A classical Martin Scorsese gangster movie by way of Hong Kong; a technically astonishing future-is-now thriller set in a world without children; a shattering you-are-there evocation that revived the trauma of 9/11—these films were among the finest the movie year 2006 had to offer. Below, Scene writers Noel Murray and Jim Ridley flip through snapshots from a year of dazzling star turns, sterling documentaries and abundant pleasures, with more available on the Scene’s “Pith in the Wind” blog. Our coverage of the year in film continues at nashvillescene.com, where Ridley talks to Children of Men director Alfonso Cuarón, Scott Foundas talks to Clint Eastwood, Rob Nelson interviews Iraq in Fragments director James Longley, Ella Taylor discusses Family Law with Argentine director Daniel Berman, and Robert Wilonsky meets with Rian Johnson, writer-director of the high-school noir Brick. The lights, please: Great Docs: From a purely journalistic perspective, the most thorough documentaries of the year were Jonestown and Cocaine Cowboys, two comprehensive reports—on the ill-fated liberation ministry of Jim Jones and the Miami drug trade of the ’80s, respectively—that deliver the same “Now I know what that was all about” satisfaction of reading a good magazine article. From an aesthetic perspective, the most striking documentary of the year was Iraq In Fragments, which uses subjective voice-over and intimate cinematography to explain the fragile state of a war-torn country. Splitting the difference between aesthetics and reporting was the year’s best documentary, The Devil & Daniel Johnston, which combines an exhaustive survey of the life and career of the schizophrenic singer-songwriter with a chilling meditation on how some people unintentionally exploit “outsider artists” out of a misguided impulse toward irony and/or extremity. The Devil & Daniel Johnston does what documentaries are supposed to do: inform and unsettle, with equal force. N.M. Great Performances: Who would have thought it possible for an actor to give a performance as James Bond—a three-dimensional, flesh-and-blood performance, not just filling the tux and modeling the product placement? Turns out that was just what the 44-year-old Bond saga needed, and Daniel Craig in the dynamite Casino Royale is the first actor in the series to suggest a core of soul-sickness behind Bond’s cold eyes. Craig’s delivery of the last line—signaling the mixed triumph of Bond’s cold-blooded ascendance to inhuman perfection—slaps defibrillator paddles on a moribund franchise. J.R. • For a pair of bracingly naturalistic turns in painful slices of post-graduate life, look no further than Will Oldham as a dimming free spirit in Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy, and Rachel Clift as an alt-weekly editor contemplating a fling with an indie rocker in Andrew Bujalski’s Mutual Appreciation. Both actors clearly know what it means to cling to “cool” even as your life’s slipping toward the tepid. N.M. • As the dueling magicians of Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige, Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman perform master-level thespian sleight-of-hand—a crucial element in an entertainment whose greatest trick is concealing its emotional gravity and devastation until the very last scene. (No major-studio movie this year better rewards multiple viewings: working in an increasingly ephemeral medium, Nolan means for his films to last.) Speaking of magic, here’s hoping that even people who hooted at M. Night Shyamalan’s Lady in the Water recognize the beauty of Paul Giamatti’s work—which has the conviction of a tear-streaked kid clapping his hands with all his might and shouting, “I do believe in fairies! I do! I do!” Sounds ridiculous? Now you know what Giamatti was up against. J.R. • Maybe he’s too good too often for people to take special notice of him anymore, but Denzel Washington in Inside Man is better than he’s been in years, puzzling through a locked room mystery without succumbing to presumption. And while everyone’s been lauding Meryl Streep’s icily commanding version of The Hell Boss in The Devil Wears Prada, let’s take a moment to recognize how much she lights up the screen in A Prairie Home Companion as one-half of a veteran sister act with Lily Tomlin, living out her life on stage as all Robert Altman’s best characters do. N.M. • In Half Nelson, Ryan Gosling imbues a crack-addicted junior high teacher with a special sense of entitlement, justified by what he feels are his uncanny powers of pedagoguery. In Sherrybaby, Maggie Gyllenhaal plays a drug addict trying to regain custody of her daughter—when really she’s just starved for the attention she used to get as her family’s golden child. N.M. The Year of the Veteran Director: Half the pleasure of A Prairie Home Companion is relaxing in the company of director Robert Altman—for the last time, as it happens—as he deploys his amiable, rambling visual style with a keen, long-since-internalized feel for what works and what doesn’t. Similarly, while no reasonable person would argue that Changing Times is André Téchiné’s best film, or The Bridesmaid Claude Chabrol’s, both have such a masterfully controlled mise-en-scéne that it almost doesn’t matter what’s going on inside the frame. And though it’s possible—just possible—that Martin Scorsese’s The Departed is a smidgen overrated, it’s hard to underestimate the work done by Scorsese himself, who free-associates with his visuals and pushes the operatic flourishes in William Monahan’s punchy script. For a commercial assignment, The Departed is often recklessly, thrillingly experimental. N.M. Sustained Action: Because movies are a real-time art—experienced as they happen—they’re at their best when they build momentum and tension, one shot, one scene, one sequence after another. Apocalypto muddles along for its first 45 minutes, alternately dreary and silly, and then the captured Mayans reach a sacrificial temple, and Mel Gibson strings together mesmerizing horrors, before launching into an extended chase that gets giddier as it goes. As 2006 action sequences go, it’s topped only by Superman’s jet-saving in Superman Returns, which finds time to contemplate the hero’s alien nature and almost creepily godlike abilities, before climaxing with a cathartic standing ovation in a baseball stadium. (You will believe a man can restore hope to millions.) Taking the bronze in the action sequence sweepstakes? A pair of Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest contraptions: one involving hordes of angry natives and a net of pirates, and another involving a water wheel, a dangling key and several rounds of swordplay. N.M. • The two sustained action set pieces at the heart of Alfonso Cuarón’s dystopian sci-fi thriller Children of Men—the best 2006 movie I saw, due soon in Nashville—are long-take wonders filmed in extravagantly unbroken minutes-long shots. One follows an ambush on a country road from quiet to sudden bloodshed, as seen from within a car under siege; the other pursues Clive Owen’s jaded knight-errant through the rubble of an urban war zone. They’re feats of staging, choreographed movement and cinematic daring—as Cuarón said, if somebody trips at any point, an entire toppling-dominoes sequence of tank battles, explosions and urban warfare has to be restarted from zero. As such, the scenes have already been slammed by some critics as empty showmanship, even though for much of these sequences Cuarón is simply following a character from point A to B without shutting off the camera. Regardless, the uninterrupted flow of time and movement is essential to the realism of Cuarón’s unfolding nightmare: a future only 20 years away in which women are infertile, children do not exist, and the absence of a future has obliterated any sense of duration. And yeah, I’ll admit it: these scenes are cool as hell. The same could be said for another long-take marvel of an action scene: Tony Jaa wiping out an army of gangsters as he ascends the levels of a four-story restaurant in the martial-arts skullbuster The Protector. Watching the unstoppable Jaa swat and swivel-kick foes out of his way and keep on going, without even a blip of a cut, gives the scene a momentum, physical solidity and exhilaration that computer generation hasn’t (yet) been able to fake. It’s the difference between some digitized fireball and the thrilling old-school stuntwork of The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift. J.R. History X: History is supposedly written by the winners, but a lot depends upon when they pick up the pen. The greatness of United 93 lies in the way writer-director Paul Greengrass largely avoids passing judgment on what’s happening, letting the events of 9/11 play out in such a way that viewers can either see the movie as a call to action or an indictment of how the war on terror has so quickly gone wrong. (Interpretations will likely still be up for grabs a couple of decades from now.) Along those same lines, The Queen might’ve jumped up a notch from “good” to “great” if director Stephen Frears and writer Peter Morgan had questioned more openly whether it was really worth ditching centuries of nation-building protocol to appease the country’s lugubrious obsession with one tabloid star. But the best 2006 explication of history’s shifting judgment is Pan’s Labyrinth, about a decades-old conflict—the Spanish Civil War—where the bad guys won, but didn’t get to write their story. In the movie’s closing line, writer-director Guillermo Del Toro holds up the memory of rebellious peasants as a flower waiting to bloom, spreading hope that people who do what’s right will one day be vindicated. N.M. Reasons to Be Cheerful, 2007 Edition: OK, so 2006 wasn’t the most exciting year for foreign film in recent memory. Next year brings some excellent items from the festival circuit to local theaters—starting with Paul Verhoeven’s rip-roaring Dutch-language Nazi melodrama Blackbook, a certain placeholder on 2007’s top 10. Monster-movie fans will devour Bong Joon-ho’s creature feature The Host (watch for it in Nashville this spring), and two standout Thai imports will probably come to town: Wisit Sasanatieng’s long-awaited Tears of the Black Tiger and Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s exquisite Syndromes and a Century. And there’s what may be the movie event of 2007: the arrival next month of the amazing 30-film “50 Years of Janus Films” touring festival—about which we’ll have more next week. Add new movies by Martin Scorsese (a Rolling Stones doc), Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez (Grind House) and David Fincher (Zodiac); the English-language debuts of Wong Kar-Wai (My Blueberry Nights) and Michael Haneke (a remake of his 1997 Funny Games—shudder); the return of Spider-Man and Capt. Jack Sparrow; Matthew Wilder’s Philip K. Dick project Your Name Here, with Bill Pullman and Taryn Manning; the Frank Miller/Zack Snyder epic 300, with the trailer that’s been burning up the Internet; and the honest-to-gosh Simpsons movie—and why venture out into the sunlight? J.R. Noel Murray’s Top 101. United 932. The Prestige3. A Prairie Home Companion4. Children of Men5. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu6. Pan’s Labyrinth7. The Departed8. Inside Man9. Mutual Appreciation10. The Devil & Daniel JohnstonThe Next 25: Brick, The Bridesmaid, Cocaine Cowboys, C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America, Dead Man’s Shoes, The Descent, Fateless, Friends With Money, Gabrielle, Half Nelson, Iraq in Fragments, Jesus Camp, Jonestown, L’Enfant, Letters From Iwo Jima, Marie Antoinette, Monster House, Old Joy, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, Police Beat, Pusher III: I’m the Angel of Death, The Queen, Shortbus, Thank You for Smoking, Venus, Who Gets to Call It Art?Jim Ridley’s Top 101. Army of Shadows2. Children of Men3. United 934. Mutual Appreciation5. Casino Royale6. The Departed7. The Prestige8. Pan’s Labyrinth9. Gabrielle10. Neil Young: Heart of GoldThe Next 25: Akeelah and the Bee, Apocalypto, The Black Dahlia, Borat, Crank, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, The Devil & Daniel Johnston, District B13, Down in the Valley, 51 Birch Street, Friends With Money, I Am a Sex Addict, Jonestown: The Life and Death of the People’s Temple, A Lion in the House, The Notorious Bettie Page, Old Joy, Overlord, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, A Prairie Home Companion, The Queen, Requiem, A Scanner Darkly, Slither, Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, Thank You for Smoking