Tuesday, March 25, 2008

The Best and Worst of 2007

2007, you might say, was the year of revelations at the cinema, a year of surprises, startling discoveries and spectacular achievements. But that is not necessarily a positive prospect, either. Saturated by ambition and ambivalence, the movies that occupied theater screens in the 12 months of the calendar year offered high stylization, great energy and loud explosions, and payoffs too brief and momentary to make many of them deserving of that output. The trend was not one limited to the more prolific of box office competitors, either; like a disease that transcends culture and social divides, no one, including the Indies or the art-house flicks, were safe from the mediocrity that spread through the crops.