Happy New Year

So, in my gig as a film critic for Detroit's Metro Times Iwas asked to put together my Top 10 (and 1 worst) list of films for 2006. Now, some films that have popped up on other lists haven't even been screened here yet, so I can't consider them. Here's my list:

1. Cache

Michael Haneke proves once again that he is one of cinema’s most uncompromising directors. Released in 2005, this haunting thriller didn’t reach our landlocked shores until Spring of this year. The personal becomes the political as a smug Parisian intellectual is forced to violently confront his past and his conscience. The fear and guilt in this film are almost palpable.


2. Pan’s Labyrinth

Known for horror fantasias like Hellboy and Blade 2, Guillermo Del Toro has an uncanny ability to fill the screen with gothic poetry of the highest order. Until now, however, The Devil’s Backbone was the only proof that his abilities rose above genre pulp. Pan’s Labyrinth will stand as the artistic turning point in this exciting filmmaker’s career. An exquisite fairy tale of horrifying beauty, it ranks as one of the best fantasy films of all time. Don’t miss it when it opens in Detroit after the New Year.

3. Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.

In a year desperate for good comedy, Sasha Baron Cohen delivers the goods by taking Candid Camera to an all-new level of depravity and outrageousness. Exploding sexism, Anti-Semitism and bigotry to the point of absurdity, 20% of the audience shook their head in disgust and the rest laughed so hard they wet their pants. It just might be The Citizen Kane of offensive cinema.

4. United 93

British director Paul Greengrass (Black Sunday, The Bourne Supremacy) delivers a gut-wrenching re-enactment of the September 11th tragedy with respect, courage and extraordinary restraint. Simultaneously harrowing and haunting, it may not resonate twenty years from now but as a piece of timely cinema, it offers audiences their best chance to reclaim that terrible day from the self-serving rhetoric of politicians and pundits.

5. The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada

Ignore the lists that place the bloated and pointless Babel in their top ten. This minor-key effort by screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga displays far more heart and soul than that star-studded Oscar darling. Tommy Lee Jones takes the director chair (along with the leading role) and delivers a heartfelt call for racial tolerance. The cast is topnotch, with Barry Pepper shining brightest as a craven border patrol officer struggling to find personal redemption.

6. The Descent

Political policy inspires popular culture as 9-11 and the Bush administration’s scary new world order inspires the greatest onslaught of horror films since the radioactive monster movies of the 50s. The last five years have seen audiences pony up big box office dollars to a cinematic slaughterhouse of death and dismemberment. This chicks-with-picks versus cannibalistic underground dwellers was the best of the bunch. It’ll have you screaming like a little girl.

7. Little Miss Sunshine

Grandpa’s hooked on porn and does heroin, big brother Paul won’t speak, Uncle Frank is a gay Proust scholar and little Olive wants to compete as a child beauty queen. Welcome to family dysfunction for the new millennium. Brainy, funny and filled with humanity, this little-film-that-could understands that comedy and character are vitally intertwined.

8. An Inconvenient Truth

The greatest slide show ever captured on film. Al Gore proves that the world would be a much different place had the Supreme Court not handed the presidency to the loser of 2000’s election. Sure, we could have done without the love letter to Al’s life and career, but the film’s message is undeniably persuasive. If it doesn’t change a few of your energy consumption habits, it will, at the very least, make you feel awfully guilty.

9. The Departed

Martin Scorcese hasn’t been this entertaining since Goodfellas. A terrific adaptation of the Hong Kong police thriller Infernal Affairs, Leonardo DiCaprio outshines a shining cast. It ain’t art but it sure is tasty. As far as meat and potatoes movies go this one’s filet mignon.

10. Army Of Shadows

So what if this was made nearly 40 years ago, Jean-Pierre Melville’s (Bob le Flambeur, Le Samouraï) noir-inspired take on the French resistance only just reached our shores this year. Gritty, steely-eyed and unsentimental, the director’s personal experiences with the WWII underground inform his unsentimental view of war as survival of the grimmest.

Honorable Mentions: Brick, Hard Candy, Flushed Away, Our Brand Is Crisis, Tristram Shandy: A Cock And Bull Story and The Prestige.

THE WORST OF 2006: The Lady In The Water

Charting M. Night Shyamalan’s career it’s clear the director’s ego and self-importance has grown in direct proportion to the awfulness of his movies. Peaking early with The Sixth Sense, the director’s flawed but interesting Unbreakable (which television’s Heroes owes much to) gave weigh to the profoundly moronic Signs and the politically misguided The Village. In each, the director dutifully provided his trademark narrative ‘twist,’ while attracting first-rate casts to his Twilight Zone-inspired filmography. Not coincidentally, with each release, he also gave himself larger and larger acting roles.

Despite the drastically declining quality of his films, however, Shyamalan always displayed a master’s touch behind the camera. Even the worst of his efforts contained tangible moments of suspense and intrigue.

Until this year, that is. 2006 saw the director’s hubris finally overwhelm all vestiges of his talent. Enjoying a level of control few directors ever achieve, M. Night’s Lady In The Water is so self-indulgent and monumentally awful that he deserves a face-stinging bitch-slap from critics and audiences alike.

Adapting a bedtime story he told his kids into a big budget summer release, this tedious and incoherent tale of water nymphs and the ‘power of myth’ is a train wreck of an ego trip. Shyamalan actually casts himself as a writer who must be convinced to pen the novel that will change the world. God help us all.