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Not exactly a best of the year, this, since honestly I haven’t seen enough films to judge - what I offer instead is a list of ten fantastic films that, if you missed them in the cinema, I would really recommend picking up on DVD. So, it’s an arbitrary and a fairly personal list - but on the other hand I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend each of these films to anyone, with a reasonable amount of confidence that they’d walk away happier, or at least more existentially fulfilled, or some damn thing.

Except, that is, for the third one down - you’ll know it when you get to it.

Munich
The fact that Spielberg turned in possibly the best film of his frequently-brilliant career seemed to get a little lost amidst all the controversy, and the director’s respectable achievement of equally offending both sides of the Israel / Palestine conflict. But if Munich’s historical veracity was open to question, as a work of drama it was utterly devastating, perhaps cinema’s greatest ever representation of the way in which cycles of hate can disintegrate the souls of those who propagate them.

Inside Man

The ever-inconsistent Spike Lee delivered his best joint in ages and the year’s best thriller, and nobody much seemed to notice. The year’s first reminder than Clive Owen really can act when he sets his mind to it, Inside Man was an homage to and sly updating of classic seventies heist movies like Dog Day Afternoon that actually managed to equal its inspirations, with a taut and twisting plot and an ending that you’d need a degree in bank-robbery to see coming.

Dead or Alive

Perhaps a dubious choice this one, but it deserves a place on at least one person’s top-ten list, partly for being so enjoyable and partly for being so damn shameless. Beautiful women doing kung fu in their underwear might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but DOA achieved everything you could hope for in an adaptation of the world’s bounciest computer fighting game, and would surely be walking away with the best-soft-porn-movie-with-ninjas Oscar if only there was such a thing.

The Cave of the Yellow Dog

An incredibly simple film, but a frequently beautiful one, Byambasuren Davaa’s semi-documentary about one girl and her dog makes you care far more about the plight of Mongolian nomads than you probably ever expected to. Stunningly shot and never less than totally absorbing despite the fact that almost nothing really happens, Yellow Dog is the antithesis of ninety-nine percent of cinema and all the better for it.

Little Miss Sunshine

Okay, so its characters are mostly just nervous ticks given form, but their interaction - and the superb ensemble cast bringing them to life - turns what could easily have been a run-of-the-mill indy into something altogether better and in places truly wonderful. It’s the kind of film that you have to accept unconditionally to really enjoy, but if you can then you’ll probably fall in love with it.

Brick

Combining high-school teen drama with seminal film noir was probably the year’s stupidest idea, so how it produced such a brilliant film is anyone’s guess. Most of the blame should go to first-time writer / director Rian Johnson, whose love of classics like The Big Sleep and inspired reworking of the dialogue that made them so damn cool keeps his insane premise on just the right side of genius. But it’s hard to imagine this being quite so good without Joseph Gordon-Levitt in the lead, proving that his astounding performance in Mysterious Skin was no fluke and creating a world-weary outsider detective that even Bogie would have been proud of.

Children of Men

Clive Owen stars in his second great movie of 2006, making him if not the best of actor of the year then at least the best at picking scripts. Without a doubt the best science-fiction film in ages, a dystopian nightmare of the kind that nobody ever seems to make anymore, a blackly-comic warning sign of things to come that never once strays into tabloid scaremongering and a damn good action movie to boot, Alfonso Cuarón’s daring masterpiece gets everything right and does it seemingly with ease.

The Departed

The Departed (Two-Disc Special Edition)

Not so much a return to form for Scorsese, since arguably he never really lost it, but certainly a return to the kind of intensely savage filmmaking that made his name, The Departed turned a great Hong-Kong police procedural into a great American gangster epic with such fluency that most critics were prepared to overlook just how closely it followed its source in places. That aside The Departed is a stunning picture, held together not only by Scorsese but by another one of those astounding performances that seem to be becoming a habit from DiCaprio and the kind of outrageous grand-standing that we haven’t seen from Nicholson since he walked away with Batman all those years ago.

Mission Impossible 3

In a year of underwhelming blockbusters, it took Alias’s J. J. Abrams to hit all the required bases - star power, huge explosions, grand action set pieces and a decent plot to hang it all on. Sadly it wasn’t quite enough to wipe the memory of John Woo’s dismally misguided first sequel from audience’s minds, and it didn’t capture the spirit of the TV series as nicely as De Palma’s original. What was left was an absolutely cracking thriller that suffered from being weighed down by its digit-heavy title - in its own right MI3 is a smart, exciting spy caper that didn’t get anything like the reception it deserved.

Pan’s Labyrinth

Although fantasy is having something of a revival in the film industry, there’s still a dearth of good fantasy, and certainly no relaxation of the Hollywood belief that the genre is primarily for kids - which makes Guillermo del Toro’s latest contribution to the genre that little bit more astonishing. His fairytale for adults certainly deserves the “for adults” part of the equation, not because it’s gratuitous, (though it is startlingly violent in places), but because it plays shamelessly around in those grubby, scary parts of the human psyche that we spend most of our time avoiding.

It’s going to be available from March in a collector’s edition with Cronos and The Devil’s Backbone, which I can’t recommend enough.

Guillermo Del Toro Collection (Pan\’s Labyrinth/Cronos/The Devil\’s Backbone)

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