Wednesday, January 2, 2008

Movies From 2007 I'm Interested In Seeing

Having just insulted everybody else's "Best Movies of 2007" lists, I eventually took a good look through them all and realized that, what do you know, there are a lot of movies from last year I'd probably like to go see! The end of the year (functioning as it does as a semi-official boundary for award show and critic's list purposes) is usually a good time to compose a list of "films I wanted to see but haven't yet." Of course, many of these films are essentially out "this year," some having not even entered wide release yet, but a few of these movies stretch back into last February. Mostly these are simply the movies that hit that particular combination of 1) appearing on so many critic's lists that I feel like I need to form an opinion of my own, and 2) actually seem interesting to me. There are some exceptions, of course. I'm not that interested in Ratatouille, having not been too amazed by The Incredibles, but so many critics said it was great that I figure I'd at least want to be able to argue with them about whether it is or isn't. Likewise, Control didn't appear on too many lists, but I like Joy Division and it sounds like it would at least illuminate my appreciation of that band. I feel like as long as I go out and see all the films below, I can feel pretty confident that I've caught at least the uppermost layer of the best cinema of 2007. We've got 15 titles in all, so it shouldn't be too hard:

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Dominik)
Away From Her (Polley)
Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (Lumet)
Control (Corbijn)
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Schnabel)
4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days (Mungiu)
Grindhouse (Rodriguez/Tarantino)
Into the Wild (Penn)
No Country for Old Men (Coen)
Once (Carney)
Persepolis (Paronnaud/Satrapi)
Ratatouille (Bird)
Sweeney Todd (Burton)
There Will Be Blood (Anderson)
Zodiac (Fincher)

Now...who wants to join me?

1 comment:

Little Earl said...

I'm serious. Who wants to go see (or rent) some of these movies with me? Free PowerBar included...