The Best Movie Of Each Year From 1925-2025

19. 2007 - Zodiac

Zodiac Jake Gyllenhaal Robert Downey Jr
Warner Bros.

Honourable Mentions: Michael Clayton, No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood

2007 was a frankly ridiculous year for cinema in terms of quality. In fact, it might just be the greatest cinematic year ever. The Coens directed a neo-Western masterpiece in No Country for Old Men, while Paul Thomas Anderson wielded a fiery Daniel Day-Lewis performance in the equally gripping There Will Be Blood. Throw into the mix Michael Clayton, a throwback conspiracy thriller for the modern age from Bourne screenwriter Tony Gilroy, plus Paul Haggis' redemptive In the Valley of Elah (the second Tommy Lee Jones-starring film to receive Oscar plaudits that year), a Pixar masterpiece in Ratatouille and other highlights like Juno and Atonement, and you have to ask just what exactly was in the water that year for everything to have landed as well as it did.

And then there's Zodiac.

David Fincher's historical thriller about California's notorious real-life serial murderer is a true tour de force in direction and performance, the director's laser-guided approach creating a perfect portrait of the Golden State milieu over the course of Zodiac's reign of terror - and long after.

Taken from Robert Graysmith's book of the same name and starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Robert Downey Jr. and Mark Ruffalo as the figures caught in Zodiac's horror story, Fincher's film explores Zodiac's impact on both a macro and micro level, resulting in a sensitively drawn adaptation that bucks true crime trends by placing the human cost of these myriad traumas - the estuaries and streams that bubble out from the river of violence - front and centre.

Zodiac was passed over for awards success at the time, but it still shows Fincher at the peak of his powers.

 
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WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.