Has it already been a year since I started this website with my 2006 Ten Best List?  Indeed it has, and it's time to add the 2nd Annual List!  I'd have to say 2007 was a bit of a come-down from the previous year, with fewer titles pushing hard for their spot on the list, but that doesn't mean there were no highlights.  In 2007, music was alive and well in the movies, with not just two Broadway musicals in my top 10, but a third film positively awash in the language and performance of it.  And while a wave of movies directly addressing the War in Iraq may have disappointed, the unease in the air generated some unforgettable visions of the destructive power of fear, highlighted by the year's best film, an old-fashioned horror meat grinder that left me literally shaking as its' credits rolled:

1.The Mist-Who'd have imagined that squishy, inspirational Shawshank Redemption director Frank Darabont could unleash the most gut-wrenching two hours of terror I'd seen in a decade?  For his third Stephen King adaptation, he turned to the author's more famous scary side and a 1980 novella about a group of survivors holed-up in a supermarket after a busted military experiment covered their town with the misty air (and bloodthirsty creatures) of another dimension.  Under the pressure cooker of terror, a new social order begins to form under a mad religious zealot (Marcia Gay Harden), and a few sane people are faced with impossible choices, leading to a pitiless, heartbreaking, and absolutely perfect ending.  Social commentary aside, its' legions of toothy tentacles and acid-spewing spiders delivered the relentless shocks necessary to keep the audience as terrified as the people on-screen.
2.August Rush-Kirsten Sheridan's symphony of sentiment took the rough outline of Oliver Twist and reimagined it as the tale of a musical prodigy (the pitch-perfect Freddie Highmore) and his long-lost parents (Keri Russell and Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) drawn back together by the power of the music in their souls.  Jam-packed with perfectly executed melodrama, it was the kind of movie that either plucks your heart strings like a violin or leaves you rolling your eyes.  Consider me played.
3.Hairspray-Pure, infectious cinematic joy:  the film version of the Broadway musical based on the John Waters movie set in the 1960's somehow managed to be the freshest movie of the summer.  Filled with infectiously catchy songs by Marc Shaiman (who'd previously done the immortal tunes for South Park:  Bigger, Longer and Uncut) and performances both gleeful and sincere from the likes of newcomer Nikki Blonsky, John Travolta as a far more convincing woman than you'd imagine he could be and James Marsden as the coolest guy ever to wear a purple suit.  I saw it four times, two more than any other movie released this year, and listened to the soundtrack about a million more.
4.Mr. Brooks-There's something chilly and distant about Kevin Costner that somehow makes him seem better and more morally certain than the rest of us in his most virtuous roles.  But it turns out that chilliness works even better as a psycho like Earl Brooks, the upstanding business leader who moonlights as The Thumbprint Killer in Bruce Evans' phenomenal psychological thriller.  Brooks is whacked:  he's even got his very own imaginary friend (William Hurt) urging him to kill.  But he's also aware enough of his own otherness and concerned enough about the daughter (Danielle Panabaker) who's starting to show homicidal tenancies of her own that he actually emerges as a sympathetic, likable character in this fascinating meditation on the nature of addiction.
5.Sicko-Nobody rakes muck like Michael Moore, and he did it again with this summer rabble rouser that attacked the priorities of the US health care system from virtually every angle.  Sure, sometimes the guy let his liberal craziness get away from him (free pills or no, I think I'd rather live in Pennsylvania than Cuba), but more interesting than any of the talk about socialized medicine or HMO horror stories was the picture the movie paints of an American public imprisoned in jobs they hate by the need to have an employer, any employer, pay for their insurance.  What makes Moore special is that he can deliver this message and send you out of the theater with a smile on your face rather than a gun to you head:  Sicko somehow manages to be quite funny and even kinda inspiring.
6.Death Sentence-The year's most under-appreciated movie, James Wan's ultra-violent thriller followed a mild-mannered father (Kevin Bacon, at the top of his game) through a downward spiral of tit-for-tat revenge with the punks who murdered his son until one looks from Bacon to punks and punks to Bacon and cannot tell the difference.  Brutally intense whenever it's not just plain brutal and shot in the washed-out colors of despair, Wan's box-office flop was widely dismissed by critics who couldn't reconcile the message with the format.  Their loss. 
7.The King of Kong:  A Fistful of Quarters-If Billy Mitchell didn't exist, no movie could have invented him:  the black-suited long-haired self-styled rock star hot sauce king was the year's best villain just by being himself in front of documentarian Seth Gordon's cameras.  Why?  Because his Machiavellian schemes to protect his decades-old Donkey Kong high-score record from the challenge of a sincere high school teacher who'd broken it in his garage made unimaginably riveting drama.  And because more than its' plot, the movie emerged as a referendum on the character of its' participants and all of our desire to look the other way to protect the illusion of our heroes' greatness.
8.Sweeney Todd:  The Demon Barber of Fleet Street-Tim Burton and Johnny Depp have worked together as often as any active director and star, but never has a project leaned more heavily on their special talents than Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler's 1979 Broadway classic about the mad barber whose victims end up as the filling in really tasty meat pies.  Propelled by the mad fury of its' characters' obsessions and Sondheim's delightful music, this intense, fun song and dance gorefest might be the most unique Hollywood musical ever.
9.Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix-In a market where most movie franchises can't even manage a single sequel in the true spirit of the original, it's officially a miracle that the Harry Potter saga is now on its' fifth film and only becomes more focused, mature and fascinating with each installment.  New director David Yates led Daniel Radcliffe and friends through their darkest hour yet, with the rising evil of Voldemort dwarfed by an oppressive Ministry of Magic determined to deny his existence and brutally punish any who speak the truth.  Imelda Staunton shined as Dolores Umbridge, their sadistic representative at Hogwarts, while the perfectly cast kids just keep getting better and better as they grow.
10.Zodiac-David Fincher's latest directorial triumph was a movie entirely unlike those that came before it, a procedural serial killer thriller that sat back and watched the sensational media firestorm over the Zodiac murders become a grueling, decades-long obsession for the men who never could solve them.  A fascinating look at both the birth of the unholy marriage of the modern media and sensational killers, and the draining horror of a truly unsolved mystery.  Somehow Fincher managed to make mountains of evidence and historical criminalistic minutia (yes, there was a time when a police investigation really did stop at the county line, and when people took handwriting analysis as seriously as we now take DNA) and smooth them into a captivating, easy-to-follow trail of evidence, albeit one that leads only to more questions.

But that's not all!  I handed out four stars to 21 different movies during the year and ended up with another I felt would have deserved the upgrade once I saw it again.  From the best of the rest, I pull these 10 RUNNERS-UP (in alphabetical order):  American Gangster, The Condemned, DOA:  Dead or Alive, Evan Almighty, Hot Fuzz, In the Valley of Elah, Stardust, 30 Days of Night, 3:10 to Yuma, Transformers and Wild Hogs.

10 THINGS WORTH REMEMBERING ABOUT THE REST OF 2007'S MOVIES
-The reaction from Bobby Lee Swagger (Mark Wahlberg) when Charles F. Meachum (Ned Beatty) protests “I am a United States Senator!” at the end of Shooter
-Steve Carrell's endlessly likable, movie-carrying performance in Dan in Real Life
-The brutally hopeless, apocalyptic first hour of I Am Legend
-The amazing Real-D technology that made it easy to look past Beowulf 3-D's uninvolving story
-That disastrous first attempt to mount Blades of Glory's Iron Lotus skating maneuver.
-The amazing fantasy world of The Golden Compass
-Dustin Hoffman's splendid exit speech in Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium
-Reno 911!:  Miami's beached whale sequence
-The Invisible's bizarre vision of Purgatory-on-Earth
-The way 300 made a man want to walk around just screaming cool stuff at the top of his lungs
 

BEST 2006 MOVIES THAT DIDN'T REACH CENTRAL PENNSYLVANIA UNTIL 2007

Ah, the eternal struggle for those of us looking to put together a 10 best list without a Manhattan mailing address or advance screenings:  what do you do with those movies released only in certain markets at the end of the previous year to qualify for award consideration?  While I just can't stand to mix them in with this year's “official” releases (OCD, anyone?), it also seems wrong to ignore some damn fine titles, so I've instead created a little sub-list to recognize four sensational films that had to politely wait their turn to be viewed by the good people of Central PA:

1.Notes on a Scandal-Writer Patrick Marber turned Zoe Hiller's novel What Was She Thinking? into a uniquely nailbiting thriller that centers around elderly teacher Barbara Covett (the scorching Judi Dench), whose aloof and embittered persona masks a loneliness so desperate it threatens to burn down the life of a fellow teacher (Cate Blanchett) who becomes her “friend”.  Complex, believable and empathetic in a way relationship thrillers just never are, it invests a series of forbidden connections with more stakes and suspense than an army of butcher knives and boiled bunnies.
2.Letters from Iwo Jima-Facing the End of the World, Pt. 1:  Clint Eastwood's masterful companion piece to Flags of Our Fathers is the most apocalyptic war movie I've ever seen, focusing on the grim final stand of Japanese soldiers stationed on Iwo Jima in the waning days of WWII not to win, but simply to make their loss as costly as possible to the enemy.  Why?  Perhaps, they rationalize, to buy just a few more days for the seemingly doomed families they left behind on the mainland.  That their perception of what's really going on in the war that will cost them their lives is totally at odds with reality only makes their grinding, bitter sacrifice all the more tragic.  A cold, hard lesson about what it really means to LOSE a war.
3.Children of Men-Facing the End of the World, Pt. 2:  Alfonso Cuaron's sci-fi action extravaganza foresaw a different kind of apocalypse, one where children simply stop being born and the human population just ages and finally dies.  A thoughtful examination of how passing the torch to future generations is pivotal to our societal sense of self, filmed with virtuoso long takes and amazing special effects that really put you in the action (and the future) like few movies I've seen.  Clive Owen chipped in a first-rate star turn as the hopeless hero.
4.Pan's Labyrinth-Guillermo del Toro's earthy-smelling, totally lived-in horror fantasy transported us to the waning days of WWII's Spanish front and to a bizarre otherworld filled with fairies and monsters.  Triumphant art direction didn't overdo the fairy tale creatures but rather made them part of the same physical world as the nastiest ogre of them all, a brutally sadistic fascist played with impressive commitment by Sergi Lopez.

And with that, I do believe we can put this one in the books, just hours before midnight.  See you on the other side, for what will no doubt be another exciting year of moviegoing in 2008.