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Inside Man
Thank You For Smoking
Match Point
Syriana

Eagerly anticipating: Inland Empire, Prairie Home Companion, Manderlay

Most disappointing: V For Vendetta

sevenarts wrote:Eagerly anticipating: Inland Empire, Prairie Home Companion, Manderlay

Why wait for "Manderlay" when you can buy it?

1. Tideland
2. Scoop
3. Brick
4. Children of Men
5. Edmond
6. Bug
7. The Departed

Special mention goes to the Little Children trailer and whoever edited it - that's still (in 2019) the greatest trailer I've ever seen and I still watch it a few times a year. I'm also still disappointed that the actual movie was nothing like the trailer.

Top 10 Films of 2006

1. INLAND EMPIRE (David Lynch)
2. Three Times (Hou Hsiao Hsien)
3. L'Enfant (Jean-Pierre et Luc Dardenne)
4. Old Joy (Kelly Reichardt)
5. Marie Antoinette (Sofia Coppola)
6. Mutual Appreciation (Andrew Bujalski)
7. Battle in Heaven (Carlos Reygadas)
8. A Scanner Darkly (Richard Linklater)
9. Miami Vice (Michael Mann)
10. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (Cristi Puiu)


Honorable Mention: Art School Confidential (Terry Zwigoff), Borat, The Case of the Grinning Cat (Chris Marker), Children of Men (Alfonso Cuarón), Clean (Olivier Assayas), The Departed (Martin Scorsese), Fast Food Nation (Richard Linklater), Gabrielle (Patrice Chateau), Happy Feet (George Miller), Jackass 2, Little Children (Todd Field), Manderlay (Lars Von Trier), Monster House (Gil Kenan), Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (Tom Tykwer), A Prairie Home Companion (Robert Altman), The Proposition (John Hilcoat), The Science of Sleep (Michel Gondry), Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story (Michael Winterbottom), What Is It? (Crispin Hellion Glover), The Wild Blue Yonder (Werner Herzog)

1. Still Life (Jia Zhang-Ke)
2. Letters from Iwo Jima (Clint Eastwood)
3. Pan's Labyrinth (Guillermo Del Toro)
4. Inland Empire (David Lynch)
5. Rescue Dawn (Werner Herzog)
6. I Don't Want to Sleep Alone (Tsai Ming-Liang)
7. Private Fears, Public Places (Alain Resnais)
8. Children of Men (Alfonso Cuaron)
9. Strike (Volker Schlondorff)
10. The Painted Veil (John Curran)

So far:

1. Cache
2. The New World
3. Scoop
4. L'enfant
5. A Prairie Home Companion
6. A Scanner Darkley
7. Manderlay
8. Inside Man
9.
10.

Starting to see a pattern emerging as to what might constitute a Top 10 for me this year:

1. Miami Vice
2. L'Enfant
3. Old Joy
4. Something New
5. Sisters in Law
6. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu

I'm a huge fan of The Lives of Others and Day Night Day Night, both of which are festival movies - the former is being released by Sony Classics in February, and the latter *might* be getting a tiny distribution sometime in the coming year - maybe. If they were included on my list, it'd probably look something like this:

1. Miami Vice
2. Day Night Day Night
3. L'Enfant
4. Old Joy
5. The Lives of Others
6. Something New
7. Sisters in Law
8. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu

Also, is it safe to say that Army of Shadows does not count?

*awaiting a worthy film from 2006*

EDIT: 4 months later and I am still waiting...

Well, since I've now seen at least ten great new films this year, I might as well stick them in here. They're only in vague order and there's more than ten (maybe I'll finalise the list and trim the excess at the end of the year):

1. Who's Camus Anyway? (Mitsuo Yanagimachi) - a stunning return to form and filmmaking: superb ensemble drama punctuated by several coups de cinema.
2. Tertium non datur (Lucian Pintilie)
3. The Death of Mr Lazarescu (Cristi Puiu) - who let all the Romanians in here? Pintilie's is a wry, precise miniature; Puiu's is a sprawling, intimate epic; Porumboiu's deadpan 12.08 East of Bucharest should be here as well, by rights.
4. Svyato (Viktor Kossakovsky) - Kossakovsky seems to be in some kind of sublime minimalist deathmatch with compatriot Sergey Dvortsevoy. His latest mid-sized work, consisting in large part of a single twenty-something minute take, records the moment when the child of the title recognises her reflection in a mirror. Profound and magical.
5. Old Joy (Kelly Reichhardt) - Subtle, (slow) moving beauty with wonderful misdirectional use of its locations.
6. The Science of Sleep (Michel Gondry) - I liked Eternal Sunshine well enough, but this is a far more effective marrying of Gondry's idiosyncracies to a long-form narrative.
7. Lunacy (Jan Svankmajer) - . . . and this is the best combination of Svankmajer's animation and long-form live action work since Alice. Oh, those Meat Follies!
8. The Host (Bong Joon-ho) - The best monster movie I've ever seen.
9. Worldly Desires (Apichatpong Weerasethakul) - And I thought Tropical Malady was uncategorizable!
10. Three Times (Hou Hsiao-hsien)
11. Regular Lovers (Philippe Garrel)
12. Police Beat (Robinson Devor) - Highly original US indie with a severe fracture between apparent action and actual narrative.
13. A Scanner Darkly (Richard Linklater)

Two film are towering above anything else I've seen this year:

The Wayward Cloud (Tsai)
Three Times (Hou)

And somewhere behind those two:

Tideland (Gilliam)
Sud Express (Velasques/De La Pena)
13 (Babluani)
Me and You and Everyone We Know (July)

I haven't seen many new releases at all this year, and I'm sure snakes on a plane won't stay in the top 10...

1. V For Vendetta
2. The Inside Man
3. Crank
4. Imagine me & you
5. Dead Man's Chest
6. Snakes on a Plane
7.
8.
9.
10.

Looking forward to:

Little Miss Sunshine
A Scanner Darkly
Lower City
Be Kind, Rewind
Tideland
The Black Dahlia
The Science of Sleep
Volver
The Unknown Woman
Paris, je t'aime
The Fountain
This film is not yet rated
The Prestige
Renaissance
Sunshine
Casino Royale
Borat
Children of Men

1. Harsh Times
2. A Scanner Darkly
3. Cache
4. Children of Men
5. L'Enfant
5. Volver
6. The Road to Guantanamo
7. Little Miss Sunshine
8.
9. DOA: Dead or Alive
10. Crank

the general idea is that if it was released theatrically in 2006 in either limited, wide, or festival form, it counts.

Films I'm not counting that were late 2005 releases but that I saw in 2006:

Caché
Match Point
The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada
The New World

Here's my list of movies I've liked that have shown theatrically in 2006 (in alphabetical order):

A Scanner Darkly (dir. Richard Linklater)
Banlieu 13 (dir. Pierre Morel)
Inside Man (dir. Spike Lee)
L'Armeé des Ombres (dir. Jean Pierre Melville)
The Proposition (dir. John Hilcoat)
Tsotsi (dir. Gavin Hood)

the general idea is that if it was released theatrically in 2006 in either limited, wide, or festival form, it counts.

Well I guess that mostly depends on where you see the films. For instance, Cache was released theatrically in big cities last fall but it didn't get to Orlando till early this year. I plan to see Volver when I visit NYC this Thanksgiving however it won't come to Orlando till next year. A number of films I saw at the Florida Film Festival of this year already made it on several top-ten lists last year. Duck Season is one of the examples.

Updated Jan. 27

• 1. Little Children
  2. Thank You For Smoking
  3. Children of Men
  4. When the Levees Broke
  5. The Road to Guantanamo
  6. An Inconvenient Truth
  
  7. Fast Food Nation
  8. Shortbus
  9. Brick
  10. Pan’s Labyrinth

2006 releases according to The Numbers

Lemmy Caution wrote:10. Lucky Number Slevin

Missed the Cut (mediocre to poor)

Cache

I know it's a faux pas to bag on people's subjective opinions, and I'm really not trying to do that, but I'm genuinely curious as to why you felt Cache was mediocre, and Slevin was something of merit?

I know whenever you see a Director who has an original style for the first time you're more taken with their work, but for me Cache (my first Haneke) was probably the best film of last year. Slevin to me was just an above average Hollywood film with a slick style and an air of pretension undermined by the most inane subplot cut & pasted in for the purpose of pleasing the teenybopper audience by having a woman/love story in the film.

Including only films that have an imdb 2006 tag

no order

The Road to Guantanamo
Cars
Ye yan /The Banquet
The Wind That Shakes the Barley
Superman Returns
United 93

no order, huh, Sal?
I see China is having an effect on you.

1) The Departed - Scorsese
2) Still Life (San Xia Hao Ren) - Jia Zhangke
3) The Wind That Shakes the Barley - Ken Loach
4) Beautiful Shanghai - Peng Xiaolian (well, this film was made in 2004 and I watched it early this year. All I can say is wow)
5) L'enfant - Dardennes
6) Flanders - Dumont
7) Le Temps qui reste - Ozon
8) Volver - Almodovar
9) Riding alone for a thousand miles - Yimou Zhang
10) This place is reserved for Ming-Liang Tsai's thought provoking, mind-boggling, multi-dimensional narrative XXX rated porn that he made, or will make in the future

1. The Departed
2. Borat
3. Rocky Balboa
4. Apocalypto

The Best

1. Borat
2. Miami Vice
3. L'enfant
4. 49 Up
5. The New World
6. Pan's Labyrinth
7. The Host
8. The Departed
9. Inside Man
10. 12:08 East of Bucharest

The Worst

Little Miss Sunshine (So cute I could puke. No competition here either.)
The Last Kiss (Zach Braff, stop torturing the silver screen.)
World Trade Center (Has Stone lost it completely? A Bush Age Kitsch Memorial.)

So far --

1. Shortbus
2. Gabrielle
3. Quinceanera
4. Brothers of the Head
5. The Queen
6. Flags of Our Fathers
7. Little Miss Sunshine
8. The History Boys
9. Two Drifters
10. A Prairie Home Companion.

Plus: Broken Sky, The Departed, Time to Leave, An Inconvenient Truth.

The formally and emotionally most interesting and fascinating films of the year so far were (at least for me) Abel Ferrara's hellishly intense "Mary" and Terry Gilliam's delightfully bizarre "Tideland".

Totally agree on Mary, you reminded me I need to start my list.

1- Mary (Ferrara)
2- Wassup Rockers (Larry Clark)
3- Thumbsucker (Mills)
4- Miamy Vice (Mann)
5- Flanders (Dumont)
6- Dans Paris (Honoré)
7- Invisible Waves (Pen-Ek Ratanaruang)
8- Squid & the whale (Baumbach)
9- Homecoming (Joe Dante)
10- Once in a lifetime (Crowder/Dower)