4 luni, 3 saptamani, si 2 zile (4 months, 3 weeks, and 2 days), Cristian Mungiu, 2007

Mungiu's film is stark, harrowing, and, like fellow Romanian Cristi Puiu's The Death of Mr. Lazarescu before it, nothing less than an unflinching stare at the human condition.

Pocket Cinephile's Best Films of 2007

1. Zodiac, David Fincher, 2007

Fincher's Grand Procedural is nothing short of masterful filmmaking. Exquisitely paced, unsparingly meticulous, and remarkably taut, Zodiac is utterly engaging for each of its 158 minutes.

2. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Andrew Dominick, 2007

Dominik's obsessive, lyrical film is possesed of a sensual acuity borne at once of Malick's prarie, all windblown grasses and hissing cicadas, and the snowbound saddle tramps of Altman's McCabe and Mrs Miller and de Toth's Day of the Outlaw. Perhaps more impressively, however, the film's resolute narrative drive is an absolute excercise in tone, mood, and precision.

3. Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives Of Others), Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, 2006

The Lives of Others is classic, populist cinema. Engaging, exacting, deliberatley paced, and genuinely affecting, von Donnersmarck's Cold War tale of surveillance and the surveilled is more accessible, and finally more successful, than Melville's recently rediscovered (and much celebrated) Army of Shadows, which treads much the same psychological ground.

4. I'm Not There, Todd Haynes, 2007

Haynes' sprawling Bob Dylan tapestry is part riff, part caricature, part revision, and part hallucination, its ultimate, overwhelming, and bewitching success won from Haynes' precision in managing his film's myriad parts.

5. Hei Yan Quan (I Don't Want to Sleep Alone), Ming-liang Tsai, 2006

Tsai's supremely austere film is a stirring meditation on human companionship in its most primitive, visceral forms, employing the director's trademark long takes and static compositions to great and lasting effect.

6. No Country for Old Men, Joel and Ethan Coen, 2007

The Coen Brothers exhibit a level of restraint and craft both deceptively skillful and all too uncommon in bringing Cormac McCarthy's dark tale of destructive wills to the screen.

7. Flandres, Bruno Dumont, 2007

Dumont, the unflinching poet of humanity's most base instincts, here conflates his familliar agrarian hopelessness with the severe, blunt realities of war.

8. Great World of Sound, Craig Zobel, 2007

Zobel's well crafted tale of music biz hucksterism buoys a seemingly limited premise with impeccable comic timing and an emotional heft rarely present in this sort of fare.

9. Se Jie (Lust Caution), Ang Lee, 2007

Ang's sumptuous, neo-classical film sharply recalls the star-crossed lovers of Curtiz's Casablanca, and is, likewise, by turns sweeping and intimate. Much of the credit for its ultimate success is due Wei Tang, who, as Wang Jiazhi, lives a whole life in her prodigious lead performance.

10. Direktoren for det hele (The Boss of it All), Lars von Trier, 2006

Von Trier, inhabiting once again the guise of cinematic Merry Prankster, here expertly deploys his acerbic, subversive wit for a theatrical, metafilmic Comedy of power and performance.

Special Mention:

The Brave One, Neil Jordan, 2007

Jordan's fever dream tale of revenge treads in dark, icy, and downright strange psychological waters. Much like Jane Campion's similarly hallucinatory In The Cut, Jordan first acknowledges, then subverts, Hollywood cobs-and-robbers conventionality, leaving a fractured, disjointed film light on procedure but rich with moral ambiguity.

There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007

Anderson's mercurial character study is impressive if wildy uneven, creating in oil man Daniel Plainview a conflicted and ultimately incomplete vision. Daniel Day Lewis' lead perfromance is likewise inconstant, reminiscent in its best moments of Jimmy Stewart's steel-headed work with Anthony Mann, but also possessed of overwrought, all too familliar histrionics.

Away From Her, Sarah Polley, 2007

Polley's directorial debut is nothing if not assured, a measured and unsentimental portrayal of marriage, loss, aging, and redemption with a debt to Bergman's icy domesticty.

Eastern Promises,David Cronenberg, 2007

Cronenberg's underworld saga, which plays like a fierce, unrepentant conflation of the Dardennes' L'Enfant and Frears' Dirty Pretty Things, suffers slightly from a lack of narrative focus, but nonetheless masterfully maintains a mood of palpable, grimey menace throughout.

Atonement, Joe Wright, 2007

Wright's realization of Ian McEwan's epic meditation on regret is a resolutely assured one, deploying an impressive compliment of affecting visuals in service of its tragic narrative.

3:10 to Yuma, James Mangold, 2007

Mangold's attempt at a neo-classical Western generally misses the mark, his solid premise and taut setup completely undone by a muddled second act and near laughable resolution.

The Good German, Steven Soderbergh, 2006

Despite a typically magnetic perfromance from Cate Blanchett, Soderbergh's overtly stylized proto-Cold War yarn is plainly short on substance, its too slight narrative compromised further by less-than-convincing turns from George Clooney and Tobey Maguire.