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A Second Twelve (because one list is never enough)
1. La Vie en Rose – Engrossing biopic of Edith Piaf held together by a tour de force portrait by French actress Marion Cotillard.
Gerard Depardieu and Marion Cottilard in Picturehouse's La Vie En Rose
2. Reign Over Me – The year’s forgotten marvel, this post-9/11 drama containing an Oscar-worthy (and who’d have thought I’d ever say that) from Adam Sandler.
3. The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters – Who knew watching others battle it out for video game supremacy would be so giddily wondrous.
4. The Savages – Writer and director Tamara Jenkins’ fascinating character study of children trying to reconnect during their father’s final days.
5. Things We Lost in the Fire – Susan Bier’s brilliant melodrama of addiction and lost featuring a masterful performance by the great Benicio del Toro.
Benicio del Toro and Halle Berry in Dreamworks' Things We Lost in the Fire
6. Michael Clayton – George Clooney, Tilda Swinton and Tom Wilkinson soar in writer/director Tony Gilroy’s fascinating industrial espionage potboiler.
7. No End in Sight – Charles Ferguson’s engrossing and chilling documentary chronicling the Bush administration’s drum-beat push to war.
8. The Orphanage - Juan Antonio Bayona’s spectacularly creepy ghost story with an emotion whopper of a climax impossible to forget.
9. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly – The surprisingly life-affirming and visually resplendent story of a man trapped within his own body proved to be the ultimate triumph for director Julian Schnabel.
10. Enchanted – Disney’s excellent melding of animation and song all of it held together by the luminous Amy Adams.
11. The Namesake – Mira Nair’s fascinating adaptation of Jhumpa Lahiri’s best seller, this familial saga spanning two continents was a subtly thundering parade of emotional brilliance.
Tabu in Fox Searchlight's The Namesake
12. Stardust – Director Matthew Vaughn and author Neil Gaiman team up to produce to the year’s most rapturously engrossing and merrily amusing fantasy adventure.
The Best of the Rest
2 Days in Paris, 3:10 to Yuma, 30 Days of Night, Adam’s Apples, American Gangster, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Away from Her, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, Breach, Bridge to Terabithia, Broken English, Charlie Wilson’s War, Crazy Love, The Darjeeling Limited, Eastern Promises, For the Bible Tells Me So, Gone Baby Gone, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Hot Fuzz, In the Shadow of the Moon, In the Valley of Elah, Interview, The Kingdom, Knocked Up, The Lookout, Lust, Caution, A Mighty Heart, Music and Lyrics, Rescue Dawn, Rocket Science, Seraphim Falls, SiCKO, Talk to Me, Vitus, Wristcutters: A Love Story
The Worst
1. Hostel: Part II – Eli Roth’s venal and disgusting horror fright fest was so bad it single-handedly destroyed the torture porn genre for good.
Bijous Philips is trapped in a bad movie in Lionsgate Films' Hostel: Part II
2. Norbit – The film that cost Eddie Murphy the Academy Award for Dreamgirls. Or, at least, the so bad, so offensive, so monstrously ghastly film I like to think cost Eddie Murphy the Academy Award. A girl can dream.
3. Good Luck Chuck – The year’s most demeaning film to women is also the one no person I know was able to sit all the way through. Like being slapped in the face for 90 minutes by a muscular baboon, and I don't mean in a good way.
4. Ghost Rider – Director Mark Steven Johnson, the mad behind both this and Daredevil, has now made the two worst big budget comic book adaptations of all time. I guess on some level that’s actually kind of impressive.
5. Hitman – The only video game adaptation I know of to make the entire Paul W.S. Anderson oeuvre (Resident Evil, Alien vs. Predator) look like works of cinematic genius.
6. Dragon Wars – Did anyone think this movie was a good idea, let alone remotely entertaining? Didn’t think so.
7. Primeval – Giant crocodile eats stupid scientists while an African warlord cackles like a madman from a bad James Bond parody. The film is far worse than this description makes it sound.
8. The Ten – The Ten Commandments have never been so pointless, and few comedies have ever been as unfunny.
9. Rush Hour 3 – Of all the big summer three-quels this one was the worst, Jackie Chan, Chris Tucker and Brett Ratner picking up huge paydays to deliver the single most tiredly unfunny and unexciting film of the year.
10. I Know Who Killed Me – After watching this ludicrous Lindsey Lohan shocker, I may not care who the killer was in the film but I definitely know who killed the one-time Disney darling’s career. While it’s a given the girl will make a comeback, after subjecting me to this I’m not sure I want her to.
Lindsay Lohan is looking for the person who killed her career in TriStar Pictures' I Know Who Killed Me
The Rest of the Worst
Alien versus Predator: Requiem, Alvin and the Chipmunks, Balls of Fury, Bee Movie, Blood and Chocolate, The Brothers Solomon, Code Name: The Cleaner, Dead Silence, Death Sentence, Descent, Elizabeth: The Golden Age, Evan Almighty, The Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, Fred Claus, Gray Matters, Halloween, Hannibal Rising, The Heartbreak Kid, The Hitcher, I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, The Invasion, License to Wed, Lions for Lambs, Mr. Woodcock, Nancy Drew, The Number 23, P.S. I Love You, Pathfinder, Perfect Stranger, Premonition, The Reaping, Saw IV, The Seeker, Shrek the Third, Spider-Man 3, Underdog, Wild Hogs
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