It's practically impossible for me to sit here and list the top ten short films from 2006. Not only are there thousands of shorts to sift through, but the majority of them are not available online. So, how does Erik go about putting together a list of the best short films from 2006? Will he randomly spew out names and titles for films you'll never be able to see unless you just happen to show up at a specific festival on a specific day at a specific time?

Of course not. What I've actually done is comb through all the previous Eat My Shorts and chosen my ten favorite short films that I've written about this year. Most (if not all) of them are not from 2006, but they are available online and all of them are wonderful, fantastic and definitely deserve your attention. This has been an amazing year for short films, and I like to think (in my own bizarre fantasy world) that Eat My Shorts truly helped spread the word -- that it helped bring more attention to an art form that desperately needs to be back in front of a mass audience. Oh, and thanks to you for being a part of the revolution. Viva la Shorts!

Between the hoards of self-conscious message movies and piles of garbage that didn't screen for the press, I saw, about two dozen films in 2006 that showed any kind of cinematic artistry. The movies that made my top ten list are movies that don't hand over any easy answers and have thus largely gone ignored this year. Moreover, these were films that used the form in a visual way, rather than simply unfolding a story on film like a big book-on-tape. The cinema isn't dead; it's just hiding...

I should note that my two favorite movies this year, Terrence Malick's The New World and Claire Denis' The Intruder officially count as 2005 movies, even though they opened in most theaters in 2006. So, with a broken heart, I leave them off the list. I also want to include a caveat that the year's most anticipated movie, David Lynch's Inland Empire, has only opened in New York and Los Angeles. No press screenings or screener DVDs have been available in any other city, so I have not been able to see it.

1. Three Times (Hou Hsiao-hsien)
One of the world's greatest filmmakers has been working for over twenty years. Yet only two of his films have received U.S. distribution. Each starred the beautiful Shu Qi (known in this country for her role in The Transporter) and each lasted about a week in theaters. Three Times, a triptych about two lovers in the 1960s, the 1920s and the present day, isn't one of Hou's very best films, but the first segment alone -- set in the Vietnam era -- is arguably his most heartbreakingly lovely achievement. It towers over everything else released this year.

So, the Los Angeles film critics have chimed in with their early-season (yet year-end) movie picks for the year of 2006, and the results are, meh, not bad / not great (If it's me you're asking). There were a few surprise picks, most notably Sacha "Borat" Baron Cohen's mention for Best Actor, although the comedian must be content to share the award with co-recipient Forest Whitaker for his work in The Last King of Scotland. Most of the other picks are fairly standard (Eastwood, Frears, Greengrass, etc.) but certainly solid choices across the board.

Plus I'm thrilled they gave two pieces of praise to Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men, because it's my very favorite movie of 2006. Here's the big list:

Picture: Letters From Iwo Jima // Runner-Up: The Queen

Director: Paul Greengrass, United 93 // Runner-Up: Clint Eastwood, Flags of Our Fathers & Letters From Iwo Jima

Actor: Sacha Baron Cohen, Borat & Forest Whitaker, The Last King of Scotland (tie)

Actress: Helen Mirren, The Queen // Runner-Up: Penelope Cruz, Volver

Supporting Actor: Michael Sheen, The Queen // Runner-Up: Sergi Lopez, Pan's Labyrinth (ooh, good pick!)

Supporting Actress: Luminita Gheorghiu, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu // Runner-Up: Jennifer Hudson, Dreamgirls

Screenplay: Peter Morgan, The Queen // Runner-Up: Michael Arndt, Little Miss Sunshine

Cinematography: Emmanuel Lubezki, Children of Men // Runner-Up: Tom Stern, Flags of Our Fathers & Letters From Iwo Jima

Production Design: Eugenio Caballero, Pan's Labyrinth // Runner-Up: Jim Clay & Geoffrey Kirkland, Children of Men

For the rest of the winners -- music, foreign language, documentary, animation, etc. -- check out Variety's Award Central 2007 blog. I figure they're the ones who first published the list, so they deserve the traffic. (Expect a lot more critics' list as December trudges on!)

Every so often I like to look at the ratings on the Internet Movie Database, just to keep my finger on the pulse of popular opinion. You can use their power search feature to sort through all kinds of lists. So I recently did a search for all 2006 movies with more than 400 votes. (For perspective, the new documentary Wordplay has 420 votes, and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest has nearly 40,000.) From there, you can sort through the top 100 movies, ranked by ratings on a scale of 1 to 10. It's like an ongoing American Film Institute list of the year's best movies, which are really the year's most popular movies.

In any case, this list gives one a clearer idea of the popular climate than the actual box office scores.

The number one movie of the year so far is, rather surprisingly, a Bollywood film called Rang De Basanti. It opened here in San Francisco back in May and I missed it. All I can tell you about it is that it was three hours long. But I can tell you that Bollywood films have a following far more rabid than anything we know here in America, where Tom Cruise acts crazy for a couple of weeks and fans turn up their noses at him. In Bollywood, he'd be bronzed.