This year, even inspirational tales of the human spirit, of the indomitable powers of the imagination, ended in rigor mortis: Julian Schnabel's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Sean Penn's Into the Wild.
Are carnage and corpses signs of the times? Are art and pop culture holding a mirror to a populace rattled by mall murders, school murders, church murders, by hometowns rife with homicides and faraway lands strewn with suicide bombers and IEDs?
Or is it a fluky confluence, this spate of blood-soaked cinema, part-and-parcel of a tradition as old as Hollywood itself: action and violence as cathartic thrills?
It's probably a bit of both, with filmmakers consciously and unconsciously addressing our concerns about tumult and war. But it's also a bit of showbiz serendipity, with long-gestating literary adaptations coming out at the same time, and studios jockeying release dates to coincide with year-end awards campaigns.
Not to say that there haven't been any laugh-out-loud comedies this year. The Judd Apatow factory is responsible for three: Knocked Up, Superbad, and Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, while Juno, the hip teen-pregnancy comedy with the amazing Ellen Page, brought goofy levity to a serious issue. And there was plenty of animated fun for the whole family, most notably Meet the Robinsons, Ratatouille, Shrek the Third, and The Simpsons Movie.
But here I am looking at my list of the 10 best of 2007, and I see just two - I'm Not There and Margot at the Wedding - in which the lead, or at least one of the principal characters, doesn't face a lethal end.
So, here are a few thoughts on these 10, and on a few honorable mentions too:
