Top Ten Movies of 2006

Bill Wine - All Headline News Movie Critic

From this corner, 2006 must have been a pretty good year at the movies. If not, then how come none of these ten terrific films made our Top Ten list?:

An Inconvenient Truth, World Trade Center, V for Vendetta, The Illusionist, The Departed, The Queen, Death of a President, The Nativity Story, The Prestige, and Happy Feet.

Think of them as the glorious honorable-mentions. So what did make the list?

Here's a countdown of one critic's choices for the Top Ten Movies of 2006:

10. The Painted Veil

Director John Curran's absorbing adaptation of the W. Somerset Maugham novel is a sweeping but intimate portrait of an unhappy marriage, brilliantly acted - with an amazing combination of outward restraint and nuanced expressiveness - by Edward Norton and Naomi Watts.

9. Water

The third film in controversial Indian director Deepa Mehta's "trilogy of the elements" (along with Earth and Fire) is a well-acted, arrestingly shot, meditative exploration into the plight and exploitation of women in India by focusing on the way widows were - and, in some cases, still are - treated: as second-class citizens. An impassioned drama of social protest.

8. Pan's Labyrinth

Mexican director Guillermo del Toro's wildly imaginative and shockingly graphic horror fantasy is a fairy tale for former children - that is, adults only - a perverse spin on Alice in Wonderland set during the bloody aftermath of the Spanish Civil War. His masterful juggling of reality and the supernatural makes for a spellbinding nightmare.

7. Lady Vengeance

Speaking of pointed gore, this stylized and audacious retribution thriller by Korean director Park Chan-wook - part of a trilogy that includes Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and Oldboy - has an uncanny streak of dark humor running through it, and features one of the most astonishing and unforgettable sequences about revenge ever put on film.

6. United 93

For those who can stand going through this unflinching memorial portrait, writer-director Paul Greengrass's gripping "docudramatic" speculation of the last hour-and-a-half of the devastating real-life tragedy aboard the Boeing 757 on 9/11 is an excruciatingly suspenseful imagining of the unimaginable.

5. Deliver Us from Evil

As disturbing as a horror classic, director Amy Berg's unforgettable documentary about the victims of a child molester, the chillingly charming Father Oliver O'Grady, is a shattering experience. Even though the approach is, amazingly, understated, the effect is devastating: you feel that you're getting a real peek into the heart of evil.

4. Curse of the Golden Flower

Could this operatic melodrama from world-class Chinese director Zhang Yimou possibly be more visually dazzling and narratively entrancing than his Hero and House of Flying Daggers? Remarkably, yes. You can't take your eyes off the screen - or off Gong Li or Chow Yun-Fat - throughout this splendiferous Shakespearean tragedy.

3. Letters from Iwo Jima

Director Clint Eastwood revisits the Battle of Iwo Jima, the subject of his Flags of Our Fathers, but this time from the Japanese perspective, something that's never been done by a major moviemaker. Alternately shocking and sensitive, this mesmerizing, moving, and marvelous war/anti-war work is even more powerful than its companion drama. If it doesn't make you sense the common humanity of Us and Them, no film will.

2. Thank You for Smoking

Jason Reitman makes a spectacular directing debut in this perfectly realized, politically incorrect satirical farce about tobacco lobbyists' unfiltered efforts to get us to inhale. And Aaron Eckhart gives an Oscar-level performance as the motormouth protagonist. A bitingly cynical, razor-sharp spin on spin, this movie is... smokin'.

1. Cars

Yeah, yeah, I know: it's animated. So sue me. But it's not just a winner in the CAR-toon ghetto. This is the movie that, for me, came the closest to realizing its daunting ambitions. Not only is director John Lasseter's labor of love a technically spectacular demonstration of what computer animation can do, but the level of honest sentiment and poignancy it reaches about two races - the human and the rat - is downright astonishing. All the best movie of 2006 does is drive off with your heart.

...On to 2007.