Geoff Andrew's films of the year

One of Time Out's finest selects his favourite films of 2006.

Dec 21 2006

Impossible as always, really, to select just five UK releases from the 2006 crop, but – bitterly regretting those omissions made for the sake of a convenient number (think 'Flags of Our Fathers', 'Three Burials', 'Three Times', 'Keane', 'The Queen', etc) – I played the masochistic game, so these were among the very best. But be warned: the final choice changes daily!

'The New World'
'All things shining,' to quote from Terrence Malick's earlier 'The Thin Red Line'; yes, transcendental (and transcendent) cinema lives on, in the safe if misunderstood and underappreciated hands of Hollywood's most mystical and magical filmmaker. The Pocahontas story gives rise to a rapturous meditation on notions of paradises of various kinds lost and found. Wagnerian, American in the best sense, Romantic and Philosophical (mind those caps!), and blessed with a fabulous performance from the hitherto virtually unknown Q'Orianka Kilcher.

'Hidden'
Is Michael Haneke finally getting the acclaim and audience he deserves? Happily, his tapping into several contemporary concerns (surveillance, celebrity, guilt and fear about the Other – particularly, in the west, the Islamic Other) at last hit the right nerves; a film of endless irony, complexity and resonance.

'The Death of Mr Lazarescu'
Romania's Cristi Puiu is someone to watch. His previous work was terrific, but this rather unlikely critical hit – a black comedy-drama about an unappealing sexagenarian slowly taking his leave of this life while being ferried from hospital to unwelcoming hospital in today's Bucharest – is the business: one of the very rare films properly to confront human mortality in all its unremarkable, everyday inevitability.

'L'Enfant'
How on earth do Belgium's Dardenne brothers manage to keep mining the same thematic vein and coming up with pure gold? There's a secret to their seemingly documentary-like miracles: look at them closely, and you'll see they are actually superbly detailed three-act dramas that observe the unities of time and place with surprising rigour. And they have compassion and wisdom galore, of course. Just a pity the cinemagoing public has barely noticed.

'Volver'
True, that first hour – while immensely enjoyable – does provoke a sense of déjà vu. Then PC gets to sing her song, and everything falls magnificently in place to show that Pedro was stringing us along all the time to lull us into thinking it was just a silly entertainment and not really a profound film about love, pain and the whole damn thing. Perhaps the most purely pleasurable gem of the year.

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