21. Retribution
Because Retribution, an unfairly slept-on entry into Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s nightmarish oeuvre of modern ghost stories, never played U.S. theaters (and came out before films got streaming releases), we’re bending the rules to let its Chicago festival premiere count towards the 2006 list. It’s just that good. Another collaboration between Kurosawa and his hangdog muse Kōji Yakusho, Retribution once again stars the perfectly scruffy star as a detective on the cusp of going cuckoo—and he’s investigating a series of Gothic murders that all point to him as the prime suspect. A sharply unsettling series of appearances by a ghostly woman in red solidifies Kurosawa as the premier cinematic conjurer of spirits, while also tying his detective’s mental state to his unwieldy and ethereal past. These repressed, compartmentalized memories are almost as threatening as the undead, and bubble up through Kurosawa’s urban-rot aesthetic like suspicious bubbles in a street puddle. Not as groundbreaking as Cure or Pulse, Retribution is a pulpier but no less effective look at social corrosion. [JO]
Released back when movies like these were still called “chick flicks,” The Holiday has stood the test of time as a perennial Christmas favorite. There’s a reason it still hits so powerfully for rom-com fans. Nancy Meyers’ whimsical cross-cultural romance doesn’t just star four incredibly likable protagonists, it’s a tribute to two entirely different styles of romantic comedies in one. Cameron Diaz and Jude Law get a classic opposites-attract, love-at-first-sight tale, while Kate Winslet works her way through the kind of self-actualizing “and-a-man” arc that’s always been a cornerstone of the romance genre. Those parallel journeys showcase the breadth of women-centric storytelling that has long found a haven within rom-coms. Add in an eclectic mix of cozy British cottage aesthetics and glamorous L.A. vibes, never-more-charming turns from Jack Black and Eli Wallach, and a lovely score from Hans Zimmer, and The Holiday feels like a movie made from only the good notes. [Caroline Siede]
19. The Science Of Sleep
On the heels of the Oscar-winning success of Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, Michel Gondry went even more whimsical in The Science Of Sleep—a film that attempts to translate the feeling of dreaming into cinematic language. Gael García Bernal stars as Stéphane Miroux, a shy, childlike creative who moves to Paris following the death of his father and who soon finds himself infatuated with his neighbor Stéphanie (Charlotte Gainsbourg). As Stéphane’s waking life begins to blend with his dreams, Gondry serves up memorably gonzo images like a TV talk show set made of cardboard, a man with a pair of giant puppet hands, and a miniature stop-motion city. Yet Stéphane’s eccentricity also hides a darker, more antagonistic side that’s not nearly as charming as the romantic protagonist he imagines himself to be. With a plot that also follows the logic of a dream, The Science Of Sleep evokes a unique mix of romance and grief that’s ultimately more challenging (if less cohesive) than Eternal Sunshine. Anchored by Bernal’s stellar performance, it’s a film that both captures and subverts a certain mid-aughts twee sensibility. [CS]
Few films embrace their title like Crank. Written and directed by Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, whose collaboration would collapse after a couple of major franchise plays, Crank matches its frenetic energy with a deliriously silly screenplay, following Chev Chelios (Jason Statham, never better), an assassin, stuck in a version of Speed that trades a bus bomb for a human heart. Poisoned with a toxin that will kill him if his adrenaline drops, Chelios electrocutes himself and the audience with a dizzying take on a Donald Westlake-style L.A. crime story. With a dark sense of humor to ground the video-game-inspired violence, Crank never ceases to find new ludicrous obstacles for Chelios to overcome, and with the ticking clock running out inside his body, he doesn’t want to. Statham’s frustrated stoicism makes for a hilarious foil to the premise, as he degrades himself to keep his heart thumping and the movie running. Crank features some of the most original and visceral American action of the decade, a feat only topped by its even-better and more surreal sequel, Crank: High Voltage. [MS]
For all its revolutionary on-screen stupidity, Jackass: The Movie never fully embraced its subtitle, outside of some too-gross-for-TV stunts and a larger shopping cart. But Jackass Number Two sees director Jeff Tremaine and leading Ass Johnny Knoxville attempting to live up to its medium, doing so with foolhardy flair, more ambitious death-defiance, and, in what would become a tradition, an elaborate musical sequence, complete with a Buster Keaton shoutout. It’s also the first time Jackass revealed its own fucked-up humanity, forcing Bam Margera to tears through increasingly abusive snake-based pranks. But it’s the elaborate and wildly racist “Terror Taxi” that pushes Number Two into the history books. The rollicking act of comeuppance against Ehren McGhehey, who’s a little too eager to don brownface and a cringe-inducing Apu accent, doles out one ingenious reversal after another as McGhehey’s palpable fear meets the catharsis of watching a supremely offensive sketch get turned on its ear with the help of a winning Jay Chandrasekhar. Number Two still stands tall with some of the series’ best stunts, character moments, and ingenuity, some of which, three Jackass movies later, have yet to be topped. Ironically, Number Two might be number one. [MS]
16. Old Joy
Though Kelly Reichardt’s debut film River Of Grass was a Sundance darling in 1994, it still took her over a decade to raise money for a second feature at a time when Hollywood wasn’t particularly interested in investing in female directors. She finally returned with the hyper-minimalist road movie Old Joy, about two thirtysomething pals who have drifted apart over the years and who try to recapture the magic of their friendship on an overnight camping trip to the Bagby Hot Springs in the mountains of Oregon. Like most of Reichardt’s work, it’s a film that’s small and hushed on the surface, but bursting with melancholic depth underneath. Will Oldham’s insecurities as lost soul Kurt butt up against Daniel London’s timid normality as soon-to-be-father Mark. Their wistful nostalgia for the past soon turns into something thornier and more ambiguous. Old Joy is the sort of film that leaves you in suspense as to whether something or nothing is going to happen on this overnight trip. Yet it’s in that very tension that the film’s aching humanity springs to life. [CS]
15. The Fountain
With the fullness of time—one the trippy sci-fi drama The Fountain‘s many subjects—it seems like Darren Aronofsky peaked with his highest-profile flop. After this ambitious and alienating movie lost so much money, Aronofsky scaled back for a pair of arresting dramas about performers at odds with their bodies (The Wrestler and Black Swan), yet in retrospect there’s something just as special about sending Hugh Jackman hurtling through time and space. It’s not that simple in The Fountain, where Jackman plays a scientist attempting to cure his wife (Rachel Weisz) of brain cancer and finds that his efforts are refracted through the intercut stories of a conquistador in service of Queen Isabella and a far-future space traveler (Jackman and Weisz star in all three timelines). But whether the non-contemporary threads are “real” or in-movie fictions that the doctor and his wife are telling each other, they build off of each other into a multi-level parable about one of life’s greatest difficulties: accepting death. Aronofsky, ably assisted by Jackman at his most open and vulnerable, consciously reaches beyond the bodily concerns (and punishments) that inform so much of his work, but doesn’t leave them behind entirely, either. He depicts transcendence as a hard-won battle with an ending both uncertain and inevitable. [Jesse Hassenger]
14. An Inconvenient Truth
What was once unfairly dismissed as a movie about a PowerPoint presentation has become one of the major documentaries explaining global warming. After losing a hotly contested election, former Vice President Al Gore returned to the national spotlight with a cause: Educate and motivate people against the common enemy of climate change. In Davis Guggenheim’s filmed version of Gore’s well-rehearsed presentation, the politician bobs and weaves between personal anecdotes and scientific data to convey the severity of the existential threat to humanity while reflecting on some of the more difficult moments in his family’s story. Breaking down what it means if the ice caps melted, glaciers collapsed, wildfire season became a year-round phenomenon, and coral reefs died out—all in terms everyone could understand—Gore sums things up: It’s not going well. But not one to leave the room on a downer, Gore ends with actionable steps for his audience to do more about climate change. Today, severe storms and near-constant weather warnings are part of our daily life, and we see just how many of Gore’s predictions have come to pass. [MC]
13. Volver
Pedro Almodóvar has regularly reflected on his relationship with his mother in his work, but never has she quite literally haunted the storyline as she does in Volver. Filmed in the same region in La Mancha where the director grew up, the film is part rape-revenger, part crime thriller, and mostly a meditation on the unique strength of intergenerational bonds between women. This is to say that there are a lot of threads deftly woven together here—which also include a film shoot and an elderly dementia patient—but arguably the most care is given to constructing an unconventional ghost story, in which the presence of a family’s long-deceased mother (Almodóvar stalwart Carmen Maura) is discovered by her children (Penélope Cruz and Lola Dueñas) when they begin to smell the unmistakable scent of her farts. It’s apt that Cruz, the first Spanish woman to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress on the strength of her performance as a complex matriarch in Volver, went on to portray Almodóvar’s mother in his 2019 memoir-flecked masterpiece Pain And Glory. [NK]
12. Casino Royale
Martin Campbell and Daniel Craig gave 007 a much-needed whack in the nuts for their dark-and-gritty pivot of James Bond. The hyper-digital, product-filled, loud-and-proud Die Another Day caused Casino Royale to sprint in the other direction—straight up a towering crane. Just like its exceptionally muscular set pieces, Casino Royale ran through its Bond basics with a grim physicality, rebooting not just the franchise, but providing a suitably sour origin for the troubled character. Craig showed the world just how suave a chiseled hunk of limestone could be, especially with a riveting, slinking femme fatale like Eva Green to drape over him. Add in a world-class villain in a blood-weeping Mads Mikkelsen, some climactic poker, and the crushing revelation that this version of James Bond (unfortunately for him) has a soul, and you’ve got one of the best 007 movies ever made. [JO]
11. Miami Vice
Released on the heels of Todd Phillips’ Starsky & Hutch, Michael Mann’s War On Terror update to Miami Vice sidestepped broad appeal for a digital makeover that upgraded the series with an original and influential look. In 2006, no major studio release would dare look like Miami Vice, with digital photography tipping into the uncanny with sweaty intimacy and awe-inspiring clarity. For all its abstraction and emotion, from its theatrical cut’s media-res opening, which includes the platonic ideal Linkin Park needle drop, Miami Vice is immensely quotable (“I’m a fiend for mojitos), funny (“Why is this happening to me?”), and romantic. Mapped by Mann’s process-oriented filmmaking and organizational realism, Miami Vice‘s plot is obfuscated by jargon and shifting motives. Crockett (Colin Farrell) and Tubbs (Jamie Foxx) are under such deep cover that who they are and what they’re doing remains uncomfortably opaque at first, though the film’s alluring sensuality and overwhelming action remain intoxicating. Like Inland Empire, the film sees an auteur embracing the abstraction of their own fixations and relying on pure id. The results are transcendent. [MS]
10. The Devil Wears Prada
Based on Lauren Weisberger’s novel, The Devil Wears Prada took on a life of its own as soon as it hit theaters. Andy (Anne Hathaway) is an aspiring journalist with little fashion sense who finds herself in the posh publishing realm of Runway magazine. She must survive a crash course on the complex art and business of fashion from her prickly boss, Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep), as well as navigate thorny inter-office politics if she wants to advance her budding media career. Inspired by Vogue editor Anna Wintour, Priestly became an on-screen icon with cutting bon mots and a brutally chilly demeanor. Stanley Tucci as Miranda’s right-hand man and Emily Blunt as Andy’s frenemy rounded out the movie’s fab four stars with pithy retorts and punchlines. While the 2026 sequel didn’t quite capture the magic of the original, it paid heavy tribute to the fans that made this movie the comic sensation it remains today. [MC]
9. Pan’s Labyrinth
Guillermo del Toro’s nightmare fantasy Pan’s Labyrinth follows a young girl named Ofelia who escapes to a fairy-tale world filled with fauns, monsters, and fantastical creatures at the height of 1940s Francoist Spain. Danger lives both in and out of the realm of make-believe as soldiers and generals battle for what they believe and a little girl watches as her world falls apart. Meanwhile, Ofelia must complete a magical faun’s three tasks in order to ascend to her rightful throne among the magical beings. Pan’s Labyrinth marked del Toro’s return to Spanish-language cinema after spending some time with Hollywood superheroes. The film built on many of del Toro’s signature fascinations, like detailed practical effects, striking character designs, and maximalist worlds that whisk audiences away from the ordinary. Pan’s Labyrinth made a splash at Cannes and went on to win numerous awards, including many of the craft Oscars, heralding del Toro as a major director to watch. [MC]
8. Talladega Nights: The Ballad Of Ricky Bobby
Will Ferrell and Adam McKay are better together. Talladega Nights, their second film, went bigger than Anchorman: a stacked cast, racecar action, and more contemporary satirical targets in the form of NASCAR and the entire American value system as it looked well into the second George W. Bush term. Ferrell didn’t need to do an actual Bush impression to spoof our love affair with cocksure, rapaciously capitalistic pseudo-champions like the fictional title character, a sponsor-happy driver who believes “if you ain’t first, you’re last.” The movie’s rise-and-fall-and-rise structure—a sports-narrative framework Ferrell is obviously fond of, but has never executed this well—gives it scaffolding on which to build both big-ticket slapstick and bespoke dialogue nonsense, leveled up by cast-wide improvisations. The satire and absurdist riffing come together perfectly in the movie’s extended jam of a family dinner-table sequence, wherein Ricky Bobby and his faithful second banana Cal (John C. Reilly) lead a digressive grace involving a feast of fast food, entitled monster-children, and an insistent preference for the baby version of Jesus. 20 years later, the only thing that doesn’t ring true about Talladega Nights is that Ricky Bobby does become a better person in the end. Maybe McKay stopped making funny comedies around the time he realized how accidentally optimistic his satires had been. [JH]
7. Inside Man
A real “yeah, I can do this too” of a movie, Inside Man is filmmaker Spike Lee at his most commercial and confident, a studio genre exercise that shows the same deference to pulpy film history (and flavors it with the same kinds of auteurist predilections) as his Kurosawa remake Highest 2 Lowest. The twisty New York bank heist/hostage thriller certainly has hints of Dog Day Afternoon, the 1975 classic Lee was inspired by when he got the script, but it also has plenty of Spike: The line between cops and robbers is drawn not depending on the legality of their actions, but how they align with the larger powers that be; it’s overrun by Real New York Characters; and Denzel Washington is killing it at every moment. It’s not just Washington and his swagger either. Lee attracted a ridiculous cast for his big studio-backed reckoning with post-9/11 anxiety in NYC (following his much more somber version, 25th Hour), which means Clive Owen, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Willem Dafoe, and Jodie Foster are all stuffed into a movie that still manages to tick and tock forward with unmatched precision and subtle insight. [JO]
David Lynch’s final film (setting aside the debate over Twin Peaks season three) and a multi-year collaboration with longtime leading lady Laura Dern, Inland Empire is easily the scariest film of 2006. Once again meditating on the La La Land nightmares that powered his masterpiece Mulholland Drive, Lynch grabbed a camcorder for an on-the-fly shoot, recording a stream-of-consciousness odyssey into the relationship between actor and audience. The fourth wall crumbles as Hollywood actress Nikki (Dern, in a career-best performance that inspired an all-time great FYC campaign) disappears into the role of Sue Blue, literally, as years of Lynchian micro-projects, such as the whatsit sitcom Rabbits, and a mysterious Polish Lost Girl (Karolina Gruszka), react to a frequently shifting narrative that’s as elusive as it is effective. Inland Empire remains one of Lynch’s most difficult, emotional, and terrifying works, challenging the viewer with a web-like structure and a deliberately unglamorous lead turn. 20 years later, there’s still nothing quite like Inland Empire. Two decades from now, there still won’t be. [MS]
5. Brick
Fittingly, Brick comes on like a school assignment, completed with smartass confidence: Write a high-school-set mystery as a hard-edged noir, complete with a detective, femme fatales, menacing underworld figures, and enough slang to choke a Dashiell Hammett character. But it doesn’t take long to realize that despite writer-director Rian Johnson’s ample wit, the movie isn’t joking around. As scrappy teenage sleuth Brendan Frye, Joseph Gordon-Levitt skulks around the parking lots and sun-streaked outdoor hallways of California, his fists jammed into his pockets like a description straight out of YA fiction, looking to solve a very adult murder case. Brick works less because of its allegiance to noir conventions—though it does have that, with a well-plotted and visually rich mystery that presages much of Johnson’s subsequent career as an expert practitioner of the whodunit—than because of its success as a teen movie. Johnson drills into the core of why displacing classic stories into high school, whether Shakespeare or noir, can be so effective: It’s a milieu where it makes sense for every character to feel deeply (and/or hormonally) invested in the outcome. As funny and thrilling as Brick can be, it’s ultimately about nursing a tough yet broken heart. [JH]
4. Children Of Men
Alfonso Cuarón’s dystopian sci-fi thriller is one of cinema’s bleakest views of the future, where immigration detention centers capture countless souls and an infertility crisis has driven the world mad with desperation. Set in 2027 after decades of infertility has left humanity without a next generation, Theo (Clive Owen) is a bureaucrat caught in the middle of a bid for the cure to infertility. He’s kidnapped by militants, including his ex-wife (Julianne Moore), to help smuggle a refugee who’s hiding humanity’s first pregnancy in years. The fight to survive and escape from humanity’s cruelty is harder than it looks, as Theo strives to save both mother and child from danger. Cuarón’s bleak portrait of the future has now haunted multiple generations of moviegoers, and his innovative camera work with cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki—capturing the sheer intensity of Theo’s journey—has stood the test of time. [MC]
Edging out 2006’s magical also-ran, The Illusionist, The Prestige was the superior sleight-of-hand blockbuster and then some. Christopher Nolan, coming off his superhero-legitimizing Batman reboot, reteamed with Christian Bale and Michael Caine for a story of competition, showmanship, and con-man artistry, making magic as compelling as any Caped Crusader. Bale and Hugh Jackman, the latter rebounding from his own superhero stint in X-Men: The Last Stand, play competing magicians each attempting a variation of the White Whale trick “The Transported Man.” Co-written with Nolan’s brother, Jonathan, The Prestige is structured like a magic trick: There’s the pledge, the turn, and the prestige, all of which is unveiled with their unique, secretly sci-fi and class-conscious approach to create a bloodthirsty magic war in 1890s London. Frequently showing the audience that there’s nothing up its sleeve, all while wowing them with intrigue, pathos, and David Bowie as Nikola Tesla, Nolan offered a glimpse of what his own future held. The key to Nolan’s artistry is lurking somewhere in The Prestige, but a good magician never reveals his tricks. [MS]
2. Marie Antoinette
Allegedly booed during previews ahead of its Cannes premiere (though Roger Ebert claimed this anecdote was wildly overblown), Sofia Coppola’s candy-colored mishmash of rococo and early aughts aesthetics remains in a class all its own. Kirsten Dunst’s embodiment of the ill-fated French ruler is deliciously anachronistic, her twentysomething American affect perfectly reflecting the self-centered hedonism that has come to define the queen in popular culture. Yet there is also something deeply tragic and sympathetic about her through the gaze of Coppola, who has built a career on dissecting bitter feminine realities. It’s easy to criticize vanity, debauchery, and superfluity, particularly in a figure who came to symbolize the frustrations of the French underclass. But it takes much more work to understand that these flights of fancy are coping mechanisms for the ennui experienced by women who have little control over their actions and image. Marie Antionette and the American teenage girl have a lot in common. Whether one soundtracks their lives with Scarlatti and The Strokes or, in 2026, Olivia Rodrigo, they all have relatively little autonomy under the patriarchy. At least unlike the film’s strikingly rebellious wardrobe of period-inspired couture and Converse—which earned Milena Canonero an Oscar for Costume Design—facing the guillotine for crimes of public scrutiny has fallen out of style. [NK]
1. The Departed
Fackin’ right Mahty is at the tahp of tha list! Finally winning a Best Director Oscar for submerging the suave and tormented cops-and-crooks tale Infernal Affairs in the Boston Harbor, Martin Scorsese returned squarely to his comfort zone for The Departed, a violent, nihilistic, profane, hilarious crime drama about men stuck in their ways and headed to hell. That these men are on opposite sides of the law doesn’t really matter; undercover cop Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon), the mob’s man on the inside, find themselves blurring into one another, their loyalties and resolve tested only by the limits of how much suffering they can personally endure. Both suffer for selfish reasons, Billy so he can prove his upbringing wrong and Colin so he can milk his deception for all it’s worth. Behind them are powerful patriarchs (Jack Nicholson’s slimy gangster, Martin Sheen’s noble police captain, Catholicism’s angry God), Scorsese’s looming and ominous imagery, and a police psychiatrist (Vera Farmiga) drawn in by both leads’ imperfections. It’s a grim duality that peaks during the movie’s most gripping moments of tension, and is one pervasive enough that it critiques America at large—which was clearly Scorsese’s down-and-dirty intent from the film’s start, which opens with footage from the ’70s Boston race riots. It all just happened to be entertaining and virtuosic enough that, like so many of Scorsese’s gangster movies, mainstream audiences gobbled it up. [JO]
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