Beyond the Multiplex

Ten (OK, 11) films to get seriously excited about in the new year -- a clip-and-save guide!

By Andrew O'Hehir

Read more: Andrew O'Hehir, Movies, Movie Reviews, Arts & Entertainment, Reviews, Beyond the Multiplex

Zinédine Zidane in "Zidane: A 21st-Century Portrait"

Jan. 4, 2007 | Film buffs will be gnawing on the leftovers of 2006 for months yet, with awards season upon us and a veritable Mariel boatlift of interesting new movies dumped in the New York and Los Angeles markets over the last two weeks of the year. So far, the box office winners look like Zhang Yimou's spectacular historical epic "Curse of the Golden Flower" and "The Painted Veil," the lush, slightly swampy Somerset Maugham adaptation starring Naomi Watts and Edward Norton. It's too early to be sure about "Perfume" or "Pan's Labyrinth."

I spend so much time pursuing the rarest and weirdest forms of insect life in the indie jungle that I've got plenty of 2006 Hollywood homework to catch up on: Clint Eastwood's Iwo Jima doubleheader, Alfonso Cuarón's "Children of Men," Steven Soderbergh's "The Good German" and Robert De Niro's "The Good Shepherd." (Are they going to make a joint sequel and call it "The Good German Shepherd"? I'm only asking.) Then there's something about a television reporter from Kazakhstan that I gather is causing quite a stir. They just can't make too many Kazakh movies for me!

The annual Village Voice film critics' poll, a must-read for every obsessive moviegoer over the last eight years, is no more, thanks to the enlightened leadership at New Times, the Phoenix-based middlebrow mega-alt publisher that recently absorbed New York's venerable weekly. (I was once fired by New Times from the editorship of a San Francisco weekly, so my perspective on this issue is as biased and unneutral as it gets.) But wait! Former Voice film editor Dennis Lim has taken the poll online with him, to IndieWIRE, and maybe it should have been there all along.

Even to the glazed-over eyeballs of those of us who fritter away our lives watching too many movies, Lim's poll is always full of surprises, and this year they start at the top. The clear winner of '06 was Romanian director Cristi Puiu's "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu," which made the top-10 lists of 54 out of the 107 critics polled. (I voted in the poll, but "Lazarescu" did not make my list, much as I admired it.) Puiu's mordant film about an aging alcoholic's all-night journey into medical purgatory, which seemed to channel both Dante and Kafka, was a festival fave-rave but played only a few big-city venues in the United States and grossed a paltry $80,000. Lim says that makes it the least financially successful winner in the poll's history. The top 10 choices are an invigorating, discordant list, from foreign-language auteur films ("L'Enfant" at No. 2, Hou Hsiao-hsien's "Three Times" at No. 6) to big-budget Hollywood sizzle ("The Departed" at No. 3, "United 93" at No. 8) and classic Amerindie earnestness ("Old Joy" at No. 7, "Half Nelson" at No. 10).

Despite that variety, Lim tentatively concludes that 2006 was an "annus horribilis" for independent cinema, based, I guess, on the fact that several of the highly ranked films were actually a year or two old and just now reaching our benighted land. (In the case of Jean-Pierre Melville's French Resistance drama "Army of Shadows," which came in at No. 5, the gap was 37 years.) I don't really agree, but it takes a leap of faith to decide you just don't care about your fellow countrymen's tastes and opinions, at least not on a mass scale. If you live in a major metropolitan area, and/or you can wield your Netflix queue as a finely tuned instrument, it's a great time to be obsessed with strange, off-the-radar motion pictures. Let the neighbors be damned as they watch "Underworld" for the 400th time, home-theater subwoofers rattling the floorboards. People like us, fueled with enough fair-trade coffee, can make it all the way through "Inland Empire" (No. 4 in the critics' poll, which is at least a little surprising). And, hey, the mall theaters aren't all bad -- the seating is awesome, and that Kazakh documentary proves that the American people are eager for educational fare, doesn't it?

Next page: A little guesswork, a little bullshit...