The Far Too Late Top Films List for 2006

My top 15--to be revised as I see more movies in the next couple weeks (the "Oscar films" are just coming out in Madison).

1. The Fountain (Darren Aronofsky)
2. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (Cristi Puiu)
3. Shortbus (John Cameron Mitchell)
4. Volver (Pedro Almodovar)
5. The Curse of the Golden Flower (Zhang Yimou)
6. Pan's Labyrinth (Guillermo del Toro)
7. Children of Men (Alfonso Cuaron)
8. The Departed (Martin Scorsese)
9. Mutual Appreciation (Andrew Bujalski)
10. Inside Man (Spike Lee)
11. Letters from Iwo Jima (Clint Eastwood)
12. A Prairie Home Companion (Robert Altman)
13. Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World (Albert Brooks)
14. A Scanner Darkly (Richard Linklater)
15. Borat (Larry Charles)

Here is my wife Anne's list.

1. Pan’s Labyrinth (wonderful bloody fantasy)
2. The Fountain (beautiful story about love and life and death)
3. The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes (very strange and surreal)
4. Volver (the importance of mothers)
5. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (it’s better to die at home)
6. Shortbus (the joy of sex)
7. An Inconvenient Truth (what is wrong with the world)
8. Letters from Iwo Jima / Flags of Our Fathers (we are all the same and should stop shooting at each other)
9. Sick Girl (the best feminist horror film ever made)
10. Curse of the Golden Flower (absolutely beautiful Chinese soap opera with ninjas)
11. A Scanner Darkly (drugs are bad, even for the narcs)
12. A Prairie Home Companion (death and the importance of moving on)
13. Children of Men (the importance of children and what is worth dying for)
14. Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World (Albert Brooks movie about how comedy is not always universal)
15. For Your Consideration (Christopher Guest movie about how silly the Oscars are)

Anne's Others List (or movies Anne saw for the first time this year but are older, in no particular order):

1. A Woman is a Woman (Godard almost-musical)
2. Cowards Bend the Knee (Guy Maddin movie where a man named Guy Maddin falls in love with the nurse performing an abortion on his girlfriend and it gets stranger from there)
3. Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (Pedro Almodovar’s film about a woman trying to decide what to do about her boyfriend who is leaving her)
4. Werckmeister Harmonies (Bela Tarr movie about the fear of the unknown)
5. The Eagle (Rudolph Valentino movie)
6. Bad Education (My first Pedro Almodovar movie, this is a film noirish movie about assumed identies)
7. Devil’s Backbone (a great horror movie about how you really should worry more about the living than the ghosts)