My Annual Top Ten Rundown

My annual write-up of my top ten films of the year is now up and running over at The Dispatch website. You can check it out here.

Meanwhile, here is my piece on my #1 pick, There Will Be Blood.

Every once in a while, a film comes along that has the feel and gravity of a classic. There have been few in recent years, Alfonso Cuaron's "Children of Men" is one recent example. This year, that addition to the pantheon is director Paul Thomas Anderson's "There Will Be Blood," a visionary epic of extraordinary power about the self-destructive nature of greed, power, money, religion and oil. Daniel Day-Lewis gives a monumental performance as Daniel Plainview, an ambitious and self-centered oil man looking to take advantage of a small, deeply religious town under the thrall of a young, charismatic religious leader, who is unwittingly sitting on a massive ocean of oil at the dawn of the 20th century. Anderson's film, through its brilliant construction, examines the soul-eating nature of greed to the point that the entire film seems diseased with it, oozing corruption from every pore like crude oil from a fresh strike. "There Will Be Blood" is a film that will shake you to your very bones, a staggering, breathtaking masterwork for the ages, and the very best film of 2007.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Great top 10 plus honorable mentions. You're right in what you said in a previous post about Top 10s being kind of crass, but it's impossible not to try and crystalize the year into a perfect 10...at least for me.

In a year like this though, it's so hard to decide what to leave off. Beyond my own Top 2 (No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood), I could've picked many many different combinations.

It's been a fabulous year.

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