Soylent Red

This list was far more difficult to choose than last year's. Not least because I visited the cinema almost twice as many times in 2006 than in 2005. Since I've adopted the habit of reviewing (poorly) every movie I see in the cinema, it was easy to compile the list of eligible films:

1. The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe
2. Syriana
3. Ice Age 2: The Meltdown
4. Mission: Impossible II
5. Slither
6. Brick
7. X-Men: The Last Stand
8. Hard Candy
9. Thank You For Smoking
10. Pirates of the Caribbean 2: Dead Man's Chest
11. Superman Returns
12. Cars
13. Snakes on a Plane
14. A Scanner Darkly
15. Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kasakhstan
16. Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby
17. Clerks II
18. An Inconvenient Truth
19. The Last Kiss
20. The Prestige
21. Casino Royale
22. The Host
23. Stranger Than Fiction

Of those 23 movies, only one completely sucked. Seven failed to live up to my expectations. Five exceeded my expectations wildly. Two more lived up to unreasonably high hopes. Two of them I saw twice. One has already made my DVD collection. I bought the book of another. Eight deserve to be on a top movies of the year list, but only five can make it.

5. Brick

This one came out of nowhere, from a writer and director I'd never heard of and with a practically unknown cast. Another month I might not have even bothered to read the short review of this in Empire that initially prompted me to check it out. This is the first movie of the year to make it to my DVD collection.

4. An Inconvenient Truth

I described this as the most important movie of the year, and I stand by that. I actually considered excluding this from the list on the grounds that it simply can't be compared to the other films whose purpose is to entertain, not to educate or rally support for a cause. But in the end, it was shown in a cinema, so it counts.

3. Clerks II

This probably had the hardest job to do out of any movie this year. It had to live up to the standards of Kevin Smith's Jersey Trilogy. It did. That alone guaranteed its place here. A different year and it might have been #1.

2. The Prestige

I'm still not certain that this shouldn't be in the top spot. I didn't write much of anything about it the first time around, and I won't do so now, because I honestly don't trust my own ability to express how great a film this is.

1. Casino Royale

Quite simply the best Bond film ever. Better than Goldfinger. This is not only a great movie, but it is a promise of more great movies to come. After Die Another Day the franchise needed rescuing. In 2006, it got it.

Now, anyone want to bet on Spider-Man 3 making the list this year?

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