The Best Movies of 2006 that I Saw (in no particular order):
Munich - Spielberg's "quiet masterpiece." Indeed. Its greatest quality is moral ambiguity, a quality I believe to be inherent in secular points of view. I applaud Spielberg's honesty in emphasizing it.
Children of Men - See below.
Crash - Complex, sensitive, heartbreaking.
Infamous - Far and away the better of 2006's two movies about Truman Capote. It delves considerably deeper into the psychological issues at play between Capote, In Cold Blood, and the killers.
Babel - If it had had a worse, or a less happy, ending (up to which it seemed to be building), I felt it would have been more essentially Christian.
The Departed - Incredibly bleak; incredible nonetheless.
Caché - Technically released in 2005, but not until toward the end, and in any case I didn't see it until 2006. This movie gets under your skin.
Casino Royale - Rehabilitating Bond after years of the franchise's mere plodding toward increasingly facile nonsense (with bigger explosions). This managed to be moderately facile, with few big explosions and one incredibly tedious poker game.
Also Good (though I wouldn't say "best") Were:
Little Miss Sunshine
The Last King of Scotland
The Queen
The Illusionist
Jesus Camp
Movies from 2006 which I have not seen, but intend to:
Brick
Match Point
Half Nelson
The Prestige
Letters from Iwo Jima
Apocalypto
The Good German
Inland Empire
The Good Shepherd
The Science of Sleep
Old Joy
The Painted Veil
Blood Diamond
Pan's Labyrinth
Movies Pointedly NOT on Any List of Mine:
Snakes on a Plane
Clerks, part 3
V for Vendetta
And let's not forget... The da Vinci Code
All in all, I think 2006 was a little lackluster filmwise.
Munich - Spielberg's "quiet masterpiece." Indeed. Its greatest quality is moral ambiguity, a quality I believe to be inherent in secular points of view. I applaud Spielberg's honesty in emphasizing it.
Children of Men - See below.
Crash - Complex, sensitive, heartbreaking.
Infamous - Far and away the better of 2006's two movies about Truman Capote. It delves considerably deeper into the psychological issues at play between Capote, In Cold Blood, and the killers.
Babel - If it had had a worse, or a less happy, ending (up to which it seemed to be building), I felt it would have been more essentially Christian.
The Departed - Incredibly bleak; incredible nonetheless.
Caché - Technically released in 2005, but not until toward the end, and in any case I didn't see it until 2006. This movie gets under your skin.
Casino Royale - Rehabilitating Bond after years of the franchise's mere plodding toward increasingly facile nonsense (with bigger explosions). This managed to be moderately facile, with few big explosions and one incredibly tedious poker game.
Also Good (though I wouldn't say "best") Were:
Little Miss Sunshine
The Last King of Scotland
The Queen
The Illusionist
Jesus Camp
Movies from 2006 which I have not seen, but intend to:
Brick
Match Point
Half Nelson
The Prestige
Letters from Iwo Jima
Apocalypto
The Good German
Inland Empire
The Good Shepherd
The Science of Sleep
Old Joy
The Painted Veil
Blood Diamond
Pan's Labyrinth
Movies Pointedly NOT on Any List of Mine:
Snakes on a Plane
Clerks, part 3
V for Vendetta
And let's not forget... The da Vinci Code
All in all, I think 2006 was a little lackluster filmwise.
2 comments:
Did Munich come out in 2006? How time flies. But, nonetheless, a powerful movie and probably the best on your list. I would put the Departed up near it, but its throw-away ending cheapened it substantially, I aver.
I believe Munich was released nationwide in January 2006 - though it was limitedly released in December 2005.
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