Friday, March 09, 2007

Top 10 of 2006

The wait, gentle reader, is over. After hours of serious deliberation and careful review, I have winnowed down the 46 movies distributed in 2006 that I have seen over the last 14 months. Eighteen of those movies received grades in the A range. For all my concern in 2006 that it wasn't a very good year, it turns out it was one of the better years in recent memory for movies. I saw a lot of worthy pictures last year, ones that challenged me, ones that made me laugh, ones that made my scratch my head. Even so, I can tell these movies are going to be with me for a long time.

As always, the list is sort of rank ordered and sort of alphabetical. I will tell you one thing: the first movie truly was the best picture of the year.
  1. Children of Men
  2. The Lives of Others
  3. Pan's Labyrinth
  4. Half Nelson
  5. The Prestige
  6. Brick
  7. A Prairie Home Companion
  8. The Departed
  9. V for Vendetta
  10. The Science of Sleep

Honourable mention goes to La Règle du Jeu, which I swore I read about before I saw, although I cannot find proof that it was redistributed in the last year or so.

What have we here? Three foreign language films, a comic book adaptation, dueling magicians, a genre pic, and a genre defying noir. How could I have doubted the greatness of last year's films?

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