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Top Ten: My Take Though it was a year of cinematographic splendor both subtle and extreme, the films that most impressed me in 2006 were for the most part quieter and more subdued than those I’ve listed as my favorites in previous years. They did not so much shout at me as seep into my consciousness, the thematic and dialogic imperfections that troubled me on first viewing making way for visions that exceeded my expectations. Even those films that at first struck me as superficial have come to resonate for me from unexpected depths. 1. Fateless – Adapted
(by cinematographer-turned-director Lajos Koltai) in haunting
and indelible images from a semi-autobiographical novel by
a man who as a child survived the ostensible fate of his people
in the camps (Nobel Laureate Imre Kertész), Fateless
lets us in on the story of a 14-year-old boy 2. Marie Antoinette – It is mood that Sofia Coppola captures best: the way a choreographed sashay turns into a scurry, or the shedding of corset wear makes liberation sensual, or a final bow over a balcony becomes a gracious act of majesty. More brazen, but no less discriminating than her previous works, her Marie Antoinette deceives us with its surfaces—a lightness of touch and spectacular scenery—but depths of perception percolate rhythmically beneath its surface, the heartbeat of a historical moment that was in great measure all about the show. A moment when a crossing from one throne to another meant the promised princess’s being stripped bare at the border all the way down to her pug and being recast in appropriate attire, and where everything from her daily toilette to the delivery of her children was on display. A moment where, ironically perhaps, the placing of the crown on the young girl’s head effectively deprived her of the right to her body, so that the two were severed figuratively long before the guillotine at Place de la Concorde was even built. 3. The
Queen -- A treatment of the Palace’s
much criticized response to the 4. Pan’s Labyrinth – Born of historical angers unresolved, Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth plays like a grown up version of the child’s fairytale, replete with frightening allusions to murder, rape and dominance, the risks of self-defense and the cost of lost innocence. The inventiveness of the design astounds, the vision so complete--the evil of his Fascist monsters so intricately graphic, the fantasy escape of his young heroine so richly drawn--that it engulfs the viewer in the imagined reality of its fiction, making it hard to step back, to step outside the truth of the telling. As the terror grows more tangible, as the film’s demons encroach on its fantasies, even the viewer safe in the theater trembles at the options. 5. The Devil Wears Prada --
Improving multifold on the whininess and self-satisfaction
of its source material, the barely disguised portrait of Anna
Wintour 7. L’Enfant -- Austerely
filmed in unprettied close-ups and bleakly modern 8. Three Times –Three short films, three different eras, three ways that love can go, Three Times becomes a sumptuous meditation on the idea of love and time, more poetic than practical, more visceral than insightful. The same two lovers, by varying names, engage in familiar pas de deux, however foreign the contexts, and the viewer, immersed in the colors and composition of the piece, the sounds of its music and the ironies and missed chances of its lovers’ fates, can do little but give in to it. 9. 49 Up -- A bird’s
eye view of growing up and growing older in intricate detail,
with a distance we could never achieve in examination of our
own or the lives of our families. Begun with the first installment
42 years ago as a political inquiry—a living document
critique of the class system in England—this 10. Little Miss Sunshine -- A slight film about family that does not take itself too seriously, Little Miss Sunshine manages to confront with easy humor the mini-tragedies, heartfelt failures and moments of self-loathing that threaten to consume us all at some point or another. Simultaneously domestic satire and apologia for family values, it manages to reassure and critique in a single bound, eschewing with increasing grace the ample opportunities it has for mean-spiritedness and cheap shots. Steeped in the tradition of comedic exaggeration, it remains grounded in the common experience: sly, subversive and utterly affirming. ©2007 Shari L. Rosenblum |
who
lived through Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Zeitz. Sentimentality
and the casual truisms of comfortable histories be damned,
Fateless refuses the rhetorical hellishness and meaningless
metaphors made palliative by repetition (“I can’t
imagine hell,” the boy says matter of factly when all
is ostensibly done, “but the camps were real”).
Fateless does not try to explain the inexplicable, highlight
the atrocities or elucidate the victories; it is first and
foremost an existential voyage, reclaiming the personal from
the political, the individual experience from the moral teachings.
Told in linear vignettes at once painterly and balletic, related
without forced emphases or stilted iconographic moments, it
unfolds in the cinematically altered starkness of surreality,
stunningly lit, composed, and scored. Its silences pierce
through the axiomatic inexpressibility of horror, its earthy
tones and streaks of graded grays rising from the screen like
a voiceless cry.
death
of Princess Diana in the wake of newfound emotionality among
the British people and a popular populist Prime Minister,
The Queen is written with intelligence and directed with palpable
respect for its players and its audiences. More impressive
still, Helen Mirren, fearlessly embodying a subject of which
she is subject, makes the reigning Queen of England both impressively
regal and remarkably human with every flick of her hand and
every flash of her eyes. 
and
the reinvention of a girl transformed by working in the high
pressure, high demand, what-kind-of-dream-is-this? job in
New York becomes a fascinating tale of the power of appearances.
Too readily dismissed for what might overliterally pass as
skin-deepness, the film tackles from all ends--some obviously,
some artfully, and some just by the nature of its casting--the
issues of presentation and power, impression and influence,
and the delusion of those who think themselves free of the
game. Anne Hathaway’s rebirth in the Vogue-alike closet
gives her greater credibility even to the audience ready to
scoff, and Meryl Streep, in a brilliant performance, is utterly
divine, transformed into a magnificent powerhouse of sleekness
just by the costume design, with a single make-upless scene
that lends a certain profundity to the whole. 
landscapes,
L’Enfant bristles on the screen with the moral ambivalence
and unexpected faith with which the Dardennes have made their
name. At once social commentary and religious allegory, the
film is more considered than complex. A studied and insistent
realism forces its way through the lens, the handheld camera
pulling in on the slightest of gestures, as a young man of
no particular worth or likeability betrays his child, other
children, his girlfriend and himself, forgiveness a belated
quest, and redemption a questionable proposition. 
documentary
series has far exceeded its original reach, having come now
to serve not only as record of the ways in which we all change
with age—physically and emotionally, and the ways in
which the world has changed specifically around us, but also
of the ways in which the documenting itself imposes itself
on the record, often directing its subjects actively or otherwise
in their choices. For the viewer who has followed along, the
participants seem bizarrely familiar with each new segment,
even if they’ve been forgotten in the intervening years,
and there is a certain comfort in seeing both how closely
they have grown into their predictions for themselves, and
by how much they’ve surpassed them.