10. “This Film is Not Yet Rated” & 9. “An Inconvenient Truth”
These movies represent a slew of riveting and socially vital documentaries released this year. I picked these two for the list because Al Gore’s enlightening environmental expose “Truth” deals in nothing less than the very future existence of our planet and Kirby Dick’s witty “Film” — about the secretive, arbitrary MPAA rating system — reveals the threat of censorship facing the artists behind the top 10 lists of tomorrow.
8. “Dreamgirls”
Bill Condon’s adaptation of the Broadway musical achieves the most memorable movie moment of 2006, with Jennifer Hudson belting the heck out of the signature number “I am telling you I’m not going.” Fabulous production design, toe-tapping energy and a few standout side performances — including Eddie Murphy’s — make this rehash of the Motown-era rank a mention despite some weakness in the original show’s book and score.
7. “Letters From Iwo Jima”
Clint Eastwood’s serviceable “Flags of Our Fathers” was really about the destructive promotional circus back home that surrounded the American flag-raisers of Iwo Jima. But his poignant companion piece is a true, traditional war picture made fresh since it depicts the battle from the point of view of the Japanese. Watching the doomed officers and grunts face their fate with pride and bravery from the other side of enemy lines reminds us of the high human cost and ultimate futility of war.
6. “The Good Shepherd”
Another fact-based record of important modern history, this saga of the early CIA and its elite WASP founders boasts an amazing group of supporting actors including William Hurt, Michael Gambon, John Turturro and the movie’s director, Robert De Niro. They anchor an unsentimental account of the merciless international spy game, headlined by Matt Damon and Angelina Jolie, that defies every glamorizing James Bond stereotype.
5. “Little Children”
This alluring and disturbing character study of upscale suburbia’s underbelly features adultery and pedophilia in a reflective and at times also a darkly comic tone. As directed and co-written by Todd Field (“In the Bedroom”), the mesmerizing piece with Kate Winslet and Patrick Wilson shows that it is often the parents who are indeed the juveniles — even if they are just doing the best that they can.
4. “The Queen”
Speaking of limeys in hot water, here’s a grand-elegant Helen Mirren as insensitive contemporary monarch Queen Elizabeth in this insider’s imagining of what was going on behind palace walls after Princess Diana’s untimely death. It’s a tour de force for Mirren, who manages to show both the absurdity and the dignity behind entrenched power. And it’s a voyeur’s delight for anglophiles and royal-watchers everywhere.
3. “Notes on a Scandal”
Juicy and naughty meets arty and highbrow in this melding of superior acting talent and guilty pleasure. It’s a matured lesbian retake on “Single White Female”-style obsession as well as a Mary Kay LeTourneau-inspired cautionary tale of teacher-student lust with Judi Dench crushing on Cate Blanchett while Blanchett’s having an affair with a 15-year-old boy in jolly old London town.
2. “United 93”
A close runner-up to No. 1, this unflinching real-time docudrama chronicling the terrorist hijacking of the plane that missed its intended target on Sept. 11 plays like the most taut and spine-tingling fictional thriller. Directed straight up by Paul Greengrass with a no-name cast and without manipulative melodrama, it also duly honors the self-sacrificing American heroes on that aircraft who prevented even further horror that day.
1. “The Departed”
The film of year was made by perhaps the best director of our lifetime. Creating another classic in gangster pictures, Martin Scorsese assembles a cast that spans generations of great actors from Jack Nicholson and Alec Baldwin to Leonardo DiCaprio and Matt Damon. It’s an epic, intense, intricate tangle of strategy and deceit in which the line between the good guys and the bad guys, between the cops and the criminals, is a fine one on the mean streets of Boston. In a violent world gone mad, as we face today on a larger scale, it’s good to have some vintage Scorsese to give meaning — and some gallows humor — to it all.
