Ten Great Movies We Saw This Year

By Rob Christopher in Arts & Entertainment on Dec 26, 2006 3:19PM

The critics' year-end lists grow tiresome just about now. The same four or five film titles repeated endlessly, adjectives like "moving" and "powerful" used so often that they start to sound Seussian, the monotonous blather about this or that movie's Oscar chances (paging Miss Cleo! You're needed to peer into the minds of Academy voters!). It's enough to make one lose sight of the actual films

We plead guilty to list-making ourselves but thought we'd try inserting a few twists in the interest of freshness. Last week we offered up ten movies we didn't see (but should have); today we present ten titles we did see, and liked. Not necessarily the "ten best" of 2006 (there are plenty of other people out there splitting hairs over that already), these are just some great movies we enjoyed.

Alphabetically:

1. Casino Royale
A perfect post-9/11 007: twinges of brutality (which border on wistfulness), plenty of old-fashioned CGI-free action setpieces, elegant settings, exotic locales, witty banter and great cocktail recipes. Daniel Craig took Bond and made him fresh. True, the third act trudged along a bit slowly, but this was one of the few recent action flicks where we really felt we got out money's worth seeing it on the big screen.

2. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu
Depending on your mood, this was either an extraordinarily depressing drama about abandonment and society's callousness or else a wickedly black comedy about a grumpy old man's demise. Either way, we will never forget this film. At its core is a humanism which makes Mr. Lazarescu's slow demise that much more disturbing. Now that it's on DVD it's time to check it out again.

3. Good Night, and Good Luck.
Yes, this actually came out last year but we weren't able to catch it until January. Its meticulous recreation of 50's-era CBS is so convincing that it somehow feels that much more contemporary, and director George Clooney's decision to use only archival footage of Senator McCarthy pays off in spades. What an amazing double feature this would make with Network!

4. Heading South
The director of Time Out collaborates with Charlotte Rampling, one of the greatest of all contempoary actresses, to create an unflinching examination of colonialism, selifishness and desire. Beautifully filmed and straightforward. The image of a car pulling up to the beach's edge in the dead of night to discharge its cargo still lingers.

5. An Inconvenient Truth
A triumph of substance over style: its technique is rather plain, but what Al Gore has to say is compelling and a damn sight scarier than anything else that came out of Hollywood this year. We hope that more policymakers will see this movie and heed its advice. Yet its up to us to make sure that happens. It's our planet.

6. Iraq in Fragments
Read our review for an in-depth evaluation. Sad to say, very little has changed since this documentary was released. Except that things have gotten worse. This is another must-see film.

7. L'enfant
The Dardenne brothers create a deceptively simple tale of blindness, theft and (possible) redemption, and they do it without flashy editing, show-offy camerawork or even a musical score! The economy of its narrative is as gripping as anything Bresson ever made. A harsh movie that's also exhilarating.

8. The Queen
What can we say about a film that takes a contemporary event involving well-known people and allows us to see it in a totally new way? We can say: bravo! Helen Mirren's queen is so fully-realized that we even forget we're watching a performance. Much as we hate Oscar predictions, Ms. Mirren is a safe bet for a statuette.

9. A Scanner Darkly
We know lots of people who were on the fence about this movie, but we were impressed. And we intend to see it again to pick up on stuff we missed the first time. The same trippy, disorienting animation style that Linklater used for Waking Life is the perfect visualiztion of Philip K. Dick's prose. Any film that contains a good Keanu Reeves performance is doubly laudible.

10. Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story
Michael Winterbottom takes on the challenge of filming Laurence Sterne's unfilmable novel by ... not filming it. Instead we get an aimiably sprawling mess involving the behind-the-scenes shennanigans of the film crew and some hilarious jibes at movie star vanity. Steve Coogan and Rob Bryden make a great comedy team. If you're renting it on DVD, be sure to watch through the end credits for their dueling Al Pacino impressions.

There you have it. We could write a few more lines, trying to sum up the year in movies, but forgive us if we don't. We got a lot of DVDs yesterday from Santa and we can't wait to dive in.