Film: best of 2007.

Waters, John ; Taubin, Amy ; Quandt, James 等

John Waters

THE BROADWAY MUSICAL BASED ON JOHN WATERS'S CRY-BABY OPENS IN MARCH 2008. (SEE CONTRIBUTORS.)

1 Grindhouse (Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino) The coolest high-concept art film of the year. A faux exploitation double feature from hell with coming attractions in between for films you'd kill to see if they were real. I could feel the ghost rats from Baltimore theaters past brushing up against my legs as I watched.

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2 Before I Forget (Jacques Nolot) This negative movie about an HIV-positive man is brave, funny, gaily incorrect, and smart as a whip. The best feel-bad gay movie ever made.

3 Away from Her (Sarah Polley) Julie Christie deserves an Oscar for this wonderfully terrifying story of falling in love the second time around on Alzheimer's. What does a husband do when his wife forgets she is in love with him and hooks up with somebody else who can't remember either?

4 Zoo (Robinson Devor) They fuck horses, don't they? No, the horses fuck them! Jaw-dropping, sympathetic documentary about the appalling true-crime story of the so-called Enumclaw Horse-Sex Incident.

5 Lust, Caution (Ang Lee) At first, I thought it was the only film to be rated NC-17 for excessive cigarette smoking, but I soon realized it was a really sexy movie for adults. The best underarm-hair shot of the decade.

6 Brand Upon the Brain! (Guy Maddin) He may be the most original auteur working these days. Nuts. Defiantly uncommercial. Hilarious. Give the man more grants and prizes.

7 An American Crime (Tommy O'Haver) The sad but true story of Gertrude Baniszewski, brilliantly told. When Gertie, the scariest foster mother in the world, encourages her own hateful children and their mutant neighborhood chums to carve I AM A PROSTITUTE AND PROUD OF IT on their teenage girl victim's stomach, you know you're on the outer edges of entertainment but somehow glad to be along for the horrifying ride.

8 I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With (Jeff Garlin) A terrific tiny little movie that is a masterpiece of munching, melancholy, and the "magic of self-loathing."

9 Flanders (Bruno Dumont) A relentlessly punishing and depressing slow-paced French film about mud, barnyard animals, bad sex, and ugly war. The worst date movie of the year made me happy, happy, happy!

10 I'm Not There (Todd Haynes) A suggestion of a biography whose million little fractions add up to one knockout of a movie. The exact opposite of Ray!

Amy Taubin

A CONTRIBUTING EDITOR OF FILM COMMENT AND SIGHT & SOUND, AMY TAUBIN IS THE AUTHOR OF TAXI DRIVER (BFI, 2000).

1 Zodiac (David Fincher) Empirical knowledge--and its limits--recorded in codes, once analog, now digital, is the underlying concern of Fincher's splendidly bleak and brainy investigative drama based on the search for the killer who symbolized the death of the Summer of Love.

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2 Paranoid Park (Gus Van Sant) Like the skateboarding kids who are its subject, this rapturously beautiful film is thrilling for its balance of precision and spontaneity.

3 Eastern Promises (David Cronenberg) Complicated morality, homoeroticized violence, terrifying tribalism, and masterfully theatrical filmmaking. Viggo Mortensen is charismatic, inscrutable, and wickedly funny. The Russian bathhouse fight scene is already a classic.

4 Razzle Dazzle: The Lost World (Ken Jacobs) As in his landmark Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son (1969), Jacobs savors and worries a silent film scrap into feature length, here translated to video from celluloid via digital pyrotechnics.

5 No End in Sight (Charles Ferguson) The smartest, best-organized, most infuriating documentary charting of almost everything that has gone wrong in Iraq.

6 Terror's Advocate (Barbet Schroeder) Examining the life of Jacques Verges, the monster who defended Klaus Barbie, this documentary traces connections between European, Middle Eastern, and North African terrorism of the extreme Left and Right. As always, follow the money.

7 Dance Party USA (Aaron Katz) High school kids in Portland, Oregon, hook up in tenderly lit, intimately framed low-end DV. Katz's follow-up, Quiet City--the two films were just released as a double DVD set--is even lovelier to look at though not as astringent.

8 Michael Clayton (Tony Gilroy) I didn't think Hollywood could still make a muckraking thriller this smart, skillful, and entertaining. First-rate work from screenwriter-turned-director Gilroy and actors George Clooney and the amazing Tilda Swinton.

9 Southland Tales (Richard Kelly) I just had to reprise this alt-reality vision of Revelations played out in Venice, California. Last year, I put the Cannes version, which Kelly now admits was a work in progress, in second place. The official US release is tighter, the CGIs spiffier, and history has all but caught up to Kelly's near-future narrative.

10 Blade Runner (Ridley Scott) and Killer of Sheep (Charles Burnett) Both directors use digital technology to tease out superior DVD versions of their already classic movies (from 1982 and 1977, respectively). Scott's allegedly final "director's cut" is definitive proof that Deckard is a replicant.

James Quandt

JAMES QUANDT, SENIOR PROGRAMMER AT CINEMATHEQUE ONTARIO IN TORONTO, IS CURRENTLY PREPARING A RETROSPECTIVE OF JAPANESE NEW WAVE MASTER NAGISA OSHIMA.

1 These Encounters of Theirs (Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet) Straub-Huillet's final feature, a declamatory pastoral about gods and mortals, has a grandeur and passion that make Huillet's death last year all the more grievous.

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2 Pour vos beaux yeux (Henri Storck) The eyes have it in Storck's 1929 ocular minimasterpiece, lost for four decades and now beautifully restored by the Cinematheque Francaise.

3 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (Cristian Mungiu) Already the subject of critical backlash, Mungiu's grim Palme d'Or winner at Cannes treats abortion less as an issue than as a pretext to explore the distortion of everyday life by a totalitarian regime.

4 Useless (Jia Zhang-ke) Jia confirms his status as the bard of the new China in this devastating inquiry into fashion design and expendable humanity, sartorial metaphor giving way to tropes of disposability, oblivion, burial.

5 Tarahi V (Haris Epaminonda) Epaminonda's eerie Scriabin-scored collages taken from Cypriot television and Greek movies from the 1960s provided, along with Tsai Ming-liang's It's a Dream, the filmic highlight of this year's Venice Biennale.

6 La Morte rouge (Victor Erice) The Arvo Part music aside, few recent films are as eloquent or plangent as Erice's half-hour elegy for the cinema, Spain, and his own life and career.

7 Fengming, A Chinese Memoir (Wang Bing) Speak, memory: For three hours, a woman recounts heart-bruising tales of political internment in Maoist China--a telephone call, a lighting cue, and a pee break rupturing the film's implacable sense of fixity.

8 Les Amours d'Astree et de Celadon (Eric Rohmer) It's tempting to treat Rohmer's fete champetre, in which shepherdesses, druids, and nymphs disport in fifth-century Gaul, as barmy divertissement, but the film is in its way as devout as Bresson's Lancelot du Lac, deadly serious about faith, fidelity, and forgiveness.

9 Alexandra (Alexander Sokurov) Forming a diptych with Sokurov's recent Elegy of Life and reviving the lunar landscape of his early Days of the Eclipse, Alexandra blears into gorgeous generality, the Chechen war left vague and emblematic even as babushka/grande dame Galina Vishnevskaya broods over the damage it has done to the Russian soul.

10 At Sea (Peter Hutton) Surprisingly narrative and less lovely than his black-and-white Hudson River films, Hutton's latest aqueous silent is nevertheless exquisitely attentive to light, accidental pattern, and meteorological effect.

Chrissie Iles

CHRISSIE ILES IS ANNE AND JOEL EHRENKRANZ CURATOR OF CONTEMPORARY ART AT THE WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART IN NEW YORK.

1 Persepolis (Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud) This brave black-and-white animated narrative feature adapts Satrapi's graphic novels about her life as a rebellious young woman in revolutionary Iran and as an expat in Vienna.

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2 Prater (Ulrike Ottinger) The story of the Prater, the oldest amusement park in the world, known as the "desire machine," told in a dreamlike sequence of surreal illusions, through the eyes of, among others, Josef von Sternberg.

3 Tigertail (Dara Friedman) A poetic short film with the texture of a home movie: children, a garden, fragments of tribal music recorded by Brian Jones in Morocco.

4 Control (Anton Corbijn) The short life of Joy Division's lead singer, Ian Curtis, as he descends into despair. Corbijn's stark black-and-white cinematography renders Macclesfield, UK, as grim as Warsaw, while the legendary young singer disintegrates under the pressure of success and the twinned afflictions of epilepsy and depression.

5 Alexandra (Alexander Sokurov) A Russian woman travels to Chechnya to see her grandson, a soldier in the Russian army. Sokurov wrote the role for eighty-one-year-old opera diva and actress Galina Vishnevskaya, who experienced the Leningrad blockade and communicates the universal trauma of war.

6 Frownland (Ronald Bronstein) A searing portrait of a dysfunctional young man desperately attempting to negotiate life in the city--and failing.

7 Observando el Cielo (Jeanne Liotta) An exquisite study of the starry sky at night. Velvety in texture, existential in the distance of the stars from Earth.

8 Quartet (Nicky Hamlyn) A room is filmed in twenty still shots, each containing elements of the points of view in the previous and following shots. The first part of the film is in color and strictly ordered; the second is black and white, and a more open interpretation of the schema of the first. A pure, structuralist analysis of space.

9 Moviola with "3 Minutes of Painting on 6 Minutes of Film" (Karin Schneider and Amy Granat) In this conceptual collaboration, a 16-mm film made by Granat of Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye was drawn on and handpainted by Schneider and Granat, then projected from a transparent wall onto a painting by Schneider of a Moviola film-editing machine. A new negative was struck from the print to include the scratches made on it by the projector during the film's screenings on opening night. Schneider and Granat's breakdown of authorship creates a visceral osmosis--between the artists, and between film and painting.

10 The Man from London (Bela Tarr) An adaptation of a Georges Simenon novel by the acclaimed Hungarian director. The film noir cinematography by Fred Kelemen and the slow pace with which this unresolved tale of murder unfolds situate it somewhere between The Third Man and Andy Warhol's Empire.

T. J. Wilcox

T. J. WILCOX IS A NEW YORK-BASED ARTIST WHOSE MOST RECENT EXHIBITION WAS AT METRO PICTURES IN NEW YORK THIS PAST SEPTEMBER.

1 Black Book (Paul Verhoeven) Resolutely suspicious of war stories told by victors and persistently hopeless--a fine parable for these dark days.

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2 The Darjeeling Limited (Wes Anderson) An unusual road movie, unconcerned with destination (or resolve), that revels in the details of its characters' individual journeys (taken together) with exquisite baggage in tow.

3 Planet Earth (British Broadcasting Corporation) Essential viewing, this BBC series, recently released on DVD, contains the most compelling and spectacular nature footage ever committed to film. We fall into this at my house, sputtering and gesturing wildly at the TV screen (regardless of whether drugs are involved).

4 La Vie en rose (Olivier Dahan) I rolled my eyes like the rest of you at the suggestion of an Edith Piaf biopic--but it's one of the best I've seen, ennobled by a superb performance by Marion Cotillard.

5 Superbad (Greg Mottola) A very funny and cringingly accurate musing on high school anxiety, complete with a drunken boy-on-boy "love" scene. What's not to like?

6 The Sarah Silverman Program (Comedy Central) From the woman who made Paris Hilton cry (the night before her incarceration). I think Silverman gets away with murder--and I love to watch.

7 Blades of Glory (Will Speck and Josh Gordon) Watch it for the costumes alone! This movie made me gag--often with laughter.

8 Eastern Promises (David Cronenberg) Cronenberg has said, "I'm not interested in the mechanics of the mob ... but [in] criminality and people who live in a state of perpetual transgression--that is interesting to me." Some of you may agree.

9 Control (Anton Corbijn) The songs of Joy Division, to which this film pays tribute, seized me at an impressionable age. Control is (at least) a beautiful-looking tribute to its sound track, and Ian Curtis's music has lost none of its enigmatic power.

10 Sicko (Michael Moore) Our health care system isn't working. If this movie helps ignite a dialogue that will improve the situation, bravo. And while we're at it, let's impeach the president.