EW’S MOVIE CRITICS PICK THE BEST OF 2006
B Y M O L LY T E M P L E T O N
n 2006, we suffered a fairly enjoyable fate: an overabundance of good movies. Just plain
good movies; the kind you like, but that don’t give you fodder for discussions that contin-
ue long after you’ve left the theater. When EW instituted our star rating system in late
September, I found myself doling out three and three-and-a-half star ratings with alarming
regularity. Was it just me? Or were the movies just … well … good? From Michel
Gondry’s pretty, uncertain The Science of Sleep to those average films that showcased great
performances (The Last King of Scotland, The Notorious Bettie Page) to ambitious pieces that
didn’t quite reach such great heights (Letters From Iwo Jima), 2006 was a year for good films.
But there were great movies, as there always are. And it was difficult to choose one single
great film above the others. In some years, something clearly stands out: I mentioned Michel
Gondry above because in 2004, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was the movie of the year.
This year, my top three films changed places with bothersome frequency. But eventually, a deci-
sion had to be made.
Like the two Truman Capote movies released in 2005 and 2006, many of my top 10 films
come in pairs. Two queens; two indelible, violent films that discover beauty in stark landscapes;
two looks at recent events, one fiction, one non. You could even pair Rian Johnson’s teen noir,
Brick, with Andrew Bujalski’s Mutual Appreciation, an intimate portrait of twentysomethings:
Something about the affection each filmmaker shows for his subjects links the two very differ-
ent films in my mind. More than anything, these are the movies that moved me. Freedom, ter-
ror, privilege, power, grief, love: It is the particular take on the universal that gives these, like
most great films, their unforgettable strength.
I
Drug lords, thugs, femme fatales, plots and revelations, they’re all here, the motor-mouthed
noir language bouncing off the bare cinder blocks of a California high school. (8/3/06)
4. Mutual Appreciation The second movie from writer-director Andrew Bujalski,
who also co-stars, begins and ends with almost the same image: Two or three twentysome-
things, sprawled in an apartment, talking. That describes more scenes than not in this warm and
charming film, which observes the uncertainty of post-college life, for a certain kind of person,
with accuracy and awkward, fantastic humor. Mutual Appreciation gets it all right: the charac-
ters, the delivery, the dimly lit corners of Brooklyn’s music scene, the way romantic relation-
ships shift and adjust to the people around them.
5. Shut Up and Sing Don’t skip
this movie because you don’t like the
Dixie Chicks. While Shut Up and Sing is a
movie about country music, it’s about far
more than that, and freedom of speech is
just the start. It’s about friendship, family,
confidence, truth and love, and part of its
considerable charm is that the movie lets
you see these themes for yourself. There
are no talking heads, no formal interviews;
the filmmakers, Barbara Kopple and
Cecilia Peck, are unseen. The result is both a surprisingly intimate portrait of extremely suc-
cessful musicians and a smart commentary on the intersection of politics, pop and the person-
al. It’s also simply and wonderfully triumphant. (12/21/06)
6. United 93 Everything that Oliver Stone
did wrong with the glossy, faux-inspirational
World Trade Center, Paul Greengrass did right
with United 93, a taut, simple, careful memorial in
the shape of a film. In an interview with Film
Comment magazine, Greengrass said “It’s a
catharsis, it’s a reliving, it’s a reconstruction. It’s a
hypothesis.” United 93 is gripping and painful to
watch, but it’s also, somehow, cleansing; it puts
front and center the people who were working like
crazy to understand what was happening, and those who, left alone on the flight, tried their best
to do what they could. There is no grandstanding, no one trying to take credit, no one turning
a tragedy into a chance at political gain. There is only a theory about what happened in the air,
and an inside look at what happened on the ground. And that is more than enough. (5/4/06)
1. Children of Men The poster reads “from visionary director Alfonso Cuarón,” and
for once the “visionary” tag is not an exaggeration. Watching Cuarón’s film was a singularly
physical experience; I perched on my seat, hands over my mouth, for the last hour. With a per-
fect cast, stunning camerawork, a dead-gray palette and a riveting premise — the world is self-
destructing because soon there will be no one left to live in it — Cuarón creates a fable for any
time. The intrusive government, endless violence, widespread ennui — it’s a deadly future and
a commentary on today, all wrapped tightly around a tiny, warm kernel of hope. What makes
Cuarón’s work all the more astonishing is that he (and a team of writers) developed this breath-
taking film from a 1992 novel by P.D. James that, its fascinating central concept aside, is rather
middling. To read the book is to appreciate anew what film can be. (1/11/07)
2. Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story
Michael Winterbottom’s
movie about making a movie about making a movie is
a great, layered romp, equal parts wildly funny and
impossibly perceptive. On the set of an adaptation of
Laurence Sterne’s novel The Life and Opinions of
Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, actors compete, produc-
tion assistants flirt, directors and writers waffle and the
outside world (often in the form of the charming Kelly
McDonald) has a hard time finding a foothold.
Inventive and sharp, Tristram Shandy is a deeply cre-
ative look at the process of creating, missteps (a black
page in the book becomes, amusingly and briefly, a
black screen), moments of brilliance and all. (5/4/06)
3. Brick Writer-director Rian Johnson melds film noir
and teen movie to great effect in his pitch-perfect first
film. As Brendan, a loner with John Lennon glasses and
perpetually slumped shoulders, Joseph Gordon-Levitt
seems to wander through his own story, trying to figure
out what’s happened to his ex, the elfin Emilie de Ravin.
7. The Prestige In a year without boy wizards, hobbits or Christ-figure lions, we got a
different kind of magic: compet-
ing stage magicians, once friends
and allies, trapped by their own
secrets and desires into a deadly
battle of wills. Director
Christopher Nolan (Memento)
once again plays with timelines
and narrative structure, piecing
together his movie using the three
parts of a magician’s trick, and
stars Christian Bale and Hugh
Jackman (with Michael Caine in
one of his always-able assists) are
magnetic in their respective roles as the ingenious magician with no patience for the stage and the
showman with no patience for working on a trick. Adapted from a novel by Christopher Priest, The
Prestige is a film about deception and obsession in which those who are deceived are too often the
magicians’ loved ones — and sometimes the tricksters themselves. (10/26/06)
8. The Proposition Bleak, brutal and arresting, John Hillcoat’s Australian Western
(from a screenplay by Nick Cave) is a story of colonialism as seen through the particular exis-
tence of a trio of outlaw brothers and the sheriff trying to bring them in. Not to be forgotten is
Emily Watson as the sheriff’s wife, a delicate Englishwoman out of place in the spare
Australian outback. Like Children of Men, The Proposition is at times painfully violent, but
never without cause. Hillcoat’s film looks unflinchingly at the line between the horrible actions
of the individual and the horrible actions done ostensibly in the name of justice, and asks
whether that line might not be so clear. (6/15/06)
9. The Queen It’s almost shocking to see beautiful, regal Helen Mirren done up plain
— though still regal — as Elizabeth II, a monarch struggling with her changing country fol-
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