Movies of the year 2006

I’ve had the same seat in the Savoy for ten years now. It’s back and to the right. I jokingly refer to The Seat as my own private Mount Olympus. But I mean it really. The cloud is not always a fluffy place to be. When you spend much of your waking life – or what passes for same – sitting on your rear at the back and to the right in a cinema, it’s easy to feel hard done by. I’ve learned to live with the prequels, three-quels and focus-group originated franchises, but one more CG animated feature with dancing animals will reduce me to a gibbering wreck in the corner of a secure institution.
In the past 12 months, I’ve seen enough gloomy rom-coms to knit an entire circus tent of tears. Look here. If I want the eternal misery of the human condition, I’ll look to Bergman not Vaughniston (The Break Up) or Zach Braff (The Last Kiss). But here’s a thing. I’m still constantly amazed just how many good films make it through the wire. This year, you were really missing out if you didn’t get to see Brick, The Three Burials Of Melquaides Estrada, A Cock And Bull Story, Little Miss Sunshine, A Scanner Darkly, Harsh Times, Middletown, The Death Of Mr Lazarescu, Hostel, The Squid And The Whale, Lady Vengeance and – I know I’m forgetting some titles here but you get the picture. And we’re not even at the top ten yet. My seat has never felt cosier.

1. PAN’S LABYRINTH
Fantastic, sadistic and sublime, Pan’s Labyrinth is a coruscating fairy-tale breeding horror, politics and unblemished innocence to produce the hands-down, honest-to-God, best movie of 2006. Locating a terrifying nexus between a young girl’s escapism and the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, the film recreates The Gold Bearded Man folktale as a splendid original. Our pretty juvenile protagonist Ofelia (Baquero) is, like many archetypal heroines before, on the verge of puberty. Equally fearful of her monstrous stepfather (Lopez), the vicious embers of guerrilla warfare and womanhood, she retreats down her own imaginative rabbit hole. Sr. Del Toro’s characteristic flair for the macabre produces unsettling spectacle – heads are ripped from bodies, instruments of torture are lovingly stroked before application and kitchen knives creatively alter facial features. The arresting use of gristle however, is eclipsed by the sad, poignant fable beneath. The spirit of the beehive lives.
2. THE DEPARTED
Just when you think it’s all over bar the lifetime achievement awards (“Congratulations on your continuing existence, old timer”), Martin Scorsese comes along and shoves your face in a grapefruit. The director’s keenly anticipated remake of Infernal Affairs trades post-colonial frisson for dirty Irish gangsters in Boston to splendid effect. Those who have ever wondered what Jimmy Cagney or Pat O’Brien might have said without the standards of decency demanded during the 30s and 40s need wonder no more. Saints and scholars, my eye. The Emerald Mob, as depicted here, are racist, lecherous, violent and endlessly entertaining. The director’s best work in a decade. Genre rules. Bang. Crash. Wallop. Can’t wait for the graphic novel.
3. THE PROPOSITION
Brutal, bloody and staggeringly brilliant, this 19th-century outback western was penned by Nick Cave and directed by his regular mucker John Hillcoat. Even if you didn’t know it beforehand, you’d quickly recognise Cave’s discordant noodles and mournful tones on the soundtrack. If that failed to ring any bells, then perhaps the steady drip-feed of primal violence, Shakespearean grandeur and blackhearted humour would tip you off anyway. This is Murder Ballads made celluloid – epic, edgy and contemptuous of the standards imposed by convention. It’s also an endlessly fascinating, morally complex proper Western despite the potential for Skippy sightings.
4. CHILDREN OF MEN
Cuaron’s fine adaptation of a rare foray into speculative fiction by P.D. James mines a motif common to the genre – what if there were no more children? Ever? The director’s canny depiction of the anarchy that ensues never strays too far from reality, incorporating steely greys and a naturalistic aesthetic that recalls footage from the ‘winter of discontent’. Clive Owen has never been better as the weary dog-eared protagonist, while Michael Caine and Julianne Moore provide convincing support.

5. BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN
The rough fumbling in the tent. Heath Ledger banging a wall in frustration. Ang Lee’s tender, heartbreaking portrait of forbidden love is filled with moments that have already become iconographic enough to find their way into animated shorts featuring bunnies and Scary Movie 4. The tragic denouement will leave you floored for days.

6. THE DEVIL AND DANIEL JOHNSON
Daniel Johnston has resided on the fringes of the music scene for two decades, where his sad, surreal DIY ballads of unrequited love have formed a siren’s call for celebrity acolytes such as Matt Groening and Kurt Cobain. A manic-depressive, he has spent many sojourns in psychiatric institutes and at 45, is still cared for by his elderly parents at their Texas home. Tender, disquieting and raw, Jeff Feuerzeig’s award-winning documentary demonstrates remarkable sensitivity to what could have played out as a terrifying freak show, with neither the protagonist (nor indeed the imaginary antagonist) being interviewed for the purposes of the film. The necessary distance creates a slightly eerie aura around its subject, who remains, appropriately, a spectre in his own life.

7. BORAT
Absurd, grotesque and hilarious, those of a sensitive disposition may well find fault with Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan to give it its full glorious title. The president of Kazakhstan was certainly not amused. He even complained to George W. Bush about scenes depicting Borat leaving his village in a horse-drawn Lada after kissing his sister – “the best prostitute in all Kazakhstan” – goodbye. Honestly, if Borat was any funnier your head would explode.
8. HIDDEN (Caché)
compresses all Herr Haneke’s pet preoccupations – voyeurism, colonialism, bourgeois complacency, weasels under cocktail cabinets – into his most effectively disquieting thriller since Funny Games. Opening with a long, static surveillance shot (the first of many) of a Parisian apartment, a sudden crackle and a female voice alerts us to the fact we are watching a video. More precisely, we’re watching resolutely middle class couple Georges (Auteuil) and Anne (Binoche) watching a video, a view of their place from the street – hours worth of footage – sent through the post by an anonymous voyeur. Menacing, brilliant and jolting, Hidden is rife with accusation, like a tap on the shoulder you’ve been dreading for years. Blink during the final shot and you’ll miss the killer twist.

9. THE HOST
Director Bong Joon-ho’s Memories Of Murder, an intriguing gallimaufry of broad comedy, action, gore and social dissatisfaction, was one of the most impressively singular films of recent years. Playing much like Q The Winged Serpent on Jason Statham’s onscreen stash, The Host, Bong’s follow-up, repeats the trick. A classic monster B-movie, already the highest grossing film of all time in its native country, allows for sideswipes at American foreign policy and South Korea’s current fears regarding toxicity, but Mr. Bong’s superb craftsmanship, echoing early apocalyptic Cronenberg and the original Godzilla, keeps you hooked. Wolfgang Petersen should take note
10. CAPOTE
In 1959, Breakfast At Tiffanys author Truman Capote, on assignment for the New Yorker, traveled to rural Kansas to investigate the slaying of a farm family. Faithfully accompanied by Nelle Harper Lee (who would soon publish To Kill A Mockingbird), Capote gained unprecedented access to the police investigation and the perpetrators, Dick Hickock and Perry Smith. He spent the next six years writing In Cold Blood, his coruscating account of the case and most enduring work. Directed by Bennett Miller and written by actor Dan Futterman, Capote draws from Gerald Clarke’s biography and Janet Malcolm’s The Journalist And The Murderer to give a chilling account of these crucial six years. As the Kentucky born writer, Phillip Seymour Hoffman marries dazzling impersonation – picture Tex Avery’s Droopy auditioning for one of Tennessee William’s southern baby-belles – with the aspect of a man undergoing trial by fire and a dead-eye callousness.