well as moments that I loved. Go see it. I’ll be talking with you soon.
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