After all the dust had settled. After all the hoopla of the year end was over. After all the lists were compiled and the top tens set in a nice orderly line. After I thought everything was a final go, along comes an eleventh hour spectacle that puts them all to shame (most of them at least) and knocks everyone down a peg. Holding off on announcing my Best of 2007 until a certain press screening on January 3rd, it all came to fruition and damn, was it ever worth the wait. Zooming in at the last second, acting as the long awaited hero (or anti-hero I suppose in this case) making the cliffhanger of a rescue, was Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood, a Wellsian - by way of Kubrick - work of American art audacious enough to fill even the deepest hole left by the wake of nearly three decades of Hollywood studio fodder. Paul Thomas Anderson, self-taught, self-stylized auteur of cinematic genuflection (that's a paraphrasing of Matt Zoller Seitz's comments in the New York Times) has set out over the years (this is his fifth feature) to create the great American film in the likes of Orson Welles or John Ford or D.W. Griffith, and after a string of hits and misses, that is exactly what Anderson has accomplished with his ode to greed, desire and God, There Will Be Blood. Now who's genuflecting?

#2 I'm Not There (Todd Haynes)

Going into Todd Haynes' experiment in semiotic filmmaking and deconstruction of cinema, I was wary of what I would think coming out. I knew this was a film I would not think lightly of and toss aside as one of the myriad mediocrities of moviemaking, but instead either completely love or absolutely despise. There would be no middle ground here. My great admiration for Bob Dylan and my deep and everlasting love of the cinema would not allow me to be on the fence on this one. It was either do or die. Well, I suppose it's obvious, considering this is my top ten list of 2007, which way I went after leaving the theatre. A brilliant filmic essay, a la Jean-Luc Godard, that not only questions the idea of biopic - and cinema itself - but beats it until it is no longer recognizable. Played by six different actors (Cate Blanchett in her androgynous quasi-fellini black & white take on the prophet Dylan is at her mimicking best), we get to see the "life" of Bob Dylan as dreamt by Todd Haynes, via the ghost of the still-quite-living Mr. Zimmerman himself - all without ever uttering the name Bob Dylan. Haynes has unleashed a nearly indescribable treatise upon cinema, and though it may be too much for the common filmgoer (who needs them anyway!?), it is one of the most deceptively powerful films to come out of America in a long while.

#3Killer of Sheep(Charles Burnett)

Perhaps it is a bit of a cheat to place this 1977 film amongst the best of 2007, but Killer of Sheep is much less repertory than its production date alludes to - a smattering of unheralded screenings at various festivals and museums doth not a formal movie release make. But now, a generation and a half later, sitting in that darkened theatre in the West Village, watching Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep, which garnered its first theatrical run of any merit (and eventual Criterion dvd release) in the spring of 2007, felt a lot like how it must have felt for Howard Carter opening up that 3000+ year old dusty sepulchral chamber and finding the unbelievable riches of King Tut laid out before him. Unbeknownst to most, Killer of Sheep showed up about thirty years late but was certainly worth the wait. Powerfully subtle, Burnett's excavated masterpiece of understatement and gallant workingman beauty, a film that took more blood and sweat and tears than most (a debut feature that rivals Cassavetes Shadows and Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali for sheer innocent bravura) is surely the filmic archeological find of the year.

#4 The Wayward Cloud  (Tsai Ming-liang)

Not quite as old as Killer of Sheep, The Wayward Cloud, Tsai Ming-liang's smutty candy-coloured minimalist musical ode to watermelon sex, made its debut at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival but did not recieve a proper, if not a bit truncated, US release until 2007. Surely Tsai's most audacious film yet - and this from a filmmaker whose name could very well be the Chinese equivalent of audaciousness (I don't know, I'm no linguistic expert) - The Wayward Cloud has also become the auteur's most reviled film to date. With a hate/love ratio of about 10 to 1, it was Tsai's other 2007 release, I Don't Want to Sleep Alone which recieved the lion's share of accolades handed out to the Taiwanese provocateur this year. Sure, that film is a wonderful film (you can find it ensconced amidst the honourable mentions below) but it was The Wayward Cloud, with its intoxicating mixture of pornography, unsimulated sexual violations (including one of the most disturbing blow-jobs ever "caught" on film), an array of Jacques Demy-inspired musical numbers straight out of a Busby Berkeley Penthouse letter and watermelons watermelons watermelons, that blew me away. A candy-coated cum-swollen cacophonous confection of coitus comeupance.

#5No Country For Old Men (Joel & Ethan Coen)

Leave it to the Coen Brothers to create a villain so enthusiastically abhorrent, so gleefully efficient, so entertainingly reprehensible that you find yourself almost rooting for him to win. From the moment Javier Bardem's Anton Chigurh, assassin to the nth fucking degree, comes on the screen to the moment he finally leaves it, we are enthralled. We are totally obsessed. Whether we want to admit it or not, we are completely absorbed by this vile, yet quite adroit, creature of killing. And he is just one third of this great film. Add in Tommy Lee Jones in one of his most amusingly malaisical roles to date and Josh Brolin queitly carrying the film as if some neuvo John Wayne, place it all in the Coen Brothers version of John Ford's Monument Valley and you get the most sophisticated film yet to appear in their already quite stunning, if not a bit shticky, oeuvre. A modern western in every sense of the word except the time period, No Country For Old Men plays out with unexpected mythical overtones lain across its broad shoulders. The Coens have finally grown up and look what wonders they can produce.

#6Regular Lovers(Philippe Garrel)

May 1968 was not only a tumultuous year in politics and social order but also in the world of cinema. There is cinema that can be called pre-May '68 and then their is cinema that can rightfully be called post-May '68, then there is Philippe Garrel's Les Amants réguliers, or Regular Lovers, which can only be described as not pre or post, but of May 1968. Rarely screened outside of Europe, Garrel's films are unknown to most (including this critic, who has only this film as a barometer for the cinema of Garrel) which may be a crime against cinema. Taking place in and around Paris in 1968 and 1969, and starring his own son, Louis as his on screen doppelganger, Garrel has unleashed a neo-Nouvelle vague film replete with students rioting and philosophizing as a war of sorts goes on around them. Shot in crystal crisp black and white and meandering along at a very pretentiously French-paced three hours and twenty some minutes, Garrel's angst-frothed film, the epitome of auteur driven cinema, is a cinephile's wet dream come to glittering big screen life. Yippie.

#7Zodiac(David Fincher)

A movie that proved (finally) that the chase is the thing. Not intent on discovering the identity of the infamous Zodiac killer so much as showing one man's life-long obsession with that very same quest of discovery, David Fincher, maverick camera manipulator that he is, has turned the story of a never-solved serial killer into a Law & Order-esque procedural of obsessive, voyeuristic - violating even - cinema. From the man who inexplicably scared the bejeezus out of us with the somewhat overzealous Se7en, fucked with our heads in the twistedly gleeful Fight Club and gave us all empathetic cases of claustrophobia with the often underrated Panic Room, Zodiac is a sinister take on compulsion, fixation and pop culture mania that has less to do with the Zodiac killer than with the men searching for him. In sum, both lurid in its fact-checking euphoria and titillating in its methodic melody, Zodiac is anything but a thriller in any of the genre's preconcieved notions of exactly what a thriller should be, yet never, in any of its two hour and forty minute running time, and no matter how forensically obsesseed (or CSI-geeked) it may get, does the sense of threat ever dissapate.

#8Grindhouse(Quentin Tarantino & Robert Rodriguez)

Many other critics have ignored half of this double feature experiment, and instead have piled lavish praise upon Quentin Tarantino's portion, Death Proof (which was elongated, prettied-up and has been released on dvd in its own right), all but tossing Robert Rodriguez's Planet Terror into the trash heap, but here and now I am placing the film as a whole - the way I first saw it in that over-crowded midnight theatre last April - upon this list. Sure, Tarantino's half is by far the better film (he is the stronger filmmaker of the duo after all) but what most forget is that this little experiment was meant as an homage to the grindhouse film style of the 1970's - a shottily done, low class exploitational moviemaking trend that never got any further than midnight showings at run down inner-city cinemas, the drive-in late show and Quentin Tarantino's teenage wet dream video collection - and because of that, it is actually Rodriguez's zombie-porn half of the double bill that is most like what grindhouse was, or is. Tarantino's tale of Kurt Russell and his killer car (with references to about two dozen different films) is actually too good to be grindhouse. All-in-all though, the two films together, with all their blips, buts and man-made scratches, and with the grotesquely hilarious fake trailers made to play inbetween the features (helmed by Rob Zombie, Eli Roth, Edgar Wright and Rodriguez himself), Grindhouse, in the way I first saw it (and in a way that will probably never be seen again save for a possible midnight cult run at IFC Center in the future) is one of the best films of 2007.

#9The GoodTimesKid(Azazel Jacobs)

When your daddy is one of the lynchpins of experimental cinema in the United States - and the world - your future has got to be a bright one, for you too can become one of the most underrated, underexposed, unheard of by most, avant-gardist auteurs in the history of cinema. With TheGoodTimesKid, Azazel Jacobs, son of legendary, if not quite a household name, Ken Jacobs, the man responsible for the brilliantly deceptive 1969 experimental bon mot Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son and the découpage juggernaut, 40 years in the making, Star Spangled to Death, gives us (and by us I mean myself, J. Hoberman and about three other film geeks from the East Village) one of the sweetest, funniest romances of the year. A melange of his paternally encrusted experimental roots, an obvious lust for the early French New Wave, live action Fleischer Brother quirkiness, Jim Jarmusch's brain in a jar, indie-pop licks and a screwball heart, all glazed over with a sort of low-def Boho Lubitsch touch, Jacobs' film - which played for exactly seven days in January of 2007 at the Anthology Archives in New York and has still not seen the shiny side of a dvd - is the one film of 2007 most in need of watching - mainly because so many have not.

#10 Black Book(Paul Verhoeven)

A year ago, if someone had told me a film by the director responsible for RoboCop, Basic Instinct and Showgirls, would wind up finding a place on my yearly top ten list, I would have probably spat in their face and called them a vicious liar and stomped out of the room, never to lay eyes upon them again, but nonetheless, warning unheeded, here is that very same film. Black Book, filmed in Verhoeven's native Holland (his first foray into the cinema of his homeland in nearly twenty-five years) is a tale of espionage and intrigue in the grand tradition of old Hollywood noir. Of course their is the requisite Verhoeven schlock and poor taste, but for some reason it works here much better (and much more formfitting) than anywhere else in the director's somewhat sleazy Hollywood oeuvre. It's as if Casablanca had a facelift and a tummy tuck and then went in for a hot steamy Brazilian wax. This may not be Verhoeven's best - I am still woefully blind toward his early Dutch works (Katie Tippel, Soldier of Orange, The Fourth Man, Turkish Delight) - but it is surely a remarkable work of quasi-sexual artiface.

A Tryptych of Runner-up Musicals:

La Vie en Rose(Olivier Dahan) - A whirling dervish of a biopic, probably more fiction than fact, whose one most impressive all-in-one-take scene is hands-down the shot of the year. Oh yeah, add to that one of, if not the best female performance of the year and the music of Edith Piaf on top of that and you no longer care if the film is as fictitious as the allusively daydreaming singer's own autobiographical accounts were.

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (Tim Burton) - Combine Johnny Depp with Tim Burton (for the sixth time by the way) and toss in Burton's come-hither period-goth missus, Helena Bonham Carter, a litany of Brechtian imagery and a full-throated shout of Stephen Sondheim - not to mention buckets of candy-coloured blood gleefully tossed about the set - and you have one rolicking good time.

Once (John Carney) - The musical that really isn't a musical - at least by common standards - this tiny little Irish film about a down-and-out singer-songwriter and a lost soul of a Czech emigre is a thoroughly warm-hearted film - and without the sentimental crap one normally finds alongside such emotion. Oh yeah, and the music is pretty damn good too.

A slew of honourable mentions (making this a top 29 list):

Lady Chatterley (Pascale Ferran); Eastern Promises (David Cronenberg); 12:08 East of Bucharest (Corneliu Porumboiu); Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (Sidney Lumet); I Don't Want To Sleep Alone (Tsai Ming-liang); Dans Paris (Christophe Honoré); Margot at the Wedding (Noah Baumbach); The Boss of It All (Lars von Trier); Day Night Day Night (Julia Loktev); 28 Weeks Later (Juan Carlos Fresnadillo); The Last Winter (Larry Fessenden); Red Road (Andrea Arnold); Private Property (Joachim Lafosse); Belle Toujours (Manoel de Oliveira); Charlie Wilson's War (Mike Nichols); The Simpsons Movie (David Silverman).

Five films I missed that may (or may not) have made the list:

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (Cristian Mungiu); Colossal Youth (Pedro Costa); Persepolis (Vincent Paronnaud & Marjane Satrapi); Southland Tales (Richard Kelly); The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Andrew Dominik).

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