American Cinema: Our Best Diplomat in 2007?

7. Eastern Promises and Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead. The year’s most bracing suspense thrillers, courtesy of two masters of the form. In Eastern Promises, David Cronenberg pulls us in on a woman-in-distress setup straight out of a ’40s film noir, then embarks upon a series of distinctly Cronenbergian machinations including — but not limited to — bodily dismemberment and the transmutation of identity. In Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, 83-year-old Sidney Lumet spins a lurid melodrama that’s also an edge-of-your-seat heist movie, propelled by a brutal efficiency that would leave many a younger director gasping for air.

8. Margot at the Wedding. The full measure of Noah Baumbach’s Chekhovian dramedy may lie in how edgy it makes viewers — how they squirm in their seats and walk out of the theater slightly dazed, as if emerging from a particularly fractious family reunion. True, Baumbach’s comfort zone is the audience’s discomfort, but it’s the rumpled humanity of his characters that shines through at every turn.

Eastern Promises (Photo by Peter Mountain)

Knocked Up (Photo by Suzanne Hanover)

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9. Knocked Up and Superbad. Even the flaccid music-bio spoof Walk Hard couldn’t stop 2007 from being remembered as the year impresario Judd Apatow revitalized the landscape of American comedy with a pair of ebulliently vulgar, surprisingly heartfelt tales of emotional panic ­— one about the looming specter of fatherhood, the other about the possibly more terrifying thought of heading off to college with your virginity still intact.

10. Redacted and No End in Sight and The Wind That Shakes the Barley. First, the only two essential Iraq movies in a veritable minefield of them: Brian De Palma’s bilious, Brechtian deconstruction of wartime propaganda, from the frontlines to our living rooms to cyberspace, and political scientist Charles Ferguson’s blistering, minute-by-minute account of how it all went wrong in the first place. Then, for a bit of perspective, there was Ken Loach’s masterful telling of an earlier war on terror — the Irish Republican Army’s guerrilla ops against British occupiers, circa 1920 — complete with its own cautionary lessons about centrism at odds with extremism, and political interests placed before human ones.