Top 25 of 2007! No, Really, This Is It! Maybe.

Audiences and critics fell for Ratatouille like a mouse falls for cheese.

The lovely and talented Slashfilmers have put together what they hope is a definitive list of the top 25 films of 2007. Here’s their methodology:

Rotten Tomatoes represents the biggest repository of critical response, while the Internet Movie Database has the largest user rated database. We averaged the two together and compiled the definitive listing of the top 25 movies of 2007. Note: A movie must have been released in theaters in the United States between January and December 2007, and must have garnered more than (either) 400 imdb user votes or 80 movie reviews to qualify for this list.

Okay, so now here’s the list:

1. There Will Be Blood
2. The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters
3. Ratatouille
4. Persepolis
5. In the Shadow of the Moon
6. Juno
7. Sicko
8. Once
9. The Bourne Ultimatum
10. No Country for Old Men
11. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
12. Enchanted
13. Gone Baby Gone
14. Away From Her
15. This is England
16. The Savages
17. Control
18. Hot Fuzz
19. Hairspray
20. 3:10 to Yuma
21. Rescue Dawn
22. Zodiac
23. Superbad
24. Knocked Up
25. Michael Clayton

It’s an interesting list and I appreciate their efforts. Where I would differ is that I give less credence to IMDB as a true arbiter of the popular taste. In general, people are only going to bother to jump onto IMDB to rate a movie if they either love it or hate it. I’m sure there’s a coterie of steady hands there who put in a rating for every movie they see, and hand out mid-range grades, but I just feel like there’s something being left out somehow, like we’re getting the ratings from a certain group of people, but not really the whole movie-going audience (which, I realize, short of handing out and collecting comment cards at every screening or doing large polls, is almost impossible).

Another thing I find peculiar is the prevalence of movies on this list that either haven’t opened widely or in some cases haven’t opened at all. This is supposed to be a combination of critical reviews and audience reviews, but virtually no one outside of critics (and the occasional lucky preview audience) has seen There Will Be Blood or Persepolis yet. I’m sure some of the docs on the list didn’t play representatively throughout the country. So in the end I think it still does skew towards the critics.

Slashfilm makes the point that there is often a great divide between audience tastes and popular tastes, but you know, I think this year the two were closer than ever. Here are some of the movies that were on many critics’ best of lists or were well-reviewed that were also box office hits: The Bourne Ultimatum, Enchanted, Knocked Up, Superbad, Ratatouille, and 3:10 to Yuma. Gone Baby Gone, No Country for Old Men, and Michael Clayton haven’t been blockbusters but have been really steady performers that will earn their keep. Juno and this summer, Once, performed well in small release. So this has actually been a pretty decent year, I think, for critics and regular folks to go to the movies together.

Nevertheless, thanks Slashfilm friends for all your tabulating and combining. Are we done with lists yet?