When it comes to the best calendar year for cinema releases, we’ve heard arguments for 1939 (The Wizard of Oz, Stagecoach, Gone With the Wind etc.), 1971 (The French Connection, The Last Picture Show, McCabe & Mrs. Miller etc.) and 1999 (The Sixth Sense, The Matrix, Magnolia etc.), but maybe it’s time to consider something a little more recent?
A new theory has recently started doing the rounds that 2007 might be in with a shout — if not the best year ever, then perhaps the most recent “great year” in American cinema. What’s interesting about each of those years is that they all come at pivotal moments for the movies: a final flush before WWII, the early, anything-goes days of New Hollywood; the last days before digital took over; and both the last year before the MCU and the year that the iPhone launched.
Looking back, it’s interesting how blockbusters shifted, but it’s especially glaring how many great comedies we used to have. Read on to discover more about the films of 2007 and use the guide below to find out where to stream the best of them on services like AppleTV, Netflix, Prime Video and elsewhere.
1. There Will Be Blood
Let’s start with the last film to be released that year, Paul Thomas Anderson’s modern classic, There Will Be Blood: a great American saga that is also probably the majority of people’s pick for the greatest film of that decade. It stars Daniel Day-Lewis as Daniel Plainview, a self-proclaimed “oil man” whose relentless quest for greed and power does little to compensate for his bottomless well of hatred.
It remains one of Day-Lewis’s defining performances, and if you like what the actor did in Scorsese’s Gangs of New York, or appreciate PTA’s latest classic, One Battle After Another, you should definitely check it out.
2. No Country For Old Men
At the 2008 Oscars, where movies from 2007 competed, most major categories were a showdown between Anderson’s movie and another modern Western: the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men. Unluckily for Anderson, the Coens basically went home with the lot for this air-tight and darkly entertaining adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s New Mexico crime novel—a film that you will especially love if you’ve been enjoying watching Fargo in more recent years.
Looking back, 2007 was actually a great year for Westerns, with Andrew Dominik’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and James Mangold’s 3:10 to Yuma both receiving recognition at the Oscars. Anderson’s movie now has the greatest reputation, but I certainly wouldn’t hold it against the Coens—it’s a great movie, and they deserved their crowning triumph.
3. Superbad
2007 was also a standout year for comedies, with Blades of Glory (starring Will Ferrell), Hot Rod (Andy Samberg), and Knocked Up (Seth Rogen) all released at various points during the summer. Better than all of them, in my opinion, was the Rogen-scripted Superbad — a film I’ve watched (and laughed at/with) countless times, and I think will continue to do so for years to come.
Perfectly cast in a story about three high schoolers trying to buy booze for a party, the film launched the careers of Michael Cera, Jonah Hill and the now two-time Academy Award winner Emma Stone, so if you’re a fan of their more recent work in movies like The Wolf of Wall Street or La La Land, you have to go back and check this one out.
4. Zodiac
After There Will Be Blood and No Country, the third movie you will likely see on most Best-of-the-Decade lists is David Fincher’s Zodiac, which might also be the most influential of those three. This is the film (along with Fincher’s spiritually connected series Mindhunter) that created what would become the go-to style for true crime shows and documentaries going forward—and if you want a fascinating rundown of those trends, make sure to check out Charlie Shackleton's excellent new doc, Zodiac Killer Project.
Fincher’s film is a relentlessly gripping and frightening procedural about a journalist attempting to track down the Zodiac killer, who terrorised the people of San Francisco with a series of murders in the 1960s and 1970s. If you’re a fan of Fincher’s movies (particularly Se7en and Gone Girl), you know what to do.
5. Hot Fuzz
If you’re looking for a different kind of comedy than the ones I’ve listed above, 2007 also boasted a few more offbeat classics. The John C. Reilly-starring music industry satire Walk Hard has basically become the go-to litmus test for every sincere music biopic that’s come since—a This is Spinal Tap for dramatised “true stories” of how famous musicians made it to where they are.
Another is the movie adaptation of John Waters’ Broadway smash, Hairspray—think Grease except with Waters’ sense of humour and Travolta in drag. Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez also released their Grindhouse experiment, which features QT’s much-overlooked exploitation movie, Death Proof. Perhaps the best of these inventive genre mashups, however, was Edgar Wright’s Hot Fuzz, his home-run follow-up to Shaun of the Dead—a movie that did for ‘80s action (like Commando) what Shaun did for zombies.
6. The Bourne Ultimatum
For all its charms, you would be hard-pressed to argue that 2007 was a classic year for blockbusters. The box office top ten for that year features Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and National Treasure: Book of Secrets (both solid) alongside a bunch of fine, third-in-the-franchise instalments: Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, Shrek the Third, Spider-Man 3.
The best of these third instalment movies was easily The Bourne Ultimatum, an awesome film that closed out the definitive action franchise of that decade with typical thrills and frantic energy. If you’ve seen the first two, you know what to do, but if you’re new to the series, it’s best to start from The Bourne Identity and work your way up!
7. Juno
Away from the big studios, there were plenty of newly-minted, indie classics hitting cinema screens in 2007, too. The micro-budgeted Irish movie Once made it all the way to the Oscars as Noah Baumbach released Margot at the Wedding and Todd Haynes brought out his experimental Bob Dylan movie, I’m Not There.
The most beloved and successful indie that year was, without a doubt, Juno, a movie that brought together the writer-director team of Diablo Cody and Jason Reitman and launched the career of Elliot Page, each of whom was nominated for Oscars for their efforts. After the success of Little Miss Sunshine the previous year, Juno confirmed that American independent cinema was a force to be reckoned with again.
8. Ratatouille
It clearly wasn’t enough that 2007 had some of the best action, comedy, indie and prestige movies of the decade; it also had arguably the greatest Pixar film too—certainly up to that point. At the Oscars in 2008—which, as you can imagine, was absolutely STACKED—Brad Bird’s Ratatouille (a gorgeous story about a friendly rodent who secretly becomes the most talked about chef in Paris) bagged five nominations, including Best Original Screenplay.
This is a beautiful film if you are in any way romantic about the French capital, but also if you’re a fan of that golden age of Pixar (think movies like Up and WALL-E).
9. Michael Clayton
Another conspicuously abundant genre in 2007 was the crime movie. Ridley Scott’s American Gangster, starring Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe, was a big hit, and we even got Sidney Lumet’s swansong, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, with Philip Seymour Hoffman.
The best crime movie of the year, and a work that’s only become more influential in the years since, is Michael Clayton. This is a film about shady corporate conspiracies that stars George Clooney and was written and directed by Tony Gilroy—and if you enjoyed the intelligent, resonant writing that Gilroy brought to Andor, you really need to check this one out.
10. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
We’ll cap this list with a quick rundown of all the exciting things that were happening in international cinema. At the Oscars at the beginning of the year, The Lives of Others beat Pan’s Labyrinth (both instant classics) to the Oscar. In Venice, Ang Lee’s erotic thriller Lust, Caution won the Gold Lion as the Spanish found footage horror [REC] shocked audiences in an out of competition slot—it has since gone on to become a cult classic.
The best international movie that year, however, was Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, a still shocking, fiercely serious, but deeply moving film about abortion rights and state control that deservedly beat both No Country and Zodiac to the Palme d’Or in Cannes. If you’re looking for something a little outside the mainstream, it is well worth seeking out!
