Film: NY Times' Top Ten Lists

[lsanderson]

Stopping at 10 Just Seems Wrong
By A. O. SCOTT

BY the end of next week, the number of movies reviewed in The New York Times in 2007 will top out somewhere around 640. The traditions of movie criticism decree that I select 10 as the year’s most worthy candidates for immortality (or at least future Netflix rental). Everyone knows that this is an arbitrary and subjective exercise — that’s part of the fun of it — but this year I’ve found it especially difficult to commit to so narrow and exclusive a list. More

A List, to Start the Conversation
By MANOHLA DARGIS

THE whole point of a Top 10 list, a friend recently scolded me, is to number them. (I was declining to do so.) My friend was wrong, but only because Top 10 lists are artificial exercises, assertions of critical ego, capricious and necessarily imperfect. (I have a suspicion that the sacred 10 is meant to suggest biblical certainty, as if critics are merely worldly vessels for some divine wisdom.) More than anything they are a public ritual, which is their most valuable function. I tell you what I liked, and you either agree with my list (which flatters us both) or denounce it (which flatters you). It’s a perfect circle. More

Films That Look Death in the Eye
By STEPHEN HOLDEN

THE betrayal of the body, decrepitude and death: in 2007 an unprecedented number of serious films, along with the usual slasher movies, contemplated the end of life. Might they be a collective baby-boom response to looming senescence and a fraying social safety net? Or do they reflect an uneasy sense that humanity is facing end times, when global warming, terrorism, nuclear proliferation and the war in Iraq, or any combination thereof, could bring on doomsday?

At once the scariest and most exhilarating of such films, “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” contemplates the world from the perspective of a stroke victim who can communicate only by blinking one eye. If its metaphor of human life as imprisonment in one’s own body is terrifying, the horror is partly countered by its portrayal of the imagination as a means of ecstatic liberation. It’s “Kiss of the Spider Woman” elevated to a metaphysical plane. More