Hurray for Indiewood!

1. "Pan's Labyrinth"
Undoubtedly some critical backlash will have kicked in against this movie by the time you read this. Nothing this universally beloved by so many people in the film business can avoid that fate. Well, nuts to that. Guillermo del Toro, the oddball Mexican auteur beloved by fanboys for "Hellboy" and "Blade II," has finally made his masterpiece, and not a moment too soon.

Interlocking the fantasies bred by a teenage girl's fascination with fairy tales and the grim real-life story of her fascist stepfather (the terrifying Sergi López), pursuing the last Republican holdouts in the Spanish mountains, might seem incoherent, or overly schematic. I think it works so beautifully because the two stories become each other: the political story becomes a fairy tale, in which the Spanish people will outlast and throw down Franco's regime, and the fantastic monsters turn out to be real.

Ken Eisen of Shadow Distribution (who has no connection to this film) describes it as the one semi-commercial picture of 2006 to possess the vibrancy, terror and thrilling confidence of the challenging art films he grew up loving, like Bertolucci's "The Conformist." I can't say it any better; this picture alone redeemed the phoniness, hassle and sunstroke of Cannes. But if "Pan's Labyrinth" is a movie for movie buffs, it's also a generous, bighearted picture that should appeal to a wide audience of regular folks. Take grandma, if she's OK with murderous fascists and eyeless child-eating monsters.

2. "Agnes and His Brothers"
I've been lauding this thrilling, disturbing and maddeningly inconsistent German movie to the skies, to no discernible effect, since it was (very briefly) first released. Marc Mauceri at First Run now says he never thought it would work, and, boy howdy, he was right. Let's see: One brother in Oskar Roehler's film is a transsexual (hence the bewildering title), another is a dorky, porn-addicted librarian, and the third is a workaholic, quasi-corrupt politician. The tone veers from madcap sex farce to torch song to murderous family satire, and the debts to Almodóvar, Fassbinder and, especially, "American Beauty" are so clear they feel like rip-offs. Sounds golden, right? (Total reported U.S. gross: $2,731. No lie!) "Agnes" is a prickly, ambitious high-wire act that doesn't always work, but is always trying to piss you off and mess with your head. If you're exactly the right person for that sort of thing, go get it. (Roehler directed a previous film called "Suck My Dick." I can't wait to see it!)

3. "Half Nelson"
Hey, if there's a poster child this year for the continued vibrancy of indie film, this is it. The hype is deserved: Ryan Gosling's agonized performance as a well-intentioned white teacher in a Brooklyn, N.Y., junior high -- OK, so he smokes a little crack in the bathroom after hours! -- is some of the noblest acting you'll see in any movie, big or small. At virtually every step, director Ryan Fleck and co-writer Anna Boden evade cliché for complexity: in the terrific performances of Shareeka Epps (as the serious-minded seventh grader who befriends the teacher) and Anthony Mackie (as the upstanding family man and drug dealer), in photographing their beaten-down urban setting, and in the exquisite delivery of that memorable knock-knock joke. And while the mode of gritty realism at first seems familiar, this is also a movie with Brechtian interruptions and lectures on the Marxist dialectic. I can't wait to see it again.

4. "Volver"
The plot may be torn from Spanish soap opera, but the emotions are real and the all-female cast (winner of a collective award at Cannes) is dazzling. As director Pedro Almodóvar has chivalrously announced, star Penélope Cruz is possessed of "the finest cleavage in world cinema," which she displays early and often in this role as a Madrid working-class woman confronting sexual abuse, a murder she must cover up, impromptu restaurant management and the visitations of her dead mother. Carmen Maura is wonderful as the not-so-spectral mom, but you'll also fall in love with Lola Dueñas, playing Cruz's oddball sister, and reedy, resilient Yohana Cobo as her daughter. Marvelously photographed in Almodóvar's home region, the central Castilian plain of La Mancha, land of wind, widows, madness and Don Quixote.

5. "The Proposition"
This terrific "outback western" from Australian director John Hillcoat and screenwriter Nick Cave (yes, the alt-rock legend) resurrected the dying genre much more effectively, to my taste, than Tommy Lee Jones' likable but miscellaneous "Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada." Impressively bloody and fatalistic, as you'd expect from Cave, but also a sophisticated film with an intelligent gloss on Aussie history and a finely honed moral sense. The outstanding cast is headed by Ray Winstone as the English-born lawman and Guy Pearce as the outlaw who must betray one brother to save another, with fine work also from Emily Watson and Danny Huston. Shot in glorious wide-screen format by Benoît Delhomme. Did only $2 million in U.S. box office despite high expectations; just too depressing for the masses, I guess.

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