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The Best of 2006:
1. Brick - To crown this as the year's top film - even on such a personal, just-my-thoughts list - seems offensive. Yet there was something grand and intoxicating and new that resonated for me long after the final frame of Rian Johnson's no-budget cheapie. Maybe it was the hybridizing of the 'Maltese Falcon' and 'Mean Girls' genres that graduated from neat idea to sheer poetry once the makers attached emotional honesty to it all. Maybe it was the lyrical dialogue that tried so gleefully hard to emulate the best of Dashiell Hammett that it actually worked. Maybe it was the motley crew of heightened-world characters (you can read them off like flavors: Brendan, Brain, Nora, Tag, The Pin) that the actors infused so wisely with grounded humanness. Or maybe I'm just a crazy yegg who sounds like he's dosing on copped jake, so I'm gonna take a powder before you call the movie bulls on me.

2. The Departed - I already know you love it, so I'll move on.

3. The Prestige - The pledge: Virtuoso Christopher Nolan will dazzle you as he directs another time-scrambling thriller about masculine angst! The turn: The movie, about dueling turn-of-the-century magicians, will itself become one of the cleverest cinematic magic tricks since 'The Usual Suspects'! The prestige: Despite the criss-cross narrative clockwork, the film will retain its human heart and complicated soul, and so transcend into operatic tragedy.
4. Casino Royale – After Jason Bourne and Batman went through the Humanizing-the-Badass car wash, the best cinematic badass of them all takes the trip with stunning results. Along with 'The Bourne Supremacy' and 'Batman Begins,' Bond 21 proved that in some Petrie dishes, mass-appeal consumerism and heady artistry can actually live in peace.

5. Children of Men – Some images will never leave your head, and some ideas will only seep even deeper. Now if only that cameraman had some Windex…
6. Wordplay – A breezy peek into a fascinating, admirable, and ridiculously nerdy subculture: crossword freaks!

7. Borat – This movie sucks snot.

8. Conversations with Other Women – Helena Bonham Carter and Aaron Eckhart transform loaded dialogue ("I hate that phrase; it sounds like dying") and a timeworn gimmick (split screens!) into an endlessly watchable stage-play-on-film about rekindled hopes, failed dreams, and what happens when perplexingly fascinating self-involved yuppies get a hold of them.
9. An Inconvenient Truth – Because no other film or Powerpoint this year had me unplugging hair dryers, telling everyone to "get a hybrid," or weeping internally over digital polar bears.

10. Perfume: Story of a Murderer – Tom Tykwer of 'Run Lola Run' fame tries his hand at this story about a man – armed with a heightened sense of smell - who goes to disturbing lengths (see title) in order to achieve the perfect scent. In tackling what Stanley Kubrick had dubbed an "unfilmable novel" by Patrick Suskind, Tykwer ends up with a flawed, odd, and beautiful portrait of a man driven by one of the human race's strangest desires: to kill and be loved in return.

Worst of 2006:
Poseidon – 'The Da Vinci Code' at least was funny. 'Eragon' at least had giant dragons. 'The Wicker Man' at least had Nicholas Cage (spoiler alert!) burning at the stake. But what can you say about this absolutely merciless movie, so hateful of its audience (victims?) it will not lob even a few bad lines of dialogue, bad lapses of logic, or bad hammy performances our way? Instead, mediocre characters rush from one mediocre special effect to another, seemingly hoping to find a big fat paycheck at the end of the upside-down boat, itself a mediocre special effect. In movies, mediocrity – frustrating, dispassionate, vapid mediocrity – is a greater torture than simple badness could ever be.