'The Death of Mr Lazarescu'

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Film: best of 2006

From grizzly bears and French colonial guilt to dancing penguins and Irish Republicanism, Time Out‘s film reviewers pick their favourite movies of the past 12 months

The New World
Geoff Andrew
Surpassing metaphysical fables of contemporary life like ‘L’Enfant’, ‘Hidden’ and ‘The Death of Mr Lazarescu’ only through its remarkably Romantic and visually magnificent transcendentalism, Terrence Malick’s retelling of the Pocahontas tale embraces Wagner, Heidegger, Emerson and various 19th-century painters, and is as enthralling as ‘Days of Heaven’or ‘The Thin Red Line’. A meditation on political and personal paradises lost (and, for Pocahontas, refound), this woefully under-seen, underrated and, it must be said, misunderstood American epic mixes myth, history and poetic mystery to exhilarating effect. Christian Bale is dependably good, Colin Farrell well cast, Q’Orianka Kilcher a distinct bonus.

The Death of Mr Lazarescu
Wally Hammond
You can imagine the Hollywood pitch. Aspirant filmmaker: ‘It’s about a 62-year-old man who complains of a stomach ache. He’s ferried around a few hospitals. Then he dies.’ Studio honcho: ‘Is that it?’ Filmmaker: ‘Yup!’ Like all great movies, Romanian director Cristi Puiu’s devastating, socially scathing, profound and movingly funny drama is based around an idea so devastatingly simple, you’re sure somebody must have used it before. The film’s low-key performances are excellent, but Ion Fiscuteanu’s as the increasingly objectified one-time engineer could be the finest this year. Finally, what makes ‘The Death of Mr Lazarescu’ the film of the year is how it makes something transcendental out of the phenomenon of audience participation and privilege – we know the poor man’s looming fate, he doesn’t; and, unlike him, we get to live, and think, after the movie. A sublime, if demanding, example of the ‘active’ film/viewer experience that gives heart attacks to today’s studio moguls.

Home to roost: Haneke's 'Hiden' made for characteristically uneasy viewing

Hidden
Dave Calhoun
This year, I was struck dumb by ‘A Lion in the House’, an astonishing near four-hour documentary about five American kids with cancer that played at the ICA in June. But, for me, the year’s fictional masterpiece was Michael Haneke’s ‘Hidden’, a brilliant refinement of his earlier harnessings of bourgeois guilt and audience complicity in films such as ‘Funny Games’ and ‘The Time of the Wolf’. The director’s latest film transplants French national shame over the massacre of scores of Algerians in Paris during a demonstration in October 1961 to the person of Georges (Daniel Auteuil), a smug television arts personality, whose past comes to roost in the Paris of the present. Haneke uses elements of the thriller – who sent the tapes?! – to create a tense, stimulating dialogue with the viewer and to provoke a debate that continues long after the credits roll.

Holding on: Penélope Cruz reteamed with Pedro Almodóvar for the stunning 'Volver'

Volver
Chris Tilly
When, in early 2005, Penélope Cruz told Time Out that she was working on a ghost story with Pedro Almodóvar, it seemed like an unlikely choice of genre for director and muse. As it turned out, the supernatural element was little more than a maguffin in ‘Volver’, Almodóvar’s sumptuous celebration of his favourite subject – womanhood. The title literally means ‘to return’, and this was a return to form for both star and director after relative misfires, Cruz delivering a performance of warmth and wonder as the put-upon Raimunda, and Almodóvar embracing substance rather than style to produce a film of immense compassion and humanity.

Grizzly Man
Ben Walters
There’s never been a film quite like this, and it’s hard to imagine there being another. Constructed by Werner Herzog largely from the footage recorded in Alaska by renegade naturalist Timothy Treadwell, including copious video diaries, this is a remarkable nature doc (that bear-fight on the beach!); a quintessential addition to an auteur’s oeuvre (another monomaniac at loggerheads with both civilisation and nature); a fascinating case study in camera behaviour (Treadwell’s self-shaping is all too deliberate); and a lip-biting exercise in dramatic irony and inadvertent character comedy. A roaring success...