Tasha Robinson
Top 10
1. Children Of Men
2. Stranger Than Fiction
3. Brick
4. United 93
5. Half Nelson
6. Shortbus
7. A Prairie Home Companion
8. The King
9. Babel
10. The Prestige
The Next Five
Todd Field's lyrical, intense, deeply moody Little Children would have made the top 10 list, if not for the ill-conceived voiceover narration, which attempts to work literary conventions (and pretensions) into a film that doesn't need them. Michael Apted's 49 Up continued the amazing documentary series that's visited a group of Brits every seven years since they were 7 years old; this installment found some of them philosophical, and some of them unusually contentious. Chen Kaige's gorgeous epic fable The Promise channeled Zhang Yimou even better than Yimou's new Curse Of The Golden Flower does, while Pan's Labyrinth isn't as emotionally evocative (until the bitter end), but is just as visually lovely in an entirely different way. Finally, Mel Gibson's Apocalypto is an action film somewhere under all the trappings, but it's an unusually vivid and immediate one that goes to great pains to make its old-world Mayan setting real.Performance
Jennifer Hudson, Dreamgirls
Though Dreamgirls isn't the best film this year, it's one of the biggest, and that's largely due to Hudson's grim, unreserved diva, who belts her way in and out of trouble throughout the picture, and projects committed passion that her costars can't match. She has the worst song in the film to contend with, but she still gives Dreamgirls its best moments.
Overrated
Marie Antoinette
Reviews for Sofia Coppola's historical drama weren't stellar, but they were still far too kind to a film that mostly seems to be about how vapid and opaque historical figures can be. The costumes, sets, and cinematography are all gorgeous, which just makes the empty, affectless performances and unenlightening script seem like more of a waste. What were the protagonists thinking during any of the significant events of their lives? Who knows? What was Coppola thinking as she made this movie? Seemingly, it was "Wow, that table full of cakes looks pretty. Can we add some petits fours?"
Underrated
Lucky Number Slevin
Like Marie Antoinette, this unfortunately titled thriller wasn't universally derided, but the many reviews dismissing it as yet another twisty-for-twisty's-sake crime thriller missed out on its sharp dialogue, its overall energy, and especially the way it played with audience expectations about what makes a twisty-for-twisty's-sake crime thriller.
Most Pleasant Surprise
Happy Feet
In a year full of CGI flicks about jabbering groups of dysfunctional animals, this looked like just another standard-issue toy commercial at film length, complete with a pat moral, a celeb cast, Robin Williams mugging in multiple roles, and medleys of pop hits. So it was impressive when the film wrapped up the rote romance and all the "nonconformity can be good" messages early on and moved forward into an entirely new story. It was almost as though the film acknowledged how trite those tropes were before going on to triumphantly surpass them.
Guiltiest Pleasure
Borat: Cultural Learnings Of America For Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan
Sacha Baron Cohen's comedy was a laugh-out-loud wonder, but they were pretty creepy laughs. Even setting aside all the lawsuits from people who claim they were duped and manipulated into appearing in the film, it's easy enough to tell just from watching it that most of the participants are struggling with their responses to the ugly situations Cohen creates, and laughing at them often feels dirty. Or maybe not feeling dirtier about enjoying the film feels dirty.
Best Non-2006 Film Seen This Year
Bridge On The River Kwai
It's embarrassing for a film critic to admit to having gone this long without seeing this David Lean standard, but some things just slip through the cracks. This is one classic that lives up to its reputation, both in scale and in the little details. The gentlemanly but rigidly confrontational conversation Sessue Hayakawa has in his tent with Alec Guinness, who suggests Hayakawa might need to commit seppuku, then cheerfully toasts him, is one of the best sequences in cinema.
Future Film That Time Forgot
Crank
This thriller was, like, totally Speed, but with a dude instead of a bus. See, this guy's been shot full of Chinese poisons, and if he slows down for more than a minute, he'll, like, die. And if the movie slowed down for more than a minute, viewers might notice that there's pretty much no other plot going on. You can get all the novelty from the one-line summary and pretty much be done with the film.
Worst Of The Year
Ultraviolet
Kurt Wimmer's thriller didn't even feel like it was trying to be a movie. Its lazy incoherence showed up in the plotting and the action sequences, which managed to make even stylish gun-fu entirely boring. Worse still, it didn't even bother pandering to its presumed brain-dead audience: Just when it should be kicking into overdrive, it cheats its way out of action sequences by cutting from Milla Jovovich getting ready to fight to Jovovich walking away from corpses. That's cheap even for a crappy, spastic, ill-conceived comic book of a movie.
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