I see hundreds of movies every year, and to break 'em all down into a Top 10 (or 20) is just not nearly enough for me. So I spent the last few days compiling ten different Top 10 lists, all in an effort to A) share my opinions and B) perhaps point you towards a few flicks you might have missed. Obviously there's a few "easy picks" among my lists, but hey, I gotta call 'em like I see 'em. (Please do feel free to share your own lists in the comment section ... and Happy New Year! Movie-wise, 2007 looks pretty awesome!)

I. Top 10 Favorite Movies

1. Pan's Labyrinth -- Del Toro is a mad freakin' genius, and I hope he makes movies for the next 50 years.
2. Children of Men -- Stunningly hypnotic sci-fi drama from a director who can seemingly do no wrong.
3. The Descent -- One of the best horror films to hit the scene in ten years.
4. The Proposition -- John Hillcoat and Nick Cave do Walter Hill meets Sam Peckinpah.
5. Borat -- Rude, crude, hilarious -- and a whole lot smarter than you might think.
6. Conversations with Other Women -- More romantic than 50 rom-coms put together.
7. Hard Candy -- Dicey subject material, delivered with style, confidence and craftiness.
8. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest -- Ignore the backlash. This stuff is pure fun.
9. The Notorious Bettie Page -- Finally, a bio-pic that's not the same old blueprint. (And Gretchen Mol is amazing.)
10. (tie) The Prestige & The Illusionist -- I hate it when someone wedges two movies into one spot, but I had to do it for this nifty pair of magician-centric period pieces.

II. Top 10 Favorite Movies (Part 2)

11. Little Miss Sunshine -- Let's hear it for dysfunction!
12. District B13 -- Some of the wildest action scenes I've seen in years.
13. Stranger Than Fiction -- Kaufman-lite, but it really works.
14. United 93 -- Precisely the sort of movie it should have been.
15. Little Children -- Insightful, intelligent and fairly subtle suburbia satire.
16. The Queen -- I went in expecting yawns, came out wishing it'd been longer.
17. The Departed -- Scorsese revisits the streets in typically fine fashion.
18. Charlotte's Web -- One of the year's most pleasant surprises, frankly.
19. Awesome; I F*ckin' Shot That! -- Sue me, I love the Beasties.
20. Brick -- Didn't love it as much as most do, but there's no denying its appealing weirdness.

I'm a film critic and I love horror movies. According to the studios, I do not exist. This year they have decided that horror movies (among other types) don't need reviews, and they have opened some dozen of them without press screenings, the latest batch being Pulse, Snakes on a Plane and The Wicker Man. Now, it may be that these movies are terrible. Or perhaps they just require a certain sensibility to understand them. In any case, they deserve a shot, and to show the studios that we critics are capable of getting horror movies, I worked on a list of the seven best from the past seven years. Surprisingly, my master list came out to more than 30 titles, which I painfully pared down to this final seven (I even had to leave out Saw and Ravenous!). Significantly, each of these films was made available to the press prior to their openings.

1. Pulse (2001, Kiyoshi Kurosawa)
This, the scariest movie I've seen in years, gave me the creeping tingles. Like Lynch or Bunuel, Kurosawa has the power to tap right into our most nightmarish fears, but does it subtly, normally, like something lurking just outside the periphery of our everyday existence. Released in the U.S. in 2005.

2. Land of the Dead (2005, George A. Romero)
Romero adds another chapter to his legendary, brilliantly masterful zombie series, evoking all manner of classical imagery to build a harrowing portrait of the way we live today. And that's really scary.

3. Audition (2001, Takashi Miike)
Three words: watch the bag.

4. The Blair Witch Project (1999, Eduardo Sanchez, Daniel Myrick)
Pushing through the hype, the money, the buildup and the backlash, one can find at the rocky center a really good, quite imaginative and gripping film done with an eye on the unseen and the unknown.

5. The Descent (2006, Neil Marshall)
The second-scariest movie I've seen in years features incredible use of total darkness as well as a surprising look at the darkness of the soul.

6. Session 9 (2001, Brad Anderson)
This underrated, barely noticed film is perhaps the most intelligent haunted house (or rather haunted hospital) movie I've ever seen.

7. The Devil's Backbone (2001, Guillermo Del Toro)
This creepy flick, improbably set in an adobe school smack in the middle of the bright Spanish desert, may be Del Toro's finest hour.