KEY POINTS:
After much deliberation and dredging of the memory banks, TimeOut reviewers agree these were the 20 best films of 2006.
1 LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE
Directors: Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris
Sometimes you need to step back a bit to see the big picture. We greeted the release of this improbably offbeat feelgood comedy with four stars when it was released but, on reflection, five stars is starting to look almost stingy. The script, which first-time screenwriter Michael Arndt reportedly put through 100 drafts, took a handful of standard movie preoccupations - family dysfunction, the road trip, the hunt for the American dream and the illusion of beauty - and fashioned one of the most distinctive, charming and flat-out funny comedies in a decade. The characters were deliciously individual yet perfectly plausible, the performances - particularly that of the hard-working and self-effacing Greg Kinnear as the father - were flawless, the comic payoff audacious beyond belief, and the direction, by a couple of rock-video veterans, was both sensitive and unshowy. Genuinely funny films are rare but this one left us all smiling for days. "Everybody pretend to be normal"? Not a chance. - PC
(Still screening at selected cinemas)
2 CAPOTE
Director: Bennett Miller
A mesmerising Oscar-winning title-role performance by Philip Seymour Hoffman transcended mimicry and anchored a film about the fabled, flamboyant and doomed writer that was also about the price paid for stardom. One of the best films ever about the artistic process. - PC.
(Now on video/DVD)
3 UNITED 93
Director: Paul Greengrass
The British master of the docudrama (remember Bloody Sunday?) meticulously recreated what happened and might have happened on board the only 9/11 flight that didn't reach its target. An unsensational, knuckle-whitening and ringingly authentic drama utterly free of hokey sentiment beside which Oliver Stone's World Trade Center looked pallid. - PC.
(Now on video/DVD)
4 HIDDEN
(Director: Michael Haneke)
The best film yet by the Austrian who is the most consistently innovative and challenging film-maker in Europe. He interrogated the way our comfort required us to keep the oppression of others concealed, even from ourselves. It was also an inquiry into the notion of film-watching that was uncomfortable and brilliant. - PC.
(Now on video/DVD)
5 SIONE'S WEDDING
Director: Chris Graham
The Naked Samoans' first big-screen outing had its creaky moments and plot flaws but was so infectiously energetic and drenched in joy that it was impossible to imagine being done better. Coming on the back of No. 2 (see below) it also represented a very pleasing assertion of New Zealand-based Pasifika film culture. - PC.
(Now on video/DVD)
6 BORAT: CULTURAL LEARNINGS OF AMERICA FOR MAKE BENEFIT GLORIOUS NATION OF KAZAKHSTAN
Director: Larry Charles
It used to be that horror movies were the only ones to be watched through the fingers. Then along came Sacha Baron Cohen's alter ego Borat and his brutally hilarious trans-American mockumentary. Now we know how to spell "Kazakstan" without looking it up. Glorious nation, we salute you. Give that Jew an Oscar. Or an interview with Mel Gibson. - RB
(Still screening)
7 OUT OF THE BLUE
Director: Robert Sarkies
In a year of otherwise feelgood New Zealand cinema, this depiction of the Aramoana massacre packed an emotional wallop in its powerful but restrained depiction of New Zealand's worst mass killing which did everything it could to show what it might have felt like to be caught up in the events of that awful day - even for killer David Gray. - RB.
(Still screening at selected cinemas)
8 MRS PALFREY AT THE CLAREMONT
Director: Dan Ireland
Dame Joan Plowright has been the least-seen of the British grandes dames, usually cast as a dotty aunt, but she gobbled up her best role in years in a tender, touching and often very funny odd-couple comedy. This was the kind of movie in which too-good-to-be-true things happened and it proved that they really don't make 'em like they used to. - PC.
9 SUPERMAN RETURNS
Director: Bryan Singer
The best blockbuster of the year might not have done the business expected of it with a story that was hardly unpredictable (Clark Kent/Superman, er, returns to find Lois Lane hitched while Lex Luthor is still in real estate mega-development!) but what an unusually beautiful and lyrical action flick it was. One which gave the myth of the man of steel a polish that positively beamed. - RB
(Now on video/DVD)
10 THE THREE BURIALS OF MELQUIADES ESTRADA
Director: Tommy Lee Jones
The debut-as-director by one of the best character actors in the business was a cracking contemporary revenge western of mythic power and grandeur. It juggled elemental concepts effortlessly and Jones himself was, as always, a pleasure to watch. - PC.
(Now on video/DVD)
11 THE QUEEN
Director: Stephen Frears
Yes, Helen Mirren's incarnation of EIIR is eerily precise but Peter Morgan's script and Frears' brilliant direction also delivered the famous as human beings: frail, uncertain, often calculating, sometimes spiteful, but all just doing the best they can. A ferociously intelligent and watchable film. - PC.
(Screening at cinemas now)
12 JUNEBUG
Director: Phil Morrison
This small but perfectly formed offbeat comic drama observed its odd but authentic characters with not a trace of condescension as a Chicago art dealer went to meet her South Carolina inlaws - a family as repressively ordered as it was emotionally chaotic. Amy Adams' Oscar-nominated sister was a gem. - PC.
(Still screening at selected cinemas)
13 NO. 2
Director Toa Fraser
Playwright turned film-maker Fraser coaxed a charming and affecting ensemble piece out of his own one-woman stage production about a family gathering called by Fijian-Kiwi matriarch Nanna Maria in the backyard of her house in Mt Roskill. The 'burb has never looked or sounded lovelier. - RB
(Now on video/DVD)
14 YES
Director: Sally Potter
Breathtakingly audacious and intensely stylised - it was written entirely in iambic pentameter - Potter's best work in years distilled the global standoff between Muslim and non-Muslim into a highly charged love story. It also featured Sam Neill's finest performance since Evil Angels. - PC.
(Now on video/DVD)
15 THE PROPOSITION
Director: John Hillcoat
The most assured Australian film in years was a grisly, often shockingly violent, and supremely stylish anti-Western. Written by moody muso Nick Cave and brimming with great acting talent, it was so vivid you could taste the Outback sand in your throat. - PC
(Now on video/DVD)
16 BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN
Director: Ang Lee
The screen adaptation of Annie Proulx's poignant 40-page love story was dubbed a "gay western" but it was never so much about two men who have sex as about two human beings who love each other. Rodrigo Prieto's jaw-dropping cinematography and Heath Ledger's performance - both choked and eloquent - were sublime. - PC
(Now on video/DVD)
17 TRISTRAM SHANDY
Director: Michael Winterbottom
The prolific and versatile British director made his most purely enjoyable film yet, conspicuously avoiding adapting the novel of the title and making a vigorous, fast and entertaining comedy which was a sly commentary on celebrity and the process of film-making. - PC
(Still screening at selected cinemas)
18 NORTH COUNTRY
Director: Niki Caro
The first American outing for the director of Whale Rider was an accomplished and stirring melodrama that proved its maker's solid talent. It drew its heroes and villains in broad strokes and resorted to some final-reel manipulations but it was a very classy piece of work. - PC
(Now on video/DVD)
19 CHILDREN OF MEN
Director: Alfonso Cuaron
It might have been directed by Cuaron - one of many Mexican film-makers suggesting there's a hotbed of talent south of the border - but this was a very British, end-is-nigh, sci-fi thriller. Clive Owen's lead performance and Cuaron's inspired sense of doom combined to make this adaptation of P.D. James' allegorical futuristic novel truly thought-provoking. - RB
(Still screening at selected cinemas)
20 HISTORY OF VIOLENCE
Director David Cronenberg
This was a taut and disconcerting crime thriller from the Canadian director reining in a few of his usual excesses. Viggo Mortensen was in fine form as an ordinary guy in smalltown USA whose family life is up-ended when some big-city crooks come a-calling, claiming he's not who he says he is. - RB
(Now on video/DVD)
- PC: Peter Calder, RB: Russell Baillie
