2006: Pity and terror

Like Children of Men, Pan's Labyrinth re-imagines war as absurd and wanton. "Sides" are irrelevant: the winner is the one who has a temporary monopoly on violence. Pauline Kael's description of Vivian Leigh's performance in A Streetcar Named Desire -- it evokes "pity and terror" -- comes closest to capturing what Guillermo del Toro has accomplished in Pan's Labyrinth. A few dissenters have chastised the film for failing to give the Spanish Civil War its proper dramatic heft, but in the performances of Sergi Lopez and Maribel Verdu, the almost bovine servility of the women, and the numbed infliction of cruelty, I was reminded of George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, Picasso's Guernica and some of Hemingway's fiction from the period. The matter-of-fact manner in which Del Toro stages the sadism of Lopez's Capitan Vidal is matched by Ofelia's confrontations with assorted monsters (the one in the picture above may be the scariest goblin I've ever seen filmed).

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Here are my favorite films of 2006:

Pan's Labyrinth
Children of Men
Marie Antoinette
Clean
The Death of Mister Lazarescu
Inside Man
L'Enfant
Volver
Neil Young: Heart of Gold
Changing Times