Critic's Choice: A guide to the top ten movies from 2007

You get a few thoughtful recommendations to tack onto the Netflix queue at your leisure, while I get the pleasure of reminiscing about my favorite movie-going experiences of the past 12 months. Even better, I get to fend off attacks from legions of impassioned readers who are predictably chagrined that I left (insert your favorite movie here) off my list.

Constructing a Top 10 list seems especially silly this year, given the staggering breadth of quality in the films of 2007. Maybe it was something in Hollywood's water supply, but this year produced such a bumper crop of great movies that the thought of limiting myself to ten recommendations seems almost criminal. I could fill a whole article with all the honorable mentions I'd like to give out, but for the moment let's cut to the chase. Without further ado, the 10 Best Films of 2007:

1. "Lars and the Real Girl": If you told me 12 months ago that my favorite movie of 2007 would be about a man who falls in love with a sex doll, I'd have been more than a little incredulous. But "Lars and the Real Girl" turned out to be a stunning elevation of its puerile premise, a bittersweet character comedy of such sensitivity and insight that I was left soaring. For a film about a sex doll, "Lars" is never once crude, vulgar or obscene; indeed there's not really any sex to speak of, just a delicate depiction of a lonely guy in search of human connection. As Lars, Ryan Gosling offers a virtuosic performance that recalls the gentle charisma of a young Jimmy Stewart or Tom Hanks. I've seen this film twice now, and both times people sitting around me were reduced to tears. Over a sex doll movie, you ask? Go see for yourself.

2. "Day Night Day Night": My second-favorite film of 2007 is an unremittingly bleak look into the final hours of an anonymous woman as she prepares (for reasons that are never stated) to blow herself up in the center of Times Square. Julia Loktev's feature debut is a quiet masterpiece, but it's not for the faint of heart -- the movie's rigorous formal construction is nearly as intimidating as the depths of human anguish that it unflinchingly plumbs. Severe and uncompromising, "Day Night Day Night" won't be mistaken for a crowd-pleaser, but it's as sparse and chilling a thriller as I've ever seen.

3. "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead": This masterful melodrama about a botched jewelry-store heist is the year's most electrifying film, a crackling crime drama elevated to the level of Greek tragedy. Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke ignite the screen as the hapless jewel thieves, but the real star is director Sidney Lumet, an 83-year-old veteran whose film has all the savage energy of a man 50 years younger.

4. "No Country for Old Men": The Coen Brothers' sinister tale of Texas blood money has already won dozens of critical accolades, and deserves every one of them; it's a bold reinvention of the Western genre, an interrogation of tortured masculinities and a ripping good thriller. As the implacable assassin Anton Chigurh, Spanish actor Javier Bardem conjures up the most memorable screen psychopath since Hannibal Lecter in "Silence of the Lambs."

5. "Zodiac": What do you call a serial killer movie without the serial killer? In the case of "Zodiac," a dramatization of San Fransisco's infamous Zodiac murders, you call it a study in obsession. Director David Fincher pays little attention to the killer himself (who remains at large to this day), instead focusing with microscopic precision on the team of detectives -- played with various shades of genius by Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo and Robert Downey Jr. -- who slowly went mad in pursuit of their quarry. An old-school detective story for the postmodern age, "Zodiac" is indispensable.

6. "Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street": Movie musicals seem to be undergoing something of a renaissance lately, and Tim Burton's gothic masterpiece is among the best of the lot. In adapting Stephen Sondheim's visionary stage musical to screen, Burton has created a dark and brilliant nightmare of a film, a sensory feast that's also mordantly funny. As the homicidal barber out for revenge, Johnny Depp stabs a knife into the heart of his Edward Scissorhands persona with a macabre (though beautifully sung) performance that will haunt your dreams.

7. "Rescue Dawn": To portray Dieter Dengler, the real-life fighter pilot who crash-landed in a Laotian jungle during the Vietnam War, Christian Bale had to lose 55 pounds, eat a live snake and subject himself to countless other physical torments. Fortunately, his efforts were in service of Werner Herzog, a German director who went into the jungle for three months and came out with one of the most harrowing survival stories ever committed to film. "Rescue Dawn" is brave and gutsy moviemaking, that is not to be missed.

8. "The Lives of Others": Last year's winner of the Best Foreign Film Oscar is this year's most expressive and sustained picture, a human drama set against the Orwellian world of East Berlin, circa 1984. The film offers shades of a paranoid surveillance thriller, but has an elegance and emotional restraint that transcends genre and adopts tragic proportions; it becomes a potent rumination on art and power.

9. "The Bourne Ultimatum": An immensely entertaining work of commercial art, "The Bourne Ultimatum" is the crowning achievement of this generation's defining action franchise. With unexpected intelligence, "Ultimatum" boldly dissects post-9/11 cultural anxieties through the vernacular of the Hollywood blockbuster, offering a top-notch espionage thriller in the bargain. Move over James Bond, there's a new kid in town.

10. "The Boss of It All": Lars von Trier's bizarre and fascinating excursion into corporate farce is a hilarious existential comedy -- think "Breaking the Waves" meets "Office Space." At one level, the movie is a bizarre visual experiment; all the camera angles were generated by a computer, sans human input. It could have been a disaster, but this unorthodox filming technique is perfectly suited to the arbitrary, synthetic business culture inhabited by the hapless characters. "The Boss of It All" is one of the strangest and most interesting filmmaking experiences I've had in awhile, and probably the best Scandinavian office comedy ever made.