Ryan Stewart's Top Ten Films of 2006

It would mean nothing for me to tell you that 2006 was a lousy year for movies -- I've been saying that every year since about 1986. But even by my standards, this was a rather lackluster year, with an abundance of prestige projects that turned out to be flawed, like Flags of our Fathers, Little Children and The Departed. Most of the gems I came across in 2006 were also released very early in the year, so I've decided not to confine my list to those films eligible for Academy Award consideration. I personally think that after awarding last year's Oscar to Crash, the Academy members should have to go away to a retreat and re-think their lives for about five years or so before handing out awards again. But that's neither here nor there. My criteria is simplicity itself: if the film was released for a theatrical run during the calendar year 2006, it's eligible.

Much like last year's list, which I co-compiled with Cinematical's ex-chief Karina Longworth, my choices this year have very little in common with one another. I have no stated genre preferences, except a love for westerns and musicals, both of which don't get made that often these days. There is evidence in the list, however, of my lingering preference for visual poetry over verbal Jujitsu. I will always side with the cold, Calvinist aesthetics of someone in the tradition of Godard over a cast-of-thousands verbiage feast offered by someone like the late Robert Altman. Looking over my ten films, I see at least six that excited me chiefly for the director's ability to communicate through painstaking, gorgeous visuals. So, without further ado:

1. Three Times


The badge around her neck reads: "I suffer from epilepsy. Please do not call an ambulance. Just move me to a warm, safe place." She is young and bored, strumming guitar on stage at night and engaging in pointless love affairs during the day. Maybe she was happier a hundred years ago. Three Times, from director Hsiao-hsien Hou, shows us a love affair played out in three time periods, always with the same actors. In 1911, the couple is confident and possessed of mutual understanding, but restrained by social mores. In 1966, that old world is cracking up and a new one emerging. An open doorway in a pool hall, with the world flying by outside, symbolizes new freedoms. We see the young man standing confidently at the helm of a watercraft, like Ulysses heading towards a battle. In 2005, freedom will dissipate again, into a morass of text messages and confusion. Is Hou saying that freedom was just a moment? This film, which glides effortlessly over the years and finds a stunning and unique visual style to match each era, evades easy answers.

2. Marie Antoinette

Sofia Coppola's third film is a triumph. Marie Antoinette borrows the life of the infamous French dauphine to create an ingenious portrait of glorious corruption. Raised from childhood to follow a Byzantine conduct code, the young Marie, gamely played by Kirsten Dunst, has neither the education or the temperament to break out of her Faberge shell. So she doesn't. The film is told entirely from her vantage; the starving of Paris are seen only once, as a faceless, torch-wielding horde. That Marie tosses off valley-girl idioms like "That is soooo Du Barry!" and has an accent to match only heightens her disconnect with the unknowable, cake-less creatures who will eventually topple her. The film is most notable for an evolution in Coppola's visual style. She follows an a-typical shot structure, holding some shots to the breaking point, then longer. Extended holds of walking, lounging and nature-gazing boldly dare the audience to cry foul. The piece de resistance of this beautifully shot film is a sumptuous, Malick-inspired sequence at Le Petit Trianon, the Queen's nature hideaway.

3. 49 Up

It's that time again. Another opportunity to examine the British guinea pigs who have opened their homes to a documentary crew every seventh year since they were seven. The 7 Up series has been rightly praised as the most ambitious documentary project of all time, and the lion's share of that praise transfers to its long-time director, Michael Apted. He began as a researcher on 7 Up and has carried the torch as the series' helmer ever since. The latest installment, 49 Up, is full of new surprises and amazing developments. No one has died yet, but being as they are on the cusp of 50, many now see themselves as 'old.' They are less interested in change and more set in their ways. A few retain the youthful buoyancy they had in 14 Up and 21 Up. Attitudes that were hinted at in earlier episodes are, some cases, fully developed. Most have husbands, wives and children attached to their hip. Some of them we've met before, some not. Watching 49 Up is a powerfully personal experience, like being reacquainted with old friends.

4. Sophie Scholl: The Final Days

Watching the endgame of Sophie Scholl: The Final Days will give you "the shock of your life," Anthony Lane of The New Yorker wrote. This little German film is, by leaps and bounds, the most effective thriller released in 2006. It concerns The White Rose, a resistance movement organized on German college campuses during Hitler's regime. Sophie Scholl, a member of that resistance played by Julia Jentsch, is arrested by Nazi police on suspicion of distributing anti-Nazi flyers on a Munich campus. She is placed in a room with a police interrogator who holds her life in his hands. He knows that she is probably guilty. The evidence tells him so, and so do her eyes. But he senses that she is smart, and he's intrigued. A chess game begins. He determines to extract something from her -- a confession, a slip-up, something -- that will allow him to justify to himself the sending of a bright young woman to certain death. Rarely has a movie told so much of its story in the way two people read each other's faces.

5. The Fountain

When did we become so intolerant of ambitious failures? Darren Aronofsky's labor of love will surely be seen as he intended in some future DVD, but the version out now is at least a visual tour de force, even if character development has been greatly condensed. It's certainly undeserving of much of its criticism, based on what I perceive as a misunderstanding of the plot. There's only one time period -- 2000. The scenes in 1500 and 2500 are the beginning and ending of the book started by Izzy, the dying (but radiant) wife played by Rachel Weisz. Izzy writes the beginning, set in a fantastical imagining of medieval Spain spawned from her limited education. (Remember how her husband Tommy scoffs when she attempts to talk astronomy) After her death, Tommy writes an ending, as she requested. The film's visual compositions are uniformly stunning, from the simplest moments between Izzy and Tommy as she soaks in a bathtub to the finale, in which a spacecraft breaks through the cloud cover surrounding a dying star. Can we please have more failures like The Fountain next year?

6. Hurensohn

Ozren is a normal little boy. It's his mother that's the problem. The two live together in a modest apartment in Vienna, and every morning she drags him out of bed and stands watch until he's out the door and off to school. Then she goes off to her own job -- prostitution. It's a volatile situation that holds together for a while, until Ozren begins to grow up and have those complicated feelings about women, which his mother's job does nothing to dispel. Hurensohn is a strong, intriguing debut from Austrian filmmaker Michael Sturminger. It's not an entirely believable film, but it doesn't want to be. It exists somewhere between a melodrama and a fable, and benefits greatly from powerful acting by Chulpan Khamatova (Goodbye, Lenin!) and Stanislav Lisnic, who plays the son. The film has nothing derogatory to say about prostitution as an industry, but is tantalized by the barriers that exist between it and successful motherhood. The fact that Ozren's mother is exceptionally beautiful complicates things further, but I'll say no more.

7. United 93

Paul Greengrass found a successful way of telling the story of Flight 93 by stripping it of its mythology and introducing a near-documentary feel that heightens the drama by a factor of nine. Remarkably free of recognizable faces and studio conventions like subplots and minor victories to soften the eventual tragedy, the film is almost intolerably sad without being sentimental. It presents a plane full of stunned passengers and gives them a pre-9/11 viewpoint: that hijackers should be cooperated with and placated at all costs. Worst case scenario, they'll end up sitting it out on a runway in Beirut, right? The late revolt by the passengers, after they've smuggled in some of the horrifying truth through cellphones, is confused, messy, and ultimately hopeless. Near the end of the revolt sequence, when the plane is already tumbling towards the ground, Greengrass includes an arresting image, of a balding, out-of-shape American having brushed off the iPod cables and other silliness and now struggling to his feet to stand foursquare against a raging, wild-eyed terrorist.

8. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu

The title says it all. The film begins in the shabby apartment of Lazarescu, a Romanian pensioner played by Ion Fiscuteanu, who seems to spend most of his time complaining on the phone to distant relatives. Most of them seem to have defected to Canada to get away from him. It ends nearly three hours later, after a rainy blur of midnight hospital visits and a lot of complaining by an angelic ambulance driver has gotten him admitted for surgery. He dies quietly on a gurney in the prep room. We know he has died only because the film ends abruptly at that moment, without cues of any kind. The story is simply over. Mr. Lazarescu may be unpalatable to some filmgoers. That's not an insult -- some people will take no joy in watching hours of hospital charts, X-rays and emergency room frustrations. But the craft cannot be denied. There's something almost heroic about the amount of work that went into this low-budget picture. It never shows its hand, pulls its punches, or changes the subject. It's a film about boring, routine death.

9. Shut Up and Sing

The Dixie Chicks seem to have a lot of meetings. The documentary Shut Up and Sing, which charts the group's career since an 'infamous' moment in 2003 when the lead singer dared to blurt out her disdain for George W. Bush, contains several roundtable discussions in which the group members debate their strategies for success. They meet with sponsors, managers, each other. This film was no doubt cooked up at one of those meetings. Nevertheless, it contains more than a few kernels of truth, and interesting ones at that. It gives us insight into the overwhelming power that a successful lead singer can exercise over the rest of a band. When Natalie Maines, the big-mouthed singer who inarguably made The Dixie Chicks the success story they are today, begins to feel pressure from her two instrumental bandmates to recant her political statements, she hits back through veiled threats to leave or even to take the group out of country music all-together. Even for non-fans of country, this film delivers as an entertaining backstage pass.

10. Babel

I've seen Babel twice, and I'm still not quite sure what it's about, but I know that I like it. The film strings together four barely interconnected stories on various continents, and in each one there's some kind of fundamental miscommunication that leads to chaos. In the best segment, a vulnerable deaf schoolgirl in Japan flirts with a cop investigating her father and ends up wildly misjudging his intentions towards her. In another, an American couple on holiday in Morocco, played by Cate Blanchett and Brad Pitt, become the victim of a shooting that may or may not be connected to terrorism. In each story, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu directs with verve and brings a jarring life to the proceedings. His camera is subtle when it needs to be and chaotic when the action reaches a fever pitch. Despite the enormous cast, there's never a feeling that any one character is short-changed -- each story is told with energy to spare, so that you leave the theater thinking you've seen four complete films, not just four good stories.