Okay, so some of his later films are reportedly a bit dodgy, but German director Wenders was one of the great directors of the 1970s and 1980s, and Wings of Desire is my definitive all-time favourite film (right now). So its great to see the BFI getting round to do a season of his films. See more at the BFI website:

http://www.bfi.org.uk/whatson/bfi_southbank/film_programme/january_seasons/wim_wenders

I can’t wait to finally see Paris, Texas on the big screen!

1. Johnny Depp returns to acting

Yes, after bumbling and gurning his way through the three Pirates of the Carribean films, it looks like our JD may finally be returning to what he does best – that is, actually acting. Tim Burton’s film version of the Steven Sondheim musical Sweeney Todd: the Demon Barber of Fleet Street seems natural enough material for the straggly-haired auteur, and, lets face it, anything with Alan Rickman in it is fine by me.

2. Juno

Hard to tell at this stage whether this is going to be the great film that I think it might be, or a tiresome post-Wes Anderson kook-fest, but is must be something special for a film of this type to be declared ‘best film of 2007′ by Chicago Sun-Times’ influential Roger Ebert. From what i can gather, Ellen Page puts in a truly wonderful performance as the titular Juno MacGuff; whether the over-sharp dialogue proves to be an annoyance, we will have to wait and see.

3. The new Coen Brothers film

Already being hailed as a masterpiece in the States, No Country For Old Men may well end up being the Coens’ greatest film so far. IMDB lists in its keywords for the film ‘blood splatter’, ‘shot in the leg’, ‘captive bolt gun’ and ‘vomit scene’ – how can it be bad?? I love Javier Bardem as well, great to see him becoming a major star in Hollywood (see Love in the Time of Cholera).

4. The return of Paul Thomas Anderson

The director of Boogie Nights, Magnolia and Punch-Drunk Love returns with a dark western chock full of violence, greed, betrayal and Daniel Day-Lewis, There Will Be Blood. Anderson’s films, for me, have become progressively greater as he has gone along, and this looks like topping those further still. Day-Lewis’ performance has already picked him up a Golden Globe nomination, and once again he looks a shoe-in for the Best Actor Oscar.

5. How to Lose Friends and Alienate People

Based on Toby Young’s famous memoir, this may well end up being a bit of a stinker, directed as it is by Curb Your Enthusiasm‘s Robert B. Weide, a TV director with no previous feature-length experience. I might be wrong though, but it will be a tough job to do the source material full justice. Still, good to see Simon Pegg getting big Hollywood roles, and i’m sure he willl bring his usual charm and natural comedic timing to the role; lets hope the film is up to his considerable talents.

6. A new Charlie Kaufman film

Entitled Synecdoche, New York, and starring the best actor in Hollywood, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, as well as personal favourite Hope Davis, this will be Kaufman’s first filmed screenplay since 2004’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and his directorial debut. Little has been revealed as yet about the plot, but expect the unexpected.

7. The Dark Knight

Christopher Nolan’s much anticipated follow-up to Batman Begins reunites him with his muse Christian Bale, but most excitingly sees Heath Ledger as the Joker, an absolutely inspired piece of casting. Katie Holmes has been replaced by the superior Maggie Gyllenhaal, but elsewhere the cast looks consistent with the predecessor. And do I spy one Anthony Michael Hall in the cast list?? Should be good.

8. Spike Jonze finally makes another film

Winning the prize for 2008’s most interesting collaboration, Spike Jonze directs an adaptation of the classic Maurice Sendak children’s story Where the Wild Things Are with a screenplay by writer Dave Eggers. It seems this is the project that led to Jonze turning down the chance to film Charlie Kaufman’s new project – a wise move? Whether its much cop, we will have to wait and see.

9. Guillermo Del Toro is back!

Fresh from the international success of Pan’s Labyrinth, Mexican director Del Toro returns to one of his personal pet projects, his bringing of Mike Mignola’s comic-book hero Hellboy to the big screen. Given his newly found international status, hopefully GDT will be given a little more creative freedom for Hellboy II: The Golden Army, so he can fully realise his vision for the film.

10. Indy and Rambo

Of course, everyone and their dogs will be queueing up for days on end to go to see the 5000 year-old Harrison Ford don the hat and whip and strut his stuff once again in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Crap title – makes it sound like a Harry Potter book.

And comedy of the year will surely go to Sylvester Stallone’s reprise of his role as Vietnam vet John Rambo, in the simply titled Rambo, amazingly his seventh feature as director. Lord help us…

I see that Roger Ebert has made Juno his film of the year (though we in the UK won’t get to see it until February 2008). Whilst other critical opinion may be divided as to whether it is any good or not, there seems to be a groundswell of opinion that Ellen Page, the 20 year-old Canadian star of the film, is in line for Golden Globe and Oscar recognition for her central performance.

Page is indeed a very talented young actress; her turn in David Slade’s 2005 shocker Hard Candy was sensational, showing a maturity beyond her meagre years etc etc etc… But what is the media’s obsession with calling her ‘the new Natalie Portman’ or ‘the new Winona Ryder’? This seems to be a curiously female phenomenon: is anyone ever seriously referred to as ‘the new George Clooney’, for instance? Okay, so I recall that Brad Pitt was once labelled ‘the new Robert Redford’ but no-one seemed to take that at all seriously. But we get ‘Scarlett Johansson is the new Marilyn Monroe’, ‘Angelina Jolie is the new Elizabeth Taylor’, ‘Naomi Watts is the new Nicole Kidman’, and Nicole Kidman is seemingly the new practically-fucking-everybody.

The idea that young actresses must follow in the footsteps of those who have gone before is patronising at best, and sexist at worst, and as simplistically narrow-minded as, for instance, labelling an up-and-coming black comedian “the new Richard Pryor” or “the new Eddie Murphy” by virtue of their skin colour alone. Stop it, please. It’s plain lazy.

Juno, by the way, looks really good, somewhat akin to Terry Zwigoff’s 2001 adaptation of Ghost World, a film I like very very much. So I guess that makes Ellen Page the new Thora Birch.

A year that saw the deaths of the likes of Ingmar Bergman, Michelangelo Antonioni and er, Anna Nicole Smith, was bound to set the revisionist critics proclaiming, once again, the death of modern cinema. In particular, there was a quite frankly ridiculous article in Sight and Sound written by Peter Matthews which proclamed “There are to be no more masterpieces”. What utter bollocks, and typical of a pompous backward-looking critical nincompoop. Certainly it is a time to reflect on the passing of a different age of filmmaking, but is it really necessary to take this as a cue to now render the entire medium artistically worthless?

Having said that, I have to admit a little disappointment with cinema-going in the year 2007. It was a bumper year for the box-office, with the ‘summer of threequels’ and the absence of a British summer attracting record numbers in through the cinema doors. Of these, there was little of lasting satisfaction; of these, there were predictably depressing franchises grinding slowly onwards – Pirates of the Caribbean, Ocean’s Thirteen, Rush Hour 3. Among these there were disappointments: Spiderman 3 was far too disjointed, confused and long, and Shrek the Third felt a lot like a film too far for that franchise. The increasing trend for CGI-onanism continued, yielding Michael Bay’s Transformers, Zack Snyder’s stylish-but-empty-headed 300, as well as dumbed-down late arrivals The Golden Compass and Beowolf.

There were several other notable disappointments: Edgar Wright’s Hot Fuzz was fun, but not nearly as good as Shaun of the Dead; Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited was just tiresome, marking his further dearth of ideas, and Danny Boyle’s Sunshine showed great promise, but a messy third act spoiled it somewhat. Joe Wright’s adaptation of Atonement had Oscar nominations stamped all over it, and while solid, it failed to deliver a real knockout punch. Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu went several steps too far with his Babel, an all too worthy film which stretched his interlinking storylines thang much too far. Which is a shame, because Amores Perros was bloody marvellous.

But amidst these disappointments there were some geniunely pleasing surprises: Julie Delpy’s sly, subtle 2 Days in Paris is the best film to nail down male jealousy that this writer has seen. Happily, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s 28 Weeks Later was a worthy sequel to the Brit-horror classic original, encompassing a post-Iraq sensibility to the zombie genre (though of course, they aren’t zombies really, are they?). I was utterly charmed by Michel Gondry’s The Science of Sleep, though i feel that you could stick Gael Garcia Bernal in pretty much anything and make it compulsive viewing. Still, Gondry has a real flair for visual ideas, and with the right script could be absolute dynamite. David Fincher’s terrifically tense, yet slow-moving Zodiac showed that he has finally come of age and embraced proper filmmaking, a real mature masterwork.

And there were other films which seemingly appeared out of nowhere; The Lives of Others, by first-time director Florian Henkel von Donnersmarck, while perhaps over-praised, still is a very well executed piece, and points to a bright new rising star of European cinema. John Carney’s Once was also a beautifully judged film, and displayed an awareness of the importance of music in people’s lives seldom found on celluloid recently.

But for me, 2007 showed that you can’t keep a good auteur down; quality offerings from the likes of Cronenberg, Meadows, Lynch, Fincher, Herzog, Greengrass, Winterbottom and Scott show that, contrary to the opinions of some in the critical community, there are still important artists in the industry today, making and distributing films within the confines of the system, but still able to assert their creative visions through their chosen medium. And with early 2008 promising new films from the Coen Brothers, Paul Thomas Anderson, Tim Burton and Todd Haynes, maybe this will be a continuing theme.

This is my by-no-means-definitive list of my favourite films of the year:

INLAND EMPIRE (David Lynch)

Essentially a David Lynch “Hits on 45” style greatest hits package. It’s all there: menace, unease, the battering down of the doors of perception, a sitcom featuring giant talking rabbits, strippers singing The Locomotion. The film Lynch fans have been waiting for, though everyone else is unlikely to have the faintest clue what the hell is going on. I loved it!

Eastern Promises (David Cronenberg)

Cronenberg continues his terrific run of form with a wonderfully fleshy, visceral tale set in the Russian underground in London. Great script by Steven Knight, great performances by messrs Mortensen and Watts, a richly allegoric tale of how life and death go hand in hand, mixed with the usual Cronenbergian identity confusions. And THAT bathhouse scene is simply jaw-dropping, one only our DC could possibly have shot.

This is England (Shane Meadows)

Superb portrait of a time and a place, specifically the Midlands in the early 1980s. Touches on many important issues, most notably how racism is fostered in the young and impressionable, and features an extraordinary performance from Thomas Turgoose as the young Shaun. Meadow’s finest film to date, and a great film about Britain’s early Thatcher years…

Control (Anton Corbijn)

… as is this. Finally, a film that shows the true poetic majesty of, er, Macclesfield. Corbijn’s masterful eye captures a late 1970s Britain, and the rise and fall of the young Ian Curtis, with a real sympathy and tenderness, both reinforcing and exploding the myth of ‘that miserable bloke out of Joy Division’. Haunting, poetic, and suprisingly funny. A quick word for Toby Kebell, who nearly steals the show from Sam Riley as JD’s permanently foul-mouthed manager Rob Gretton.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Andrew Dominik)

Superbly played, in particular a stand-out performance by Casey Affleck as the eponymous ‘coward’ Ford. Wonderfully shot, with a careful eye for time, place and season, and a well paced screenplay all adds up to one hell of a good film. Unfolds almost like Shakepearian tragedy with an eerie inevitability; yet this is also about finding a man trying to find reconcilement with his own mortality, as well as examining the fickle nature of celebrity and infamy. Fabulous stuff.

Top 11:

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Andrew Dominik)
Control (Anton Corbijn)
This is England (Shane Meadows)
Eastern Promises (David Cronenberg)
INLAND EMPIRE (David Lynch)
Zodiac (David Fincher)
The Lives of Others (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck)
Once (John Carney)
The Science of Sleep (Michel Gondry)
Syndromes and a Century (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)

Two Days in Paris (Julie Delpy)