Movie critics around the globe are announcing their 10-top best movies of the year, and I can't believe what I'm reading.

With rare exception, No Country For Old Men, the methodical tale of a psychopath with a bad haircut, is on the list on all of the country's most well-known critics, Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times to Richard Corliss of Time Magazine.

The movie was directed by the Cohen Brothers, likely most well-known for their direction of Fargo.

What I don't get is why the critics have selected this film as epic moviemaking? Tommy Lee Jones is a fine actor, and his role is worthy.

But this slow-moving film simply falls flat. Its symbolism is shallow, and it's as if the critics just don't want to say the wrong thing or go against the grain. They seem to have a collective love affair with the Cohen Brothers, and it's undeserved.

Only
The New Yorker expressed disappointment with the film. In its front-of-the-book capsule review, the magazine states: " . . . The result is oddly unemotional, as if a vicious game were being played by solemn rules, with barely a flicker of interest in the characters' moral plight . . ."

Conversely, the two best performances this year, in my opinion, have gone largely unmentioned — at least so far.

Angelina Jolie was brilliant in A Mighty Heart. She portrayed Mariane Pearl, wife of the Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter who was killed in Pakistan in 2002. Her acting is superb throughout the movie, but her gut-wrenching emotional breakdown when she's told her husband has been killed is acting at its best.

Hal Holbrook was equally strong in his small but poignant role in Into The Wild, the film adaptation the best-selling book directed by Sean Penn. Holbrook's a master at filling the screen with expression and relevance — and he does so again with his role as an aging, lonely man with wisdom to spare.

And for the record: Into The Wild was the best film I saw in 2007.