By now, even compulsive listmakers like your humble Screengrab staff are getting sick to our bones of year-end top ten lists. We've seen them all, or at least we've seen all the movies that are on them, and you can only hear so many times how goddamn great the Coen Brothers are, even if you really, really believe it. But leave it to Film Threat to come up with one last 2007 recap, and actually make it worth reading: Phil Hall counts down the Ten Best Unseen Films of 2007. (And he's right: we haven't seen any of these).
Each year, for whatever reason, a lot of filmgoers -- even critics, industry types, and other insiders -- don't have the opportunity to see a lot of the films completed and released during that calendar year. Possibly they've only gotten an overseas release, or they're having trouble getting a distrubutor, or they're still making the festival circuit, or they go straight to video or are only available from the filmmaker. (By way of example, two of the Screengrab's favorite movies of 2007 were dated far earlier; the Oscar-winning German drama The Lives of Others, while completed in 2006, only showed in the U.S. at one film festival that year, while Charles Burnett's masterful Killer of Sheep was made over three decades ago but is only now seeing theatrical release due to clearance rights issues and financial problems.) That's why lists like Hall's are valuable; they provide us with a sort of checklist for movies we might likely see in the year or years following for which our eyes should be peeled.
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