When The A.V. Club film writers sat down to discuss what 2006 had to offer, we quickly discovered a remarkable amount of overlap between our lists. We could immodestly claim that great minds think alike, but the more likely explanation is that the most important and accomplished films of the year were just too bold to deny. In light of that fact, we've tallied our individual lists into a super-list that reflects our consensus over the films that meant the most to us this year. But that doesn't mean we've committed entirely to group-think: Individual Top 10 lists and commentary follow the master list.
The Master List
1. Children Of Men
Like the best science fiction, Alfonso Cuaron's visionary pre-apocalyptic thriller portrays the future that humanity has carved out for itself, in this case a world so lacking in compassion that it's been rendered infertile. With references to Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, anti-immigrant fervor, and ethnic strife, the film may seem like a catch-all of ripped-from-the-headlines topicality, but its gripping urgency makes it feel more like a punch in the gut. Much has been said about the film's astonishing single-take tracking shots, but far from showy, they all but forbid the viewer to breathe during the most crucial sequences.
2. United 93
For a time, it looked like Oliver Stone's cop-out melodrama World Trade Center was going to become the "acceptable" 9/11 movie for awards-giving bodies, but Paul Greengrass' underseen United 93 has staged a stunning rally late in the year, as critics have either aggressively advocated—or just finally caught up with—a film that documents with haunting and ultimately purposeful detail what exactly happened on one of the worst days in American history. It's a measure of United 93's economy and restraint that people of varying political persuasions can see it and walk away with different interpretations but equal admiration.
3. The Departed
Though Martin Scorsese has made several great (and frequently underrated) movies since 1990's Goodfellas, nothing has captured the sheer propulsive energy of that film like this whipcrack adaptation of the Hong Kong staple Infernal Affairs. Everyone's firing on all cylinders here: William Monahan's script wittily captures Boston's salty dialect, editor Thelma Schoonmaker crosscuts parallel storylines with a percussionist's rhythm, and the performances are uniformly peerless, especially Leonardo DiCaprio as an undercover cop whose face suggests the roiling ulcers within, and a scabrously funny Mark Wahlberg as a "statie" with a well-honed bullshit detector.
4. Brick
Rian Johnson's decision to make a modern noir set in a high school could have been a mere conceptual exercise. Instead, it's an inspired conceptual exercise. The stylized dialogue and younged-down stock characters get the surface right, but peel it back and you'll find a strong connection between noir themes and the hard realities of high-school life. Johnson also gets another amazing performance out of Joseph Gordon-Levitt, one of the most exciting actors around, even if nobody knows it yet.
5. A Prairie Home Companion
A Prairie Home Companion admitted Garrison Keillor fans to the universe of the venerable public-radio program, but even for non-fans, it was still one of the liveliest films writer-director Robert Altman ever made. And that was only the smallest part of its genius. The rest came from its touching, wise examination of mortality, both human and cultural. There's death at the center of the film, but just as much bittersweet concern with the slow, inevitable passing of the pop landmarks we share and the immortality that sustains them as long as we keep their memories alive.
6. Half Nelson
Like The History Boys, this indie drama reconceived and reinvigorated the inspirational-teacher genre, both by centering on a profoundly flawed protagonist and by exploring the philosophical issues behind what gets taught and what education ultimately means. In a performance that echoes his career-defining turn as a Jewish neo-Nazi in The Believer, Ryan Gosling delivers another stunning turn as an increasingly burnt-out idealist of a teacher whose efforts to save a student from a paternalistic drug dealer are compromised by his own spiraling addiction to crack.
7. The Prestige
It may sound cocky to say that people who didn't think much of The Prestige didn't really "see" it, but given how elliptical director Christopher Nolan and his screenwriter brother Jonathan make their adaptation of Christopher Priest's highbrow pulp novel, it's hard to believe that anyone could really pick up everything that's going on in just one viewing—especially since the Nolans make one of their big twists obvious on purpose, in order to throw the audience off the trail of the bigger ones to come. That a movie this purely entertaining could keep so many secrets—and be so ruthless in its examination of obsessive rivalry—is a kind of magic.
8. Pan's Labyrinth
Like The Prestige, Guillermo Del Toro's dark fantasy conceals a lot of what it's about beneath a rip-roaring adventure plot, and Del Toro's film has the added distraction of being a gory, R-rated children's fairy tale, at once too simplistic for adults and too horrifying for kids. But Pan's Labyrinth decodes itself slyly in its final 10 minutes, revealing the fallacy of reducing history—and the Spanish Civil War especially—to one long story about good and evil and winners and losers. Because the definition of all those terms changes every time the books get re-written.
9. Letters From Iwo Jima
No film this year better captured the full equation of warfare than Clint Eastwood's elegiac, quietly heartbreaking meditation on World War II, told from the perspective of outmatched Japanese soldiers who face certain defeat while contemplating the lives they've left behind. With Iwo Jima, Eastwood's late-period renaissance is starting to rival Robert Altman's, so it is poetically fitting that both Iwo Jima and Altman's Prairie Home Companion find venerable masters wrestling with the eternal question of how to die with dignity and grace.
10. The Devil And Daniel Johnston
Not since Crumb has a documentary plumbed as deeply into the fragile co-existence of madness and art. Whether you believe Daniel Johnston to be a savant pop genius or a falsely idolized fringe-dweller should have little bearing on how you respond to director Jeff Feuerzeig's intimate portrait of the manic-depressive visionary. Johnston's ambitions to fame often encouraged the worst from his champions, and his brief rise and precipitous fall from pop grace is marked by periods of violence and institutionalization. The big question is who's going to take responsibility for this troubled man, which leads to a wrenching and deeply ironic conclusion.
- Comments