Movies that mattered

Dec. 25, 2007 | The top-grossing movie of 2007 was Sam Raimi's "Spider-Man 3." But we're not here to talk about that. Nor are we going to trouble ourselves much with "Shrek the Third," "Transformers," "Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End" or even the perfectly satisfying "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix," which round out the top five.

Box-office receipts have become a large part of how we look at movies, and they do matter somewhat, since they partially dictate what kinds of movies we'll be seeing in the years to come. But they have nothing to do with how we actually feel about movies. The terrible and wonderful truth is that people who still bother to venture out to movie theaters (you know who you are) might very well go to see "Spider-Man 3" if they were fans of the first two pictures, or if their friends say it's good, or even if they just need an evening of mindless entertainment.

But far more interesting patterns emerge when moviegoers look back on the year and think of the movies they took the trouble to see, the ones they wanted to see and missed, the ones that dashed or exceeded their expectations. Those wonderfully rangy and idiosyncratic lists say more about what we hope for (and either do or don't get) when we go to the movies than any number of box-office statistics can.

I recently met a young writer who, having decided he didn't know as much about movies as he wanted to, put together a film course for himself via his Netflix queue, a way to work through the likes of Godard and Chaplin, Fellini and Hawks, Hitchcock and Renoir. We talked about Netflix queues not just as lists of titles but as dream outlines of the people we'd like to be -- you, or I, might be a person who watched "Masculine Feminine" three times before returning it; who had every intention of getting through "Hiroshima Mon Amour" but ultimately sent it off in the pouch, unwatched; who is glad to have seen "The Passion of Joan of Arc" but also relieved at the prospect of never having to watch it again. Through movies, we collect bits of ourselves, and sometimes we reject parts of ourselves, too.

So in the context of the movies many people didn't choose to see this year, what do we make of the numerous pictures that attempted to deal, directly or otherwise, with the Iraq war? Nearly every critic I know wrestled with what the mere existence of these movies meant, as well as with what they might mean to individual viewers and to the culture at large. Maybe it's great that these movies got made in the first place. But what does that matter if they're no good -- or if no one goes to see them? Countless publications ran articles and essays speculating about why audiences weren't turning out in large numbers for pictures like "In the Valley of Elah" and "Rendition." At Salon, we had a staffwide e-mail discussion about whether there was a way to write a reported piece on why these movies failed to attract audiences.

I don't think it's possible for anyone to come up with a definitive answer. One portion of the explanation might lie in the fact that most of the Iraq war-related movies were rated R, not PG or PG-13, which automatically trims their potential audience. Ultimately, the slender turnout for these movies may point to a larger and knottier problem: American moviegoers aren't necessarily turning away from the war as a subject. It could simply be that the audience for any kind of serious adult drama has shrunk, period -- after all, it's been shrinking for years.

Of course, some of those "movies no one saw" were worth our time: My own thoughts about that are reflected in my top 10 list, below, as well as in the sprawling list of also-rans that follows it. And while I can't get on the creaky-wheeled existentialist "No Country for Old Men" chuck wagon, I'm willing to concede that it at least allows people to think it's a movie made for grown-ups. Then again, "Ratatouille," which is about a cartoon rat who finds his true calling in the kitchen of a Paris restaurant, really is a movie for grown-ups, and for everyone else. What follows is a list of my favorite movies of the past year, somewhat in order of preference, although beyond the top three I always find making such distinctions difficult. (Check back later this week for my colleague Andrew O'Hehir's top 10 list.) These are all pictures that moved me, delighted me, surprised me or left me devastated in 2007.

Next page: And now ... the list