Well, I’ve finally rounded out my 2006 movie viewing. Since it is the first day of the second half of 2007, I can now officially review 2006. Ah, home theater.
I list my ratings at IMDB, which are out of ten points. I’m marked a few as provisional as I almost never give 9’s or 10’s on an initial viewing. I need time to grok a great movie. Anything marked with an asterix may be up-rated in the future.
Here are the critics’ top choices, along with my commentary. Metacritic’s best-rated movies includes obscure films and rel-releases, so I’m going with their list of movies receiving the most #1 rankings and awards, which is closer to the apparently defunct criticstop10.net.
Looking at IMDB and restricting the list to movies with more than 25k votes, we see the top ten with viewers were The Departed, Pan’s Labyrinth, The Prestige, Children of Men, Little Miss Sunshine, Casino Royale, Blood Diamond, Apocalypto, Stranger than Fiction, United 93. I enjoyed little Little Miss Sunshine, have not seen Blood Diamond, Apocalypto or Stranger than Fiction. I’m not terribly interested in latest ultra-violence from the modern Sam Peckinpah, but I will see the other two.
Expanding the list to films with 10k or more votes brings in The Lives of Others, An Inconvenient Truth, Little Children and The last King of Scotland. I have not seen any of these, but will see three of them shortly.
The surprises on the viewers’ list are The Prestige, a movie that got strangely little love from the critics, possibly because it overlapped The Illiusionist, and Casino Royale, which the critics liked as well. But you can’t put a Bond film on your top ten list and still get ballots from the AFI. I enjoyed both films.
As for the other films from the critics list, Borat was ranked 13th and Babel 15th. Cue critic scrailing about the uneducated provincial public.
All in all, 2006 was better than 2005. This wasn’t terribly hard since 2005 was one of the worst years in modern movie history. Of the top movies of 2005, I have one on DVD and even that one (King Kong) I wasn’t too sure about. With 2006’s movies, I’ll get at least two and probably four on DVD.