bestmovies122907

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Covert's eleven

Handout, Mct

Keira Knightley, foreground, and James McAvoy stars in Focus Features' drama, "Atonement."

A survey of 2007 on the big screen -- the great, the good and the ugly.

By COLIN COVERT, Star Tribune

Last update: December 28, 2007 - 5:40 PM

End of the year. You know the drill. Here's a ridiculously subjective, alphabetical rundown of 2007's top 11 films.

Atonement

A love story about time, memory and imagination. It's epic in its aims, with ambitious intellectual, narrative, visual and thematic scope. Keira Knightley and James McAvoy are gorgeous and moving as the story's doomed lovers.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

A transcendent film about an uncinematic subject: A paralyzed man dictates his memoir by blinking his eyelid. Mathieu Amalric acts up a storm with his left eye and vibrantly narrates the locked-in man's eloquent interior monologues.

Eastern Promises

A power struggle in London's Russian mafia inspires David Cronenberg's cold-blooded underworld mystery. Viggo Mortensen's stunning battle against knife-wielding killers in a public bathhouse will enter the action-movie lexicon alongside the car chase from "Bullitt" and the bank shootout from "Heat."

The Host

A Korean creature feature that juggles the terror of "Jaws," the dysfunctional family comedy of "Little Miss Sunshine," and the kinetic oomph of "Aliens." Writer/director Bong Joon-ho even slathers political symbolism onto this tale of a fish-creature attacking Seoul, but you're too busy shrieking, laughing and gasping to notice.

INTO THE WILD

Sean Penn's soaring, grueling road movie argues that freedom's just another word for losing everything. Emile Hirsch is flawless as a comfortably born dropout whose yen for adventure trumps his common sense.

JUNO

An accidentally pregnant teen comes to terms with coming to term. Ellen Page is a dynamo as "the cautionary whale" and Diablo Cody's dialogue is sharp enough to cut glass.

Michael Clayton

George Clooney shelves his glamour for brooding gravitas in this story of corruption, conscience and corporate whistleblowers. Tilda Swinton creates a new kind of villain as his mousy, awkward, amoral nemesis.

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN

A taut crime yarn with more on its mind than who kills who. The Coen siblings' supremely intelligent thriller is shivery with premonitions of death. Tommy Lee Jones, Josh Brolin and a creepily coiffed Javier Bardem are riveting.

ONCE

Two Dublin outcasts make beautiful music together in a modest indie with a 24-karat heart. It's not quite a romance -- it's too shy and European for that -- but it's so suffused with love that it makes you want to be a better person.

Sweeney Todd

A dark dream of injustice, revenge and razors. The film has composer/lyricist Steven Sondheim's cynically poetic heart and director Tim Burton's haunted eyes.

Zodiac

David Fincher's bracingly original take on serial killer movies oozes dread. This true-crime drama, set in the 1970s, eerily predicts the anxieties of the 21st century. The deeper that Robert Downey Jr., Jake Gyllenhaal and Mark Ruffalo dig into the still-unsolved case, the closer they come to losing their marbles.