Ill-Informed Gadfly

1. UNITED 93. With journalistic rigor and quiet moviemaking brio, Paul Greengrass’s blistering docudrama recreates the only hijacked flight on 9/11 that failed to hit its target. Greengrass also explores the control rooms populated by smart, hard-working but unprepared professionals who had to respond on the fly to an attack on America, with no guidance from the so-called commander-in-chief. Ultimately, as this urgent and unforgettable movie shows, it was up to the passengers on the plane to lead the nation’s defense against jihad, and “United 93″ is brave enough to ask whether, at the moment the plane went down, we became holy warriors ourselves.

2. PAN’S LABYRINTH. Stylistically, nothing could be further from “United 93,” but Guillermo del Toro’s masterpiece explores the same subject: the horrific consequences of an ideology that people are willing to kill for. If that’s not a reason to love and respect the artistry of movies, I can’t think of a better one. Del Toro’s beautiful, seductive fairy tale, set in 1940s Spain, creates parallel universes with equal gusto: the battle between Franco’s Fascist army and the Republican resistance and a girl’s adventures within an elaborate fantasy world. The real and the supernatural intersect with brutal force.

3. FAST FOOD NATION. I was shocked by the shallow critical reaction to Richard Linklater’s trenchant American epic, which was frequently dismissed as an overcrowded anti-meat screed. Its exciting structural gambits, like Greg Kinnear disappearing from the movie halfway through, were misunderstood, as was the heartbreaking climax, a graphic documentary-style visit to the “kill floor” of a slaughterhouse. It wasn’t about the cow! It was about the trauma of having no choice but to work there. “Fast Food Nation” is a sardonic, multivalent look at the choices we make and the way those choices are dictated by our socioeconomic status.

4. THE QUEEN. Helen Mirren’s going to win the Oscar for beautifully shaded and deeply human portrayal of Queen Elizabeth II; I know it, you know it, and most important, she deserves it. But please, Academy, show a little love for her director, Stephen Frears, who makes movies with rare intelligence, economy and precision. That he could wring compelling drama from the question of whether a stuffy monarch would publicly acknowledge a death in the family is a testament to his consummate skill.

5. THE DEPARTED. Vivid, textured and explosively funny. If Martin Scorsese does win the Oscar, it will inevitably be interpreted as a reward for career achievement rather than for this movie, which does a disservice to his juggling of a half-dozen great performances and his sly bravery in turning this grim and bloody cops-and-gangsters saga into the darkest of comedies.

6. HEADING SOUTH. If you want to see film writing and acting at its finest, check out the astonishing soliloquies by Karen Young, Charlotte Rampling and Louise Portal as wealthy, middle-aged white women who travel to Haiti in the 1970s, primarily for sex with younger men. Director Laurent Cantet’s incisive and improbably romantic study of sexual politics in the third world is so much more than an exercise in envelope-pushing discomfort. It’s tense, revelatory, expansive storytelling.

7. CHILDREN OF MEN. Alfonso Cuaron’s brilliantly visualized near-future dystopia begins as an astringent, clinical exercise, more concerned with image and atmosphere than with emotion or storytelling. But what images! In the second hour, Cuaron savvily raises the dramatic stakes, and “Children of Men” becomes an enraged, passionate plea for tolerance, anchored by Clive Owen as the ideal hero for this grim future: a cynical one who has numbed himself to the possibility of feeling.

8. BORAT: CULTURAL LEARNINGS OF AMERICA FOR MAKE BENEFIT GLORIOUS NATION OF KAZAKHSTAN. As with “Fast Food Nation,” I’m tired of having to defend this movie. I am willing to concede that it’s not the most sophisticated political satire ever made. But if you don’t think “Borat” is funny, please, hold a mirror under your nose to make sure you’re still breathing. In a thrilling high-wire act, Sacha Baron Cohen creates an indelible comic character while working almost exclusively alongside non-actors. While “Borat” may be crude and exploitative — brilliantly so, I would argue — Baron Cohen has clearly thought long and hard about the implications of intolerance.

9. THE DESCENT. I caution that I’m not an expert on horror, but this is the best scary movie I’ve ever seen, because director Neil Marshall imbues it with so many elemental fears — the dark; falling; being trapped; being crushed; abandonment; suffocation and so on — and then he introduces the monsters. Pure visceral exhilaration.

10. A PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION. I can’t say it better than A.O. Scott of The New York Times: this gentle, touching elegy to a community of entertainers became “almost unbearably moving” after the death of its director, the great Robert Altman. He told anybody who would listen that the movie was about death, but it was hard to figure his own end was so near, because at 81, he retained the spitfire energy that characterized his brazen, innovative, galvanizing body of work.

HONORABLE MENTIONS: I noted earlier this year that, in my view, 2006 was a strong year, and this list bears it out because I couldn’t find room for three movies I absolutely loved: HALF NELSON, THE SCIENCE OF SLEEP and THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS.

I also had great respect and affection for CHARLOTTE’S WEB, CLEAN, THE DEATH OF MR. LAZARESCU, DUCK SEASON, AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH, INLAND EMPIRE, JESUS CAMP, MIAMI VICE, SHERRYBABY, STRANGER THAN FICTION, VENUS, VOLVER and, yes, MY SUPER EX-GIRLFRIEND.

Finally, many critics put Jean-Pierre Melville’s brilliant epic of the French Resistance, ARMY OF SHADOWS, on their lists. It was undisputably one of the ten best movies I saw last year, but even though it had not been released previously in the United States, it’s hard for me to consider it a 2006 film because it debuted in French theaters in 1969.