There Will Be Blood
Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
2007
Day-Lewis builds an American monster out of oil and resentment, and Jonny Greenwood's score scrapes at the nerves for two and a half hours without once letting up.
★ 9.4
Browse by time · year
2007
Showing 105 works across all media from 2007
No Country for Old Men
Directed by Coen Brothers
2007
The Coens made a chase film with almost no music in it at all: Javier Bardem's killer with a cattle gun became the most frightening figure of the decade.
★ 8.9
In Rainbows
2007
They put it online and let people pay whatever they wanted, including nothing. Some of the songs had been played live for ten years.
★ 8.6
Back to Black
2007
Producer Mark Ronson had a Brooklyn soul band play it live to tape like a sixties session. Winehouse wrote about the man she kept leaving.
★ 8.2
Stronger
2007 · From Graduation
West cleared the Daft Punk sample through their manager, had Timbaland reprogram the kick drums, and hit number one.
★ 7.7
Ratatouille
Directed by Brad Bird and Jan Pinkava
2007
Almost nothing else takes both cooking and criticism this seriously: a rat with a palate steers a hapless human around a Paris kitchen, and the food looks extraordinary.
★ 7.3
4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
Directed by Cristian Mungiu
2007
The Romanian New Wave announced itself with this: an illegal abortion arranged across one day in 1987, filmed in long static takes that give you nowhere to look.
★ 7.2
Graduation
2007
It came out the same day as a 50 Cent album, and the two turned it into a public sales contest. Kanye won by a distance.
★ 6.9
Can't Tell Me Nothing
2007 · From Graduation
DJ Toomp built the beat and bassline, West layered the strings, and Zach Galifianakis lip-synced it on a tractor.
★ 6.9
Sound of Silver
2007
All My Friends is one piano figure repeated for seven and a half minutes while everything else is built up around it.
★ 6.7
A Secular Age
2007 · 896 pages
In 1500 disbelief in God was barely possible. By 2000 it is ordinary. Taylor explains the shift not as science clearing away superstition but as Christian reform building a self sealed against transcendence.
★ 6.7
The Bourne Ultimatum
Directed by Paul Greengrass
2007
Handheld chases got shakier for a decade because of this film: Greengrass films spying as legwork rather than glamour, and the Waterloo Station chase is the most tightly constructed surveillance sequence ever filmed.
★ 6.7
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Directed by Julian Schnabel
2007 · France
Schnabel put the camera inside a paralyzed man's one working eye and left it there: the memoir it comes from was dictated letter by letter, by blinking, and the film feels weightless anyway.
★ 6.7
With Every Heartbeat
2007
No chorus, just strings and a rising ache; Kleerup's living-room track became Robyn's first British number one.
★ 6.4
Hot Fuzz
Directed by Edgar Wright
2007 · United Kingdom
Wright's parody is better constructed than most of the films it mocks: a London supercop is exiled to a picture-perfect village, and the final act is staged better than the real thing.
★ 6.4
India After Gandhi
2007 · 960 pages
Guha carries India from independence in 1947 to the present and asks why it never broke apart, given partition, famine and insurgency. He calls it an unnatural nation and an unlikely democracy.
★ 6.4
Don't Stop the Music
2007
StarGate looped Michael Jackson's chant from Wanna Be Startin' Somethin', and Rihanna took it to number one in ten countries.
★ 6.4
Consider the Lobster
2007 · 352 pages
Sent to the Maine Lobster Festival, Wallace asks whether boiling an animal alive is defensible. The same scruple drives his reports on a porn awards show and Senator McCain's presidential campaign.
★ 6.3
What Hath God Wrought
The Transformation of America 1815-1848
2007 · 928 pages
Morse tapped the title into the first telegraph line in 1844. Howe's Pulitzer-winning account of antebellum America argues that communications, markets, and revival religion remade the country while Jacksonian politics took the credit.
★ 6.3
Into the Wild
Directed by Sean Penn
2007
Sean Penn spent ten years persuading the family to let him film this: a graduate burns his savings and walks into the Alaskan interior, and the film neither mocks him nor canonizes him.
★ 6.3
Good Life
2007 · From Graduation
West and DJ Toomp sped up Michael Jackson's P.Y.T. into a Grammy-winning glide, T-Pain's hook floating over it.
★ 6.2
Superbad
Directed by Greg Mottola
2007
Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg began writing it at thirteen and it shows: one night, a catastrophic fake ID, and a friendship neither boy can say anything about directly.
★ 6.0
Impossible Germany
2007 · From Sky Blue Sky
Nels Cline's lead guitar turns a quiet Tweedy song into the twin-guitar epic Rolling Stone compared to Television.
★ 6.0
D.A.N.C.E.
2007
Justice built it from Michael Jackson song titles and handed the chorus to a London children's choir.
★ 6.0
The Underdog
2007 · From Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
Jon Brion produced this track and no other on the album, adding mariachi-style horns and handclaps to Britt Daniel's warning.
★ 5.9
Raising Sand
2007
T Bone Burnett chose every song and neither singer had heard most of them. Plant sings underneath Krauss rather than over her.
★ 5.7
Juno
Directed by Jason Reitman
2007
Diablo Cody won an Oscar for dialogue that no teenager has ever spoken, and it works anyway: a sixteen-year-old handles a pregnancy with more composure than every adult around her.
★ 5.6
Buy U A Drank (Shawty Snappin')
2007
Auto-Tune used as an instrument rather than a fix, T-Pain producing himself, Yung Joc riding a snap beat.
★ 5.6
Kala
2007
Denied a visa to work in America, she recorded it instead in India, Trinidad, Liberia and Australia, with whoever was in the room.
★ 5.4
Our Song
2007 · From Taylor Swift
Swift wrote it in roughly twenty minutes for a ninth-grade talent show, then spent six weeks atop the country chart.
★ 5.4
Call Me By Your Name
2007 · 256 pages
Elio is seventeen the summer a visiting scholar stays six weeks at his family's house on the Italian coast. Aciman renders desire from the inside, every calculation and humiliation of wanting someone.
★ 5.4
The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 · 2007
God is Not Great · 2007
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
2007 · 339 pages
Oscar is an overweight Dominican nerd in New Jersey, desperate for love and buried in fantasy novels. Díaz runs his family through Trujillo's dictatorship in footnotes where history and comic books collide.
★ 5.1
The Portable Atheist · 2007
Teardrops On My Guitar
2007 · From Taylor Swift
Nathan Chapman's production stays hushed while Swift and Liz Rose leave the real classmate's name, Drew, in the lyric.
★ 5.1
Gone Gone Gone
2007 · From Raising Sand
A 1964 Everly Brothers single, rebuilt by T Bone Burnett into swampy menace, won a Grammy.
★ 5.1
Flightless Bird, American Mouth
2007
Brian Deck built a loop for Beam to layer guitar over; Stewart reportedly chose it for Twilight's prom.
★ 5.0
Hang Me Up To Dry
2007
Cut first for the Up in Rags EP, all four members co-producing, a clothesline standing in for one-sided love.
★ 5.0
Neon Bible
2007
They bought a church in Quebec and recorded in it, using the pipe organ, a military choir and a Hungarian orchestra.
★ 5.0
The Way I Are
Timbaland and Keri Hilson
2007
Cut in Virginia Beach with Danja co-producing, Keri Hilson co-writing, and a hook that shrugs at the whole courtship.
★ 5.0
The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears
2007 · 240 pages
Soldiers killed Sepha Stephanos's father in Ethiopia, and seventeen years on he keeps a failing store in a Washington neighborhood gentrifying around him. With two African friends he plays at naming dictators.
★ 4.8
Crank That
2007
A steelpan loop built on a demo copy of FL Studio, seven weeks at number one, three million downloads.
★ 4.7
I Will Possess Your Heart
2007 · From Narrow Stairs
Five minutes of Harmer's bass riff before a word arrives, a krautrock crawl radio edits had to hack apart.
★ 4.7
Bleeding Love
2007
Hollywood Records turned it down for McCartney; Tedder recut it in a new key and Cowell called it the one.
★ 4.7
Born Standing Up
A Comic's Life
2007 · 208 pages
Working the Disneyland magic shop as a teenager, Martin set out to build comedy without punchlines, so laughter had nowhere to land. He filled arenas with it, then quit for good.
★ 4.6
Boy with a Coin
2007
Sub Pop led The Shepherd's Dog with this, the record where Beam's whispered four-track folk grew a full band.
★ 4.5
Encounters at the End of the World
Directed by Werner Herzog
2007
Herzog went to Antarctica announcing he would not film penguins, then made the saddest scene about one anyway: he is really there to interview the people who chose the place.
★ 4.5
Sunshine
2007
A hangover, a bike ride to Ant's house, and an optimistic beat that became Atmosphere's biggest song.
★ 4.4
5 Years Time
2007
Laura Marling's ukulele and Charlie Fink's deadpan flopped in 2007; a 2008 re-release carried the sunshine to number seven.
★ 4.4
Love Song
2007
Epic wanted a radio-friendly love song; Bareilles wrote a refusal instead, and that piano riff climbed to number four.
★ 4.4
Dreaming with a Broken HeartJohn Mayer
Dreaming with a Broken Heart
2007
Pino Palladino on bass, Ricky Peterson on piano, Steve Jordan producing, and Mayer singing the moment the dream ends.
★ 4.3
Low
2007
DJ Montay's beat, T-Pain on the hook, and the first song to sell four million digital copies in America.
★ 4.3
Forever (Chris Brown)
2007
Written first as a Doublemint gum jingle, then extended by Polow da Don into a wedding-aisle staple.
★ 4.2
Apologize
Timbaland and OneRepublic
2007
Tedder wrote it, Timbaland remixed it, and radio played the result 10,394 times in a single week.
★ 4.2
Big Things Poppin' (Do It)
2007
A guitar line lifted from the Top Gun theme, Mannie Fresh on the boards, and ESPN running it all summer.
★ 4.1
Summer Love
2007 · From FutureSex / LoveSounds
Cut at Thomas Crown Studios in Virginia Beach, with a prelude fused to the front of the summer single.
★ 4.1
La Vie en Rose
Directed by Olivier Dahan
2007 · France
Marion Cotillard ages from a young street singer to the end of Piaf's life and is unrecognizable throughout: the first Best Actress win for a performance given entirely in French.
★ 4.0
I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed. I hate most people.
There Will Be Blood · 2007
With You (Chris Brown)
2007
Stargate cut it at Battery Studios with Espen Lind on acoustic guitar, and Brown took it to number two.
★ 3.6
What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.
God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything · 2007
Well, I can tell you about the river Or we could just get in.
From the Rivers to the Ocean · 2007
Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere.
Ratatouille · 2007
Don't Matter
2007
Ten weeks climbing from number seventy-nine to the top, with a chorus built partly on Marley's Zimbabwe.
★ 3.5
Taxi to the Dark Side
Directed by Alex Gibney
2007
Alex Gibney's father was a naval interrogator and told him to make it: an Afghan taxi driver died in American custody at Bagram, and the film follows the policy up the chain.
★ 3.4
Beautiful Girls
2007
Rotem built it on Stand by Me, and Kingston, seventeen, became the first nineties-born artist to top the Hot 100.
★ 3.3
Lake Michigan
2007
Roger Moutenot produced the album, Zach Rogue wrote every word, and a Zune advert gave this one legs.
★ 3.1