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 12 films 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 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 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
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
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
Borat
Directed by Larry Charles
2006
Baron Cohen stayed in character in front of real Americans who had no idea, and they told him what they actually thought: the funniest film of its decade and the most uncomfortable.
★ 6.3
The Queen
Directed by Stephen Frears
2006
Helen Mirren plays a reigning monarch during the worst week of her reign and makes her sympathetic without softening her: the week after Diana died, reconstructed almost hour by hour.
★ 5.5
Inside Man
Directed by Spike Lee
2006
Spike Lee's biggest commercial hit is also his slyest: a rehearsed crew takes hostages inside a Wall Street bank, Denzel Washington negotiates, and Jodie Foster turns up representing somebody nobody can place.
★ 4.7
The Last King of Scotland
Directed by Kevin Macdonald
2006
Forest Whitaker learned Swahili and studied Idi Amin's speeches for months: the film watches him through a young Scottish doctor who mistakes charisma for something safe to be near.
★ 4.4