d+kaz

Most humbly submitted, my favorite films that were given a theatrical run of at least a week in the United States in 2007:

Syndromes and a Century (Weerasethakul, Thailand)
There’s not much to add to this film that I didn’t say in my original review, except how overjoyed I am to have found a filmmaker that makes works as eccentric, experimental, and surprising as they are gentle, caring, and warm-hearted. As much as I love someone as groundbreaking as David Lynch, it is rare to see a filmmaker push a similar degree of cinematic innovation and embrace it in the warm humanism one might find in a film by Jean Renoir.

Colossal Youth (Costa, Portugal)
My find of 2007 was Pedro Costa, and this was my first gateway into the filmography of one of the world’s most distinctive, talented, and important filmmakers. Costa here returns to the Lisbon slums that have served as his cinematic focus since Ossos (1997), and this new feature retains the collaborative aspect of his style he started after that film. The filmmaker uses autobiographical inspiration and creative input from his non-professional cast, but here swerves away from his “purer” documentary version of this style, In Vanda’s Room (2001). This swerve makes Colossal Youth a subtle departure, one that contains a quality of the mythic and mysteriousness that moves subtly closer to genre cinema, and suggests a social-realist ghost story if there ever was such a thing. A more tremendous, visionary, literally haunting film one is unlikely to top in the near future.

Triad Election [Election 2] (To, HK/China)
Prolific neo-studio director Johnnie To improves upon his original Election (2005) with this contemplative, distancing view of Triad violence, Chinese politics, and the gangster genre itself. To’s criticism is spread far and wide, and his glorious widescreen photography and chilled stylization results in a magisterial genre film that cuts deeply into its own romantic and political roots.

The Host (Bong, South Korea)
Perhaps 2007 is the year of the resurrection, or at least re-assertion, of excellent, self-conscious genre cinema. The Host, like Triad Election, is a conventional thing done right, done consistently, done with an assured self-knowledge, and done with a captivating blend of craftsmanship and artistry. Its political allegory is less interesting than its genre roots in social insight through horror and thrills, tearing down and building up a dysfunctional family, and showing yet again Bong’s talent in both unexpected dramedy and his Imamura-like love for the downtrodden losers of the world.

The Wayward Cloud (Tsai, Taiwan)
The jumping off point for Tsai, who returns to his pair of erstwhile lovers from What Time Is It There? (2001) to confront the difficulty of tender, human intimacy and love in a world of commodified sex and desire, not to mention the usual urban melancholy of alienation. The finale is one of the most complex and masterful evocations of the ambiguity of this modern existence.

Ratatouille (Bird, USA)
Pixar’s first studio film; in other words, the company’s first film that isn’t an event, it’s just another of their products. And under Brad Bird’s writing and direction, a small, almost-nothing of a movie turns into something elegant and graceful, inspired in motion and color, in character and in humanism. The plot and themes tread the hoary and the convoluted, but if there ever was a more lovely result from such conventional and/or confused material I would be very surprised.

Regular Lovers (Garrel, France)
I think I first saw Garrel’s inconceivably beautiful revision of the May ‘68 cinematic myth in 2005, but thankfully such a personal, idiosyncratic work was finally released theatrically in the U.S. this year. Even though he has been working since the 1960s, Garrel is one of the most criminally underseen and underappreciated directors in the world. Every scene, every image aches with memory, with personal investment and personal experience. Watching a Garrel film like Regular Lovers is like listening to a veteran finally tell you about his time in war after decades of silence. Each moment has to be savored.

No Country for Old Men (Coen/Coen, USA)
I don’t quite understand the nay-saying around this film, a film whose precision and craftsmanship are often being derided as over-planned and artless. In this day and age where mainstream American cinema is eons away from the craftsmanship that was at the very least a default during the studio era, the Coens’ hyper-meticulous skill is all the more welcome. And, to supply a ridiculous pull-quote, this is the Coens’ least condescending film yet! Of course, craft and a lack of the usual glib tone is not what makes the film great. What makes it great also moves beyond the specifics of the film’s morality and ambivalent portrayal of evil. Getting down to it, for me this film is a beautiful gem of the spectral, of negative spaces filled with menace, long-gone wisps of longing, and a muted, fated sense of impending apocalypse. In my mind, ultimately the power of all films derives from abstractions (both emotional and intellectual) created by the form, and the Coens have accomplished a very rich film of terrifying abstractions.

We Own the Night (Gray, USA)
I can understand this film flying under people’s radars, as Gray’s terrific 2000 film The Yards did for me. But to ignore this director would be a crime; he is without a doubt one of the most talented of American filmmakers, and this work of tremendous sincerity and melodrama is working on an entirely different wavelength of cinema than the rest of Hollywood. It has the drama and interest of a 1930s gangsters film, and the heart, soul, and earnestness of the most personal of art cinema.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Dominik, USA)
A visually gorgeous film that one may think covers its pretensions towards revising Westerns, and commenting on celebrity identity and the nature of re-telling history with Roger Deakin’s immeasurable photography and crystalline air. But that would be missing the evocations of its fabulous cast, Casey Affleck’s Malick-like performance of a dreamer, the weight of menace and the impending crash of fate emanating from Brad Pitt’s meta-fame, and the half dozen other actors here who Dominik pulls great performances from. It turns the film away from its formal powers (a bit slim and underdeveloped compared to its pictorialism) and puts the emphasis on characters, and the weight of the film’s more grandiose themes mentioned above on the characters. It is an unexpected shift and an entirely welcome one.

A late addition to this list might be Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, but I’m still sitting on that strange film and it is too soon to tell.

All additional films I liked, including those which did not receive a theatrical release in 2007, repertory films I saw in theaters, and favorite films I saw on video, can be found here.