Top 10 films

A.O. Scott thinks it8217;s unfair to list the top 10 films of 2007. He does it anyway. 1. Cristian Mungiu8217;s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Da...

A.O. Scott thinks it8217;s unfair to list the top 10 films of 2007. He does it anyway.

1. Cristian Mungiu8217;s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days won the Palme d8217;Or at Cannes. It8217;s about the ordeal of life under Communism and about abortion.

2. Ratatouille, like 4 Months, demonstrates a bracing integrity in its commitment to the highest ideals of art.

3. Violence, vengeance, motiveless evil: these are on the verge of becoming movie clicheacute;s. In Paul Thomas Anderson8217;s There Will Be Blood, Tim Burton and Stephen Sondheim8217;s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, misanthropy can attain a jarring, revelatory intensity.

4. Todd Haynes8217;s I8217;m Not There and Julien Temple8217;s Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten. Temple8217;s documentary about the leader of the Clash is more straightforwardly biographical than Haynes8217;s fractured fantasia on the life of Bob Dylan.

5. In documentaries, Charles Ferguson8217;s No End in Sight is a devastating and dispassionate chronicle of American folly and hubris in the early months in Iraq.

6. In 12:08 East of Bucharest, a singularly undistinguished TV panel of provincial Romanians squabbles about the revolution of 1989. In Live-in Maid, the relationship between a Buenos Aires lady and her maid is strained by economic turmoil. Both are debuts films for their directors.

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7. What does freedom look like? Find one set of answers in Sean Penn8217;s Into the Wild, and another in Julian Schnabel8217;s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

8. There8217;s always place for melodramas in which a cynical or downright malignant character taps into an unexpected reservoir of decency. The real world is grayer than the East Germany depicted in The Lives of Others and the corporate arena of Michael Clayton. But these movies work as earnest fables of individual heroism, with lead performances by George Clooney and Ulrich Muuml;he.

9. The Savages by Tamara Jenkins, and Sarah Polley8217;s Away From Her, based on a story by Alice Munro, both deal with the indignities of old age. Feature some of the best acting of the year.

10. Knocked Up is most intensely argued about movie of the year, as well as one of the funniest. Its send-up of sexual confusion in early adulthood was topped only by Superbad. The sharp, complicated feminism of Juno stands as both a complement to and an implicit critique of those boy-centered pictures. NYT