Out Of The Past - 2006 At The Movies

So you just found a subscription to Netflix under your Christmas tree and you're wondering what to do with it. Don't worry: I'm on it. I can't tell you what you'll like, but I can share with you my 10 favorite films of 2006, including some undiscovered gems you may have overlooked. So excavate your TV from the debris of tinsel and discarded wrapping paper, pop some corn, order these titles, and settle in for a long winter's nap.

THE NEW WORLD Okay, technically this one was released in 2005, but it didn't get to Santa Cruz until March, and it remains my favorite movie that I saw this year. Terence Malick resurrects the dusty 4th-grade history book story of John Smith, Pocahontas, and the founding of Jamestown Colony, plunging us into the eerie strangeness of two cultures in collision (as disorienting as it must have been for the natives and colonists themselves) in a complex work of hypnoitic grandeur and mesmerizing experiential sensation. This is the movie Apocalypto wanted to be.

THE ILLUSIONIST Neil Burger's sly, beautifully rendered romantic period drama about a stage magician caught up in  tyrant's political agenda is a plangent and timeless mix of love, magic, redemption and crafty political dissent.

LOOK BOTH WAYS Impending doom lurks around every corner in this debut live-action feature from Australian animator Sarah Watt. Yet for all the portents of death, it's a smart, funny, zesty, irresistibly inventive film about embracing life—chaos and all.

UNITED 93 We already know the outcome, yet Paul Greengrass' tale unfolds as a gripping thriller of ordinary people facing the unimaginable with extraordinary courage. Greengrass refuses to simplify the complex political climate leading to 9/11, or to sensationalize this compelling human drama.

THE LAST KING OF SCOTLAND A powerhouse performance by Forest Whitaker dominates Kevin Macdonald's shrewd, propulsive drama about the rise and fall of Ugandan dictator Idi Amin from the perspective of a young Scottish doctor beguiled into his inner circle.

WATER Set in India in 1938, Deepa Mehta's lyrical, wrenching and provocative drama  of the religious and social subjugation of women in a houseful of abandoned widows could not be more timely, as circumstances lead a deeply religious woman to question the moral value of her fundamentalist beliefs.

BABEL In three parallel, gradually connected dramas of wrenching intensity, Mexican filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu orchestrates a brilliant morality play on cultural paranoia, human interaction, and the tragic, penicious influence of guns in every aspect of contemporary global culture.

JOYEUX NOEL French filmmaker Christian Carion's haunting take on the true story of enemy soldiers who dare to declare a spontaneous Christmas Eve cease-fire in the trenches in the middle of World War I, zeroes in on the profound disconnect between the hell of wafare and the empty propoganda of political leaders.

AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH Who knew Al Gore could be funny? But the best thing about Davis Guggenheim's lively and important non-fiction film is it's actually got the press and politicians (finally) talking about global warming.

THE U. S. vs JOHN LENNON David Leaf and John Scheinfeld's gripping documentary with the killer soundtrack is an incendiary, elegiac, inspirational, absurdist, often scathingly funny look at how the charismatic ex-Beatle's campaign for peace made him Public Enemy #1 on Richard Nixon's hit list.

Runners-up:

SCOOP Casting himself as the sidekick, Woody Allen graciously passes the torch of comic/romantic lead to the delightful Scarlett Johansson in the friskiest, funniest Allen comedy in years.

THE QUEEN Superb craftswoman Helen Mirren humanizes the disappointed mother and misunderstood stoic that is Queen Elizabeth II beneath the icon of a thousand years of royal traditon in Stephen Frears' audacious, witty, and engrosing drama.

THE PROPOSITION A bloody, brooding morality play about outlaws, aborigines, and colonial imperialism in the Australian outback.

MOUNTAIN PATROL A masterful epic of dark, terrible beauty, suspense, and extreme visual poetry as volunteer patrolmen protect wild antelope from poachers in the unforgiving wilds of Tibet.

THE HOLIDAY Nancy Myers' unexpectedly charming romantic comedy takes the time to fully develop her unlikely couples, while paying witty homage to classic screen heroines of the '40s like Barbara Stanwyck and Irne Dunne, who set the gold standard for female "gumption." Kate Winslet, Jack Black, Jude Law, and even Cameron Diaz have never been so bewitching.

LITTLE  MISS SUNSHINE Well-written and played to perfection, the sleeper comedy sensation of the year is a buoyant romp through the drama, pain, and disconnect of modern dysfunctional family life.

THE PAINTED VEIL Naomi Watts and Edward Norton grow their characters from stock figures in a tawdry melodrama into fully-realized people, touching in their courage, copassion, and camaraderie, in John Curran's absorbing adaptation of the W. Somerset Maugham novel about a British bacteriologist and his restless new bride in 1920s China.

SHUT UP AND SING The Dixie Chicks rockumentary with a rebel heart and mind of its own.