With liberty and justice for all...white people

When it came time for the always-disparate Stylus staff to select the year's best albums, there seemed to be a higher-than-normal degree of consensus surrounding a few records in particular. They weren't necessarily #1s or even top 5s on everyone's lists, but a surprisingly robust number of staffers (especially given our oft-divergent tastes) found places for the likes of Ghostface, TV on the Radio, Hot Chip and the Knife (I voted for all four).

Still, in arguably our hivemindin'-est year of all (particularly when it came to Ghostface), we've got nothing on film critics. I'm fully aware of course that their options are significantly more limited than ours in terms of material, but in scanning the Metacritic compilation of critic top-10 lists in order to jog my own memory of films I'd seen in '06, I was startled at the numbing uniformity. Some might argue the pickin's were slim, but this lockstep granting of laurels came at the expense of several great, and greatly overlooked films.

Now, I'll be honest: I don't even remotely resemble a film critic, and the list of noteworthy films I haven't seen (mostly due to a similar lack of access as Alfred recently alluded) would arguably outshine the ones I have. So it's quite possible "Pan's Labyrinth" and "Old Joy" and "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu" are all better than the crap I liked; I'm just surprised such a paucity of critics ventured outside a relatively small cluster of widely-heralded flicks.

01 Half Nelson - maybe the only time this year I walked out of a theatre feeling truly affected.

02 The Proposition - showed up on only a handful of the dozens of Metacritic lists; I think Ray Winstone may have given the performance of the year.

03 Inside Man - impeccable mainstream stuff.

04 The Queen - Mirren was fabulous regardless of what Alf says; I actually got a bit misty when the little girls hands her the flowers, and that almost never happens to me with movies.

05 CSA: Confederate States of America - wickedly funny and criminally underrated; on par with the best of the Chappelle Show (p.s. - it's also the source of the title of this post, in case it wasn't obvious).

06 Borat - brutally, probably unfairly, mocked the region of the country I've lovingly called home since birth, and still I howled.

07 The Matador - technically released in December of '05, but I don't think it was reviewed until early '06 by most critics and I only caught it this summer on DVD.

08 Thank You For Smoking - Katie Holmes' duplicitous reporter is transparently silly, but the father-son stuff redeems it.

09 Scoop - of course Scarlett Johansson impersonating Woody Allen while acting alongside Woody Allen is ridiculous, but it never tries to be more than a lightweight trifle and surprisingly satisfies because of it, much like another of Scarlett's underrated pics, In Good Company; lord knows she's still miles better here than in The Black Dahlia.

10 Little Miss Sunshine - undoubtedly the year's most critically divisive film - some saw charmingly skewered brilliance, others witnessed put-upon eccentricity; I'll lean towards the former mostly because I thought the ending was irreverently liberating rather than exploitative and cheap.

Honorable Mention:
V for Vendetta
Over the Hedge
Dave Chappelle's Block Party
An Inconvenient Truth
Down in the Valley

Better than Expected:
The Night Listener
Scoop
A Scanner Darkly

Disappointing:
The Departed
For Your Consideration
A Prairie Home Companion

Just Plain Sucked:
Miami Vice
Hard Candy
The Black Dahlia
Lady in the Water