Top Films of 2007

We're making a list and we're checking it twice. While my cosmology allows for more than a mere Ten Best List, that is what the Houston Society of Film Critics require (www.houstonfilmcritics.com). Free Press Houston publisher Omar Afra lets me roll my own, if you know what I mean, and I never have to put up with the kind of editorial persuasion as some of my colleagues. For instance one local critic who’s syndicated on radio stations in New England was told to delete references to Alfred Hitchcock in a review because “People don’t know whom Hitchcock is.” Yeah, maybe on the moons of Saturn. Another writer with a Katy weekly newspaper was reprimanded for revealing that the spider dies in Charlotte’s Web. Obviously denizens in the hinterlands never read a book.

1. Zodiac
2. I'm Not There
3. Into the Wild
4. Hot Fuzz
5. No Country For Old Men
6. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
7. Sweeney Todd
8. No End in Sight
9. Superbad
10. Deathproof

But wait there’s much more, this last year rocked cinematically. Consider these titles as also worthy of your attention: There Will Be Blood; Gone Baby Gone; Lake of Fire; Lars and the Real Girl; The Diving Bell and the Butterfly; Michael Clayton; Once; The Bourne Ultimatum; Atonement; Juno; Darjeeling Limited; Charlie Wilson's War and Lust, Caution.
There's still a number of films that I felt were not in the league with the films above - Eastern Promises, Rescue Dawn, Beowulf, Redacted, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, Control, Black Snake Moan, Breach, The Last Mimzy, American Gangster, Reign Over Me, In the Valley of Elah, The Mist, The Hunting Party, Knocked Up, Mr. Brooks, Eagle and Shark, La Vie en Rose, In the Shadow of the Moon, 3:10 to Yuma, Daywatch, The Golden Door, Broken English - that are still worth seeing. All in all, nobody has any reason to complain with the variety of great films released in Houston in 2007, and that doesn’t even take in the superb retrospective of Antonioni that unreeled at the MFA in September. And yes, I occasionally see films that I hate, but that’s another story.