Film Review of the year: Thank goodness for Balzac and his star-crossed lovers

Nineteenth-century high romance brings the year to a magnificent close eclipsing the convoluted, the bombastic and the downright barking

A year's not over till it's over. Some of 2007's finest films arrived in the final stretch Carlos Reygadas's Silent Light, fractured Dylan biopic I'm Not There and so, for that matter did two of the worst, Richard Kelly's Southland Tales and Francis Coppola's Youth Without Youth, both convoluted, bombastic and downright barking. But the screen year reaches a magnificent close this week with the latest offering from veteran French auteur Jacques Rivette. Don't Touch the Axe (PG, 137 minutes) is no slasher schlocker, but a poised adaptation of Balzac's 19th-century tale La Duchesse de Langeais. Jeanne Balibar and Guillaume Depardieu are star-crossed lovers in the salons of 1820s Paris, whose intense courtship leads to a sombrely melodramatic outcome. High romance in vintage mode, with the restraint of a Racine tragedy, this magisterially classy offering boasts two of the year's incandescent performances.

Something strange happened to American mainstream cinema in 2007: there was an unlikely odour of art-house in the air. David Fincher's sprawling Zodiac broke the rules of Hollywood storytelling with a true-life crime tale that didn't end so much as fade off with a disconcerting shrug. There was also a hankering for the American sublime, for landscape and the wide blue yonder. Sean Penn's Into the Wild was one such, but it didn't do it for me: what did was The Assassination of Jesse James..., the most melancholic Western in ages. Director Andrew Dominik put in a persuasive bid to be the new Terrence Malick, and Casey Affleck gave one of the performances of the year as the whiny but oddly likeable anti-hero Robert Ford.

If it was the sublime you were after, my two absolute favourites of 2007 more than delivered. One was Carlos Reygadas's Silent Light, set among Mexico's Mennonites. The other was from Thailand's Apichatpong Weerasethakul. His Syndromes and a Century was a cryptic diptych set in a hospital, or maybe two hospitals: a spellbindingly loose-leaf narrative of love, monks, orchids and dentistry.

Two defiantly non-mainstream British films stood out in 2007: Control, Anton Corbijn's insightful picture of the life and death of singer Ian Curtis, and This is England, the best yet from Shane Meadows an ebullient, angry, personal reminiscence of 80s skinhead days.

One of the year's surprises was Grard Depardieu back on form, offering a portrait of the artist as a clapped-out (but still game) family entertainer in Xavier Giannoli's The Singer. And while Bergman and Antonioni bowed out in 2007, don't forget that the year began with the late Robert Altman demonstrating the art of bowing out gracefully, with his genially boisterous A Prairie Home Companion.

Wildest card of all was The Family Friend: director Paolo Sorrentino played the Fellini ticket with a grotesque fantasia of small-town Italian life. Wallflowers of the year: Kelly Reichardt's below-the-radar bucolic Old Joy, and Mutual Appreciation, a sweetly downbeat comedy from Andrew Bujalski, reluctant figurehead of the no-budget US indie wave called "mumblecore".

And the year's Guilty Pleasure: Zack Snyder's pectorally overloaded bout of CGI Hellenism 300, about the Battle of Thermopylae. It was monstrous, ugly, overblown and overbearing, and I enjoyed every minute though I can't help feeling uneasy about liking a film that was probably huge with Scandinavian neo-Nazi S&M biker gangs.