The elaborate dream world of a little girl traumatized by the horrors of the Spanish Civil War. A day in the lives of a group of people bound together on a fated flight. A mustachioed moron bringing out our inner demons with howls of laughter.
Curious concepts all, but with a big, fat common denominator: These were three of the very best films of 2006.
The year included more than its fair share of by-the-numbers movies, for sure, but it was also a year sprinkled with some truly unique and eclectic filmmaking. This was a year when non-mainstream venues closed up shop right and left, and when it became harder than ever to experience anything that wasn't a big, dumb, cookie-cutter movie. And yet the good stuff was still there. We just had to look harder to find it.
Sharp-eyed readers will notice that the majority of titles on this year's Top 10 are just this sort of film — smaller movies that only played in a handful of local theaters, and then only for a week or so — but that doesn't mean that smaller movies were the only thing worth seeking out this year. I saw Superman Returns twice (once on a conventional screen and once in IMAX 3-D) and enjoyed it immensely each time. Flushed Away and Monster House were thoroughly satisfying as well, both first-class animated entertainments. And no less than three remarkable and deservedly popular horror films — Hostel, Slither and The Descent — just narrowly missed making this year's list.
Other films that I liked a lot but that didn't quite wind up in the Top 10 include a trio of wildly imaginative independent outings — The Science of Sleep, Thank You for Smoking and Art School Confidential (any one of them better than the indie world's current darling, Little Miss Sunshine) — the Taiwanese import Three Times and the documentaries 49 Up and I Like Flies. There were more, too, but here I am rattling on about the also-rans, and I know what you're here to find out. And so, without further ado, here are the 10 best films of 2006.
1. Pan's Labyrinth
Although it's not scheduled to show up in the Bay area for a few more weeks, an early local screening ensured Pan's Labyrinth a place at the very top of this year's list. An elegantly achieved but nearly indescribable mix of pagan fantasy, coming-of-age drama, gothic horror and perhaps one or two more genres, Guillermo del Toro's magnificent film unfolds during Spain's civil war and perfectly imagines an imperfect world through the eyes of a child. Evoking both Spirit of the Beehive (perhaps the greatest Spanish film ever) and the director's own The Devil's Backbone (a sort of companion piece to this film), Pan's Labyrinth gives us a world both achingly familiar and utterly new. It's a classic fairytale tweaked to modern perfection.
2. United 93
Drama of the first order, but it doesn't really behave like a mainstream movie. There are no conventional arcs here, either to the characters or to their story, and the entire first hour unfolds as a collection of small, seemingly inconsequential details that simply serve to bring us into the reality of what we're observing. Details accumulate as an extended checklist of ordinary life, amplified and made almost unbearably poignant because of the extraordinary horror we know is also part of this picture. United 93 skillfully segues from everyday banalities into the chaos of what happened on September 11, as director Paul Greengrass orchestrates the confusion like a mysterious, terrible symphony. The obscene impossible becomes possible, hardens into reality, then passes into history before our eyes.
3. Borat
Believe the hype. Borat is an equal-opportunity offender, with all races, creeds and colors skewered with gleeful, indiscriminate abandon — and if you have a problem with that, then this is probably not the movie for you. The jokes, designed to shock as much as delight, might be hard for some to even acknowledge as "jokes." But by the end, you'll probably be laughing so hard you'll appreciate the handful of brief interludes that punctuate the nonstop chaos and allow us to catch our breath.
4. Manderlay
In Manderlay's unforgiving and decidedly non-PC world-view, everybody is either a slave or a sadist (or both), and many of our most deeply felt assumptions about faith, hope and basic human decency are routinely shredded. The middle installment of Lars Von Trier's notorious "American trilogy," Manderlay cuts right to the emotional and intellectual core of its story, throwing out not only the niceties of narrative nuance, but stylistic flourishes and just about every other sort of artificial sweetening. The film unfolds like a curiously austere brand of slapstick, a terrible comedy of errors performed by people who can't begin to comprehend the absurdity of their situation. If Manderlay weren't such a richly composed, meticulously realized artistic vision, it'd be nearly unbearable.
5. The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada
Old-fashioned codes of masculine honor hold sway in Tommy Lee Jones' film, but notions of revenge, redemption and other frequent staples of the Western genre are gently shredded and manipulated with considerable black humor. It's all told from multiple, Rashomon-esque perspectives that seem to revel in a world that's essentially one long border crossing, where cultures and individuals collide and inevitably transform in the most curious ways. The movie segues neatly from neo-Western to Greek tragedy to macabre, absurdist farce, heaping plenty of abuse upon its players (even the best of whom are victims of their own illusions), but never gratuitously. What Three Burials ultimately comes down to is what all those classic Westerns of bygone days came down to — the notion that sometimes only a truly grueling ordeal can grant us the dignity of a place in the world.
6. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu
A Romanian slice-of-life that's part excruciating social critique, part absurdist farce, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu makes for riveting stuff as it follows an ailing pensioner from hospital to hospital while he fades away in real time. It's a movie that breathes fresh life into the old cliché about not knowing whether to laugh or cry. As with many of the best films being released these days, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu barely made it into local theaters, but happily it's now available on DVD.
7. The Departed
Martin Scorsese's remake of a classic Asian blockbuster turns out to be his best film in years and the likely vehicle to snag the director that shiny little gold statue that's been eluding him for years. Good for him, and for us. The Departed isn't quite up there with Goodfellas or the rest of Scorsese's very best work from decades past, but it's still a solid piece of cops-and-robbers filmmaking, both authentically gritty and wholly cinematic in a way that's unique to this great American director.
8. L'Enfant
The latest in Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne's series of microscopically focused examinations of fringe-dwellers, L'Enfant hones the Belgian brothers' austere vision to its minimalist essence. The film gives us a day or two in the lives of a young, aimless girl and her callous boyfriend, who is a character much like the fabled scorpion, stinging simply because it's in his nature. And yet L'Enfant finds unexpected grace notes in these blank-eyed misfits, eventually allowing us a glimpse of the extraordinary within the ordinary. The Dardennes scrutinize their unglamorous characters with a rigorous energy and unblinking honesty, allowing us to feel as if we're seeing the world roughly as they see it. If you can stand the heat, you may come away amazed.
9. The Proposition
Director John Hillcoat's brutal but strangely poetic tale of frontier justice in old Australia sets brother against brother in a tale of mutated honor, bloodshed, buzzing flies, parched landscapes and bad behavior. It's all set to a combination of authentic period music, outer-space drones and blasts of white noise, with a cumulative effect not unlike the cinematic equivalent of one of those old murder ballads as interpreted by Nick Cave (who also happens to be this film's screenwriter). The cast is more than solid (particularly a skeletal, virtually unrecognizable Guy Pearce) and, despite some shocking moments that might give Rob Zombie pause, there are some distinctly un-Cave-like moments of tenderness here, too.
10. A Scanner Darkly
A pulp visionary in the best and worse sense, Philip K. Dick spewed paranoid rants that have largely become our reality — something that director Richard Linklater communicates with spooky clarity in this fascinating head trip. Employing that strange rotoscoped animation technique from Waking Life, A Scanner Darkly is Slacker played out in a dystopian near-future, where claustrophobic dread skids into genial, loopy shtick at the drop of a hat. With its modest cast of characters and abundance of rambling, internal monologues, this is a far cry from the whiz-bang spectacles of most big-screen Dick adaptations — but Scanner Darkly is the real deal, right down to the twists and hooks of the master's Total Recall and Blade Runner.
This article appears in Dec 27, 2006 – Jan 2, 2007.