Children of Men
Directed by Alfonso Cuaron
2006
It looked like science fiction in 2006 and looks like the news now: Cuaron's roaming takes put you inside a collapsing Britain, and the ambush in the car is astonishing.
★ 8.7
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2006
Showing 91 works across all media from 2006
Pan's Labyrinth
Directed by Guillermo del Toro
2006
Del Toro put a child's fairy tale and Franco's Spain in the same film and refused to make either one safer: the creature with eyes in its hands follows people home.
★ 8.5
The Lives of Others
Directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck
2006 · Germany
It made an entire country look at its own surveillance state: a Stasi officer listens in on a playwright's apartment, and the last line of the film lands like a blow.
★ 8.3
The Road
2006 · 287 pages
Pushing a shopping cart south through a burned gray America, a man and his boy hide from people who eat other people. The talk between them is the tenderest thing McCarthy ever wrote.
★ 8.3
The Departed
Directed by Martin Scorsese
2006
Scorsese remade a Hong Kong thriller and made it entirely his own: a cop inside the mob, a mobster inside the police, and a pitch that never once relaxes.
★ 8.2
The Wire · 2006
Back to Black
2006 · From Back to Black
Ronson cut it at Daptone with the Dap-Kings, sixties girl-group machinery rebuilt around a voice in ruins.
★ 7.9
Rehab
2006 · From Back to Black
Cut live to tape at Daptone in Brooklyn with the Dap-Kings, and it took Record and Song of the Year.
★ 7.8
International Player's Anthem (I Choose You)
2006 · From Underground Kingz
A Willie Hutch loop left alone at the top, and Andre 3000's verse reportedly returned with the drums stripped off.
★ 7.6
The Prestige
Directed by Christopher Nolan
2006
Nolan built a film about magicians the way a magician builds a trick, and tells you so in the first minute: two rivals destroy each other over one illusion.
★ 7.2
Casino Royale
Directed by Martin Campbell
2006
It stripped Bond back to a man who bleeds: the parkour chase in the opening twenty minutes told audiences immediately that the gadgets and the winking were gone.
★ 7.1
SexyBack
2006 · From FutureSex / LoveSounds
Timberlake sang it in a distorted low register borrowed from Prince, and it held number one for seven weeks.
★ 7.0
Letters from Iwo Jima
Directed by Clint Eastwood
2006
Eastwood made two films about the same battle, and the Japanese one is the better: shot almost entirely in Japanese, with a general nobody in America had heard of.
★ 6.9
Irreplaceable
2006
Ne-Yo pitched it as country, written with Shania Twain in mind; Beyoncé turned it into ten weeks at number one.
★ 6.8
When You Were Young
2006 · From Sam's Town
Twenty minutes for melody and title, by Flowers' account, and Flood and Moulder gave it Born to Run scale.
★ 6.7
United 93
Directed by Paul Greengrass
2006
Greengrass cast real air-traffic controllers and military officers as themselves, and shot in real time: the least exploitative film about September 11 because it refuses every note of uplift.
★ 6.6
You Know I'm No Good
2006 · From Back to Black
Ronson cut it at Daptone in Brooklyn with the Dap-Kings, Winehouse writing about infidelity and offering no apology.
★ 6.5
What You KnowT.I.
What You Know
2006
DJ Toomp turned a Roberta Flack interpolation into a synth fanfare, and T.I. won a Grammy for the performance.
★ 6.4
The Omnivore's Dilemma
2006 · 450 pages
Pollan traces four meals backward: a drive-through, Whole Foods, Joel Salatin's farm, and a pig he shoots himself. Carbon isotopes reveal Americans are built of corn. He made provenance a mass preoccupation.
★ 6.3