The pleasure we take in movies is rarely in the movie as a whole but in moments within a movie: a particular performance, a hilarious line, a memorable score, a knock-out dress. (You did notice Christopher Walken's ensemble when you saw "Balls of Fury," didn't you?)
Several Globe writers and editors recall their favorite movie moments from 2007.
The only reason to see "Charlie Wilson's War" is the fabulous performance of Philip Seymour Hoffman as a disheveled, crafty CIA operative named Gust Avrakotos. Gust resides far down the food chain from the well-born chosen who arrive at the agency through the traditional Groton-Yale glide chute, and is, quite simply, a refreshing breath of foul air. In a delicious exchange with Charlie Wilson, the Texas congressman played by Tom Hanks, Wilson looks at the disheveled Gust and says, "You ain't James Bond." To which Gust replies, without missing a beat, "You ain't Thomas Jefferson."
SAM ALLIS
So what if, realistically speaking, "Juno" is to teen pregnancy what "Pretty Woman" was to prostitution? As naive and politically incorrect as it is hilarious, this spunky little comedy has dozens of moments that resonate. Most impressive is when Juno (Ellen Page) breaks the baby news to her impossibly tolerant father (J.K. Simmons), who remarks: "I thought you were the kind of girl who knew when to say when." Though Page barely winces, you see her entire body absorb the blow. "I don't really know what kind of girl I am," she says on behalf of daughters everywhere. Whatever else "Juno" gets wrong, it gets this exchange exactly right.
JANICE PAGE
About 10 minutes into John Turturro's "Romance & Cigarettes," just when you're thinking you know what kind of movie it's going to be - grubby Queens comedy/drama about adulterous Nick Murder (James Gandolfini), sexy bit-on-the-side (Kate Winslet), and vengeful wife (Susan Sarandon) - it takes a delirious turn into something unexpected, weird, and right. Nick and his wife have just had a hilarious, awful argument over her discovery of his affair. Finally he walks out the door. He stands on the porch and looks around. And then he starts to sing. He sings "Lonely Is a Man Without Love," and he means it. Not only that - a chorus of his blue-collar neighbors soon join in, putting down their garbage cans and raising their welder's masks to help him belt out his heartbreak. If they camped it up, it wouldn't work. But it's completely straight-faced, and it lasts less than two minutes. And when it's over, you're laughing and sad at the same time, and you know that, wherever this movie is going, it won't be where you expected. But you're eager to go along.
LOUISE KENNEDY
One by one, the album covers drop, each a classic of 1950s jazz on the vanguard Verve record label. And then we hear a voice-over. "Your personal experiences include rape, abortion, jail, heroin addiction," to which a woman curtly interjects, "It's the way it went down, Bryant." Anita O'Day is addressing (or better yet, dressing down) a young Bryant Gumbel in an interview where he rattles off a list of the late jazz singer's more notorious moments. It's the start of the documentary "Anita O'Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer," and O'Day's response - with hardened emphasis on "down" - perfectly encapsulated the life of an artist whose demons were matched only by her defiance and will to overcome them.
JAMES REED
While some people saw "Black Snake Moan" because they were intrigued by a film about a man who chains a woman to a radiator, many other people flocked to theaters as devotees of pop star Justin Timberlake, who has a supporting role in the movie. Director Craig Brewer, who also made "Hustle & Flow," had a gift for those fans. The opening sequence of "Black Snake Moan" features Timberlake in the throes of passion. The sex scene is fairly graphic, a mess of grunts and freckles. For Timberlake followers who have spent good money (in some cases, their allowances) on albums, concerts, and copies of Seventeen with the crooner on the cover, the first minutes of "Black Snake Moan" answered an important question: "What would it be like to be with Justin?" Most likely, what those fans saw on screen is exactly what it would be like, in real life. Because even the diehard fans know, Timberlake can't be that good of an actor.
MEREDITH GOLDSTEIN
She's the walking definition of an ugly American, trundling through Paris in white sneakers and an oversize fanny pack. But as a lonely tourist practicing her French, Margo Martindale provides a lovely, bittersweet coda to the omnibus film "Paris, Je T'Aime." Martindale narrates Alexander Payne's concluding segment in clunky French, reporting back to her language class about her week's vacation. We watch one unexceptional encounter after another, as the script deftly sketches in details of a middle-aged woman's hunger for more. A job as a letter carrier, the two dogs, the boyfriend she hasn't seen in more than a decade - with every small revelation we come to understand why the trip will be both a lifesaver and a disappointment. At the end there's an epiphany of sorts, which Martindale, a wonderful character actress, underplays beautifully. As time goes by, she'll forget the moment, and remember everything.
SCOTT HELLER
The occasional upside of a bad movie is a performance that tattoos itself on your brain. Not far into "Alpha Dog," Nick Cassavetes's unwitting love letter to the teen gangstas of the San Fernando Valley, Ben Foster arrives high as a blimp, inked with body art. Holy Morton Downey! He's a Jewish neo-Nazi, too. He has about four scenes as the half-brother of a kidnapped kid. In the most unexpectedly funny one, he crashes a house party, socks one lady partygoer, spin-kicks another, slaps somebody else around, screams, suavely pulls himself together, and barks an announcement ("If anybody sees Johnny Truelove, tell them Jake Mazursky is looking for 'em. Thank you.") The other kids look at him in exhilarated awe. They've just watched the best Michael Jackson video in 12 years.
WESLEY MORRIS
This movie moment didn't happen on screen, and it was memorable for all the wrong reasons. But there was something deeply moving, as if it were a kind of plagal cadence for film culture, in the near-simultaneous deaths of Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni in July. It was, in a way, like Thomas Jefferson and John Adams dying within a few hours of each other on July 4, 1826. Bergman and Antonioni didn't care much for each other's films, and their major contributions lay well in the past. They shared a dual kinship, though: that of greatness (everything that rises really does converge when it rises as high as their masterpieces did) and of enduring importance, the sort of importance that pillars of a mighty house have - the house that shelters the republic of cinema.
MARK FEENEY
