Note: These lists are unchanged from their final form the year they were compiled… in many cases, they don’t reflect my current opinions of the films listed.

• Jump to the best music of 2006

#1 – Children of Men
Four years later, Alfonso Cuaron has topped his masterful Y Tu Mama Tambien with a film that on its surface seems completely different. In fact, I see the films as oddly similar. Consider: Y Tu Mama is a road movie with characters heading toward Paradise on Earth, and along the way they lose their innocence; Children of Men is a road movie with characters heading toward Hell on Earth, and along the way they rediscover the power of innocence. In both films, Cuaron’s camera serves as a character, exploring the environment, following the characters but never judging them. Children of Men is a film of big ideas and big emotions. It’s about nothing less than the salvation of the human race — in both the childless future world of the film and our own. It is also a gripping suspense film with the most masterfully directed scenes I’ve encountered since City of God. If there was any doubt that Cuaron is among the world’s finest filmmakers, this film erases it.

#2 – Pan’s Labyrinth
Has a film year ever been so splendidly redeemed in its final month as 2006? Though I didn’t catch up with this December release until mid-February, it joins Children of Men as a 2006 film that will be remembered decades from now. These films are so exciting and fresh, but so elemental — they seem almost instantly to broaden the horizons of cinema. Pan’s Labyrinth is one of the most fantastic, beautiful films I’ve ever seen, and one of the most devastating. It’s brutal, sad, gorgeous, uplifting — often all at the same time. The stunning Ivana Baquero, in the best child performance I’ve seen since Whale Rider, is the anti-Alice in this Wonderland, where the fairy tale horrors she encounters pale in comparison to the real ones she escapes. It sounds horrible, and it is, but it’s so very wonderful.

#3 – Volver
If Cuaron has entered the stratosphere of world-class filmmakers, he’s now in the company of Pedro Almodovar. No auteur is more in love with movies — in love with color, with sound, with words, with music, with the human face and the human body. He creates worlds you never want to leave. With Volver, Almodovar delivers one of his trademark women’s pictures. This is a world almost devoid of men, and the few we see are either threatening or completely out of their league. It’s a film about mothers and daughters, about sisters, about friends. Penelope Cruz is a revelation here. I remain completely in love with her Raimunda, a character and performance that’s simultaneously larger than life in the style of classic movie stars of the Golden Era and entirely grounded in the small-town sensibility of the film.

#4 – The Departed
Martin Scorsese returns to the mean streets, triumphantly. The Aviator was a fine film, but it didn’t crackle like this one does. No matter how many other genres he tries (and he’s tried several with a lot of success), Scorsese is always at his best when depicting the underworld. This film, his best since Goodfellas, features an A-list cast at the top of their games and a violent, hilarious script full of chewable scenery. Leonardo DiCaprio is wonderful as the heart of the film, a cop so deep undercover he’s nearly lost track of his soul. And Matt Damon is just as good as his counterpart, the criminal impersonating a good guy. Some nice thematic stuff here about the nature of good and evil, but mostly it’s a just a magnificent movie-movie. And amen to that!

#5 – The Prestige
Christopher Nolan is fast establishing himself as one of Hollywood’s best directors. He has demonstrated expertise with budgets big (Batman Begins) and small (Memento) and plots both simple and extraordinarily complex (the same two movies). The Prestige falls in the middle on both of those scales. It is a beautifully filmed and acted tale of two rival magicians and the lengths they’ll go for their art. It’s incredibly smart but never pretentious, and the tricks up its sleeve are certainly clever but, more important, they’re metaphysically haunting. I keep finding myself thinking back on the different ways these men give themselves up in the pursuit of excellence. Powerful stuff.

#6 – The Lives of Others
It took me until August of 2007 to catch up with this late 2006 release, but it was well worth the wait. Set in a frightening 1980s East Germany where the Stasi maintains order through wiretaps, harsh interrogation and a network of informants, the film follows a particularly effective agent as he conducts surveillance on a writer and his actress girlfriend. His evolution from a no-nonsense enforcer to a sympathetic guardian angel is exquisitely drawn. The film works on many levels — a fascinating look at a scary moment in recent history, a cat-and-mouse thriller and mostly as a touching character piece. The film is definitely worthy of its Best Foreign Film Oscar (though I would have given the prize to Pan’s Labyrinth).

#7 – Babel
The opposite of a movie-movie, Babel is a capital-F Film about loneliness, despair, loss and the failure to make connections. It follows four stories spanning three continents in five languages — never let anybody tell you director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and writer Guillermo Arriaga aren’t ambitious. In fact, it’s their ambition some critics hold against them. Not me. Arriaga’s scripts are mythic and meaty, his characters horribly human. And Arriaga, like his countryman Cuaron, is a master behind the camera. Sequences of this film — most notably an extended nightclub scene in Japan — will stick with me for years. Beautifully imperfect, Babel reminds me of Magnolia more than anything. And while it has no rain of frogs, I was thrilled by the Biblical allusion in its haunting finale, set atop another sort of tower.

#8 – United 93
The unlikeliest great film on my list. Many felt it was “too soon” for a movie about 9/11, while others didn’t see much potential for a story like this to be more than a TV movie. Paul Greengrass proved everybody wrong by crafting a heroic film that never once panders to emotion and an exacting recreation of that horrible day using many of the people who lived through it. The greatest achievement of United 93 is that it so believably puts the viewer in the room with the air traffic controllers and the passengers of Flight 93… it allows us to experience the terror not as the horrifying incomprehensible images we all remember from that morning but as a series of problems some fellow Americans faced during a regular working day.

#9 – A Scanner Darkly
Linklater’s latest tour de force is a marvel of contradictions. It’s one of the funniest movies I saw all year, but one of the saddest. It’s an anti-drug message movie that must be amazing to watch while high. This will be a cult classic, beloved for years to come, primarily because of the outstanding interplay of Robert Downey Jr. and Woody Harrelson. But Keanu Reeves does some of his very best work here, burrowing into the wasted soul of his brain-damaged character. Linklater, a master of dialogue, proves equally adept at sci-fi plotting. This film doesn’t quite reach the heights of Linklater’s Holy Trinity — Dazed and Confused, Before Sunrise and Before Sunset — but it’s a worthy addition to his legacy.

#10 – Casino Royale
When I walked out of Casino Royale, I wanted to climb to the roof of the parking garage, jump onto a moving truck, shoot some bad guys, play a hand of poker and take Eva Green to bed. I felt the way I did when I was 12 years old walking out of an Indiana Jones movie. And I never feel that way after watching action movies as an adult. This film tapped into the retro soul of a character I’ve loved since childhood and brought him thrillingly to life in the 21st century. Daniel Craig is a marvel… when he utters that famous catchphrase just before the credits, I yelped with delight. Yes, I actually yelped. (And I did take Eva Green to bed, incidentally, though she’d likely deny it if asked).