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The Year In Film 2006

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By Noel Murray, Keith Phipps, Nathan Rabin, Tasha Robinson, Scott Tobias
December 21st, 2006

Noel Murray

Top 10

1. United 93

2. The Prestige

3. A Prairie Home Companion

4. Children Of Men

5. The Death Of Mr. Lazarescu

6. Pan's Labyrinth

7. The Departed

8. Inside Man

9. Mutual Appreciation

10. The Devil And Daniel Johnston

The Next Five

It's no coincidence that so many movies this year were about living with violence and corruption, and few were as pointed as Kevin Willmott's alternate-history mockumentary C.S.A.: The Confederate States Of America, which proposes that if the South had won the Civil War, the country would've grown to accept slavery as the norm, and James Longley's triptych documentary Iraq In Fragments, which looks at the mercurial hopes of a war-torn nation's varied religious and ethnic factions. On a smaller scale, Nicolas Winding Refn's sickeningly bloody Pusher III: I'm The Angel Of Death considers how easy it is for well-meaning men to keep doing awful things, while Robinson Devor's dreamy Police Beat uses the random, sexualized violence of a major city as a counterpoint to one lonely cop's lovesick interior monologue. And on an entirely different note, Nicole Holofcener's feather-light Friends With Money captures what it's like to be rich enough to dodge mere adult responsibility, let alone the horrors of the real world.

Performance
Ryan Gosling, Half Nelson

Finally realizing the promise he showed in The Believer, Gosling takes what might've been a gimmicky role—a crack-addicted junior high teacher—and finds the core of the character in his arrested adolescence. Always the smartest kid in school, Gosling's wannabe-inspirational pedagogue stays close to the classroom, where his recklessness looks like a method.

Overrated
Babel

Alejandro González Iñárritu's dour montage-fest came roaring out of Cannes as a critical darling and a sure-bet best-of-the-year candidate, but the movie is just another indistinct we're-all-connected middlebrow muddle, albeit artier than most. Though some influential writers continue to throw Babel's name into the Academy Awards Best Picture mix, it's hard to believe that people could be swayed by two-and-a-half hours of unrelenting degradation, disguised as deep meaning.

Underrated
Lady In The Water

Yes, M. Night Shyamalan's latest fairy tale for grown-ups is lumpy and over-earnest, and weighted down by a plot that should come with a set of charts. It's also as visually striking as his earlier work, with long, off-kilter takes that keep the audience from seeing too much too soon. For better and worse, Shyamalan's movies don't look or feel like anyone else's.

Most Pleasant Surprise
Monster House

Given how stiff and alien the motion-capture animation in The Polar Express looked, it was hard to muster much enthusiasm for a movie that used the same process for what promised to be a cacophonous horror-comedy. But in Monster House, the animation technique reveals subtle gestures, and helps create a kid-scaled suburban milieu that feels at times chillingly familiar. It goes off the rails at the end, but for the first hour, Monster House is as funny and natural as any low-budget indie film. With better mise-en-scene, too.

Guilty Pleasure
Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest

Critics savaged the biggest blockbuster of the year, calling it overlong, bombastic and confusing. Some words they forgot: Funny, energetic, clever, well-acted, imaginative, and packed with sprawling action set pieces that twist and spin like a Rube Goldberg contraption. Soulless? Maybe. Brainless? Hardly.

Best Non-2006 Film Seen This Year
Overlord

Stuart Cooper's long-forgotten '70s cult item popped back into the cineaste consciousness thanks to the reveries of Cooper fans in the documentary Z Channel, and now that this strange, abstract World War II film has finally been given a U.S. theatrical release—with a DVD soon to follow, surely—devotees of the lyrical cinema of Stanley Kubrick and Terrence Malick have another fetish object to pore over. Of particular fascination: Cooper's use of nightmarish WWII stock footage, integrated into the story of one British army recruit's fitful journey to the grave, and John Alcott's high-contrast black-and-white imagery and shallow depth of field, which makes the characters look like blobs of ink, dripping across the scarred countryside.

Future Film That Time Forgot
The Sentinel

In the year that TV audiences decided en masse that they'd had it with interminable, resolution-free serialized dramas, movie audiences decided that they'd rather not see what amounts to a season's worth of ridiculous plot twists shoehorned into a 100-minute big-screen political thriller. The Sentinel even has a "TV in the middle '00s" cast, including a pistol-packing Eva Longoria, and Kiefer Sutherland on a busman's holiday from 24, essentially playing the same moody government agent he's been playing for the last five years.

Worst Of The Year
All The King's Men

Or maybe this should be the worst of last year, since it's been sitting on a shelf since '05. A year of fine-aging didn't help Steven Zaillian's adaptation of Robert Penn Warren's classic 1946 novel about political corruption, because Zaillian hadn't bothered to make the material fresh or relevant in the first place. Instead, he sticks high-powered actors with fakey accents into long, dialogue-heavy scenes that never build to anything; and he ditches the story of one man's awakening to the powers of demagoguery for a twisty scandal-exposé plot that has about as much impact as a crumbling newspaper.

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