2007 in Review: Best Rentals/Revivals

I watch twice as many older films as new releases, and 2007 was a banner year on my couch and at the revival house. I saw four of my top ten as homework for Edward Copeland's survey of the top 100 foreign films of all time, and others resulted from my Oscar obsession (#7), a gift of a membership at Chicago's Siskel Center (#4), and my too-infrequent trips to the revival house in my own neighborhood (#8).

It physically hurt to have to leave off such films as Andrei Tarkovsky's poetic Andrei Rublev (USSR, 1969), Réne Clément's deeply disturbing Forbidden Games (France, 1952), the sublimely religious The Song of Bernadette (1943), and Charles Burnett's devilish To Sleep with Anger (1990). But it's a top ten list, and I couldn't quite figure out how to shove fourteen films into it.

10. The Narrow Margin (1952). Studio hack Richard Fleischer's minimalist noir is like a hypodermic full of pure suspense jabbed right into the heart, or something equally thrilling (but maybe less painful). A good cop has to shepherd a mob moll cross-country to testify, but which of the beggar's banquet of tough guys on the train is the assassin sent to kill her? Maybe they all are. It's surely the best suspense film set on a train, despite what you may have heard about a certain portly British director.

9. The Conformist (Italy, 1970). This fragmented masterpiece suggests that Tarantino wasn't just watching kung fu movies. The story of a regular guy who's so driven by the need to fit in that he ends up a Fascist hit man is driven to dizzying heights of directorial and photographic audacity by the 29-year-old Bernardo Bertolucci and his brilliant cinematographer Vittorio Storaro. This must be the coolest film ever made.

8. Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003). A three-hour lullabye to the film industry, this documentary looks at how Hollywood has chosen to depict its hometown. Its hundreds of movie clips are only the start of the fun; director Thom Anderson also provides a smart analysis of the interplay between architecture and cinema and the ways that films have rewritten the city's history. Most intriguing to me, however, is the complete absence of movies about the movie industry, but I guess that would be fodder for another three-hour documentary.

7. Shanghai Express (1932). Most of Josef von Sternberg's talkies leave me cold: they're so frosty and beautiful, with stylized mannequins who stand around talking about love and devotion but not demonstrating any of it. This one bowled me over because it combined von Sternberg's brilliantly realized visual flourishes with some real, human feeling. Dietrich was never again so divine as she was here.

6. Strangers on a Train (1951). OK, but this one takes place only partly on a train. Less than The Narrow Margin, at any rate. Hitchcock's masterpiece (which may be my favorite of his films) is filled with signature touches, my favorite being the tennis match. The audacity of how long that sequence takes is just one example of the Master of Suspense's mastery of timing. Who else would dare drag it out that long, and to such delicious effect?

5. Pickpocket (France, 1959). My first Bresson film, and why did it take me so long to get around to him? His stripped-bare version of Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment retains all the angst and grand ideas about supermen as a take-it-or-leave-it proposition; it could be that Michel is just blowing smoke to cover his addiction. The characters stand at obtuse angles from each other; they're only truly alive during the balletic pickpocketing sequences.

4. War and Peace (USSR, 1968). It's the biggest and most expensive film ever made, and will probably retain those titles forever (it helps when you can use most of the Red Army for a single battle scene), but the scale and spectacle are only part of this sweeping epic's charms. Sergei Bondarchuk is able to balance all that delirious excess with the sensitive performances of his sprawling cast, especially Lyudmila Savelyeva as Natasha and Bondarchuk himself as Pierre.

3. Come and See (USSR, 1985). Where War and Peace showed us war in all of its possible permutations, this nightmarish down-the-rabbit-hole film is about only one: the "hell" part of "war is hell." It's the story of one patriotic kid who joins the Soviet resistance against the Nazi invaders during World War II, and pays for his patriotism with his sanity.

2. Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Germany, 1974). My first Fassbinder film, and why did it take me so long to get around to him? His reinterpretation of Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows is one of the most beautifully depressing films I've ever seen, the story of how love triumphs over everything except our own pettiness and prejudice. Excuse me while I get some tissues.

1. Persona (Sweden, 1966). I'm not positive that I could explain more than a scene or two of Ingmar Bergman's modernist masterpiece; all I know is that it's emotionally shattering, an almost religious cinematic experience—religious in the sense that it's like developing an intimate relationship with something that's unknowable. It defies interpretation, or at least my fumbling attempts at it. I think it's one of the five or six greatest films ever made.