Movies Illustrated - bringing you the finest movie and film news right from around the world, with movie features and film reviews. Sign up via RSS >>

• Features
• Rewind
• Posted

Article

Movies Illustrated 2007 Movie Awards

2007 brought us some great movies all across the board, lets take a look at some of the the good films, the strange ones and a few other bits and pieces from this year.

Best movie that wasn’t what i expected
Winner - Zodiac
I never saw Zodiac coming and loved it when it arrived, slow paced and lingering. Zodiac had great style and art direction, a docile lead character with a passion for puzzle solving and a mysterious killer with a penchant for cryptic notes. Not your typical David Fincher movie, less violent and graphic then previous films and actually based on a real life story, but none of this stopped it being an interesting movie.

Strangest movie of the year
Winner – Beowulf
Who would have expected to see a CGI Angelina Jolie and Ray Winstone with a few years and a few pounds taken off for the big screen. Well it happened thanks to Robert Zemeckis pushing the boundaries and the use of computer animation. I personally still don’t think that CGI is quite good enough to do realistic human characters yet, but they are getting much closer and Beowulf is proof of that.

Best trailer of the year
Winner – The Nines
With a strange, quirky and quite long trailer The Nines piqued my interest in the fact that It gave us a good portion of the film to judge if it was any good or not, and it did look good.

Longest movie of the year you were happy to sit through
Winner - American Gangster
Quite a long movie and not as epic as it wanted to be, but that just made it all the more watch able. with some great sets, clothes and vehicles that all represented the time, American Gangster was a long movie but one that never dragged it feet.

Best low budget movie
Winner – Half Nelson
No Cgi in sight, at least non that you could spot anyway, and a very watch able movie with some great acting from all of the main characters. Now this movie is debatable as a 2007 movie because in the United Kingdom it wasn’t out till 2007, where as almost elsewhere else it was out in 2006. So Half Nelson makes it into my 2007 and deservedly so.

Most hyped award movie that was deserving
Winner - Blood diamond
Blood Diamond was well promoted via the award ceremonies and stood up to the test of actually being a good films. With great performances in the movie from Jennifer Connelly, Djmon Hounsou and Leonardo DiCaprio with an interesting South African accent. Tackling a serious issue of the diamond trade, this movie was gripping from start to finish.

Best animated movie
Winner – Ratatouille
Pixar were back on form with a nice mix of human characters and creatures in this rat who can cook, slapstick comedy story. Great fun from start to finish and it worked on a whole load of levels for all ages.

Best all out action movie of the year
Winner - The Bourne Ultimatum
The third Jason Bourne movie was seriously action heavy with more than a few stand out scenes, including the rooftop chase and some tense scenes as Bourne makes contact in the train station. Bourne was back and on form after the less focused second movie and a solid end to the trilogy.

Well thats it for another year, but there are loads of promising movies arriving in 2008, lets hope they are as good as the best from 2007. Have a good new year!

Article by - Alan Dalton