An Inconvenient Truth, United 93 and Little Miss Sunshine fared well with Straight critics.

Given the number of films being released these days, it seems almost quaint to limit our top choices to 10. Still, it’s always just as hard to trim those suckers below 15 as it is to find 20 that are really worthwhile. So perhaps we’ll hold the line against this particular form of inflation for at least another year.

Foreign-language films suffered in 2006 with critics and at the box office. Borat’s fake version of Russo-Kazakh was perhaps the most pervasive tongue to intrude upon our ears, and I’ll venture to say that mock doc hovered on the edge for the crix (as they say in Variety-speak) who hesitated to invite that cheerfully transgressive upstart into the relatively polite company of the top 10. (Only Al Gore’s enviro-pleading documentary, indie darling Little Miss Sunshine, and the doclike United 93 roused more than two votes from our reviewers.) Confusing things even more was the release of Oscar-worthies much later in 2006, or early in this one, making at least one entry below something that readers can only experience for themselves in the next few weeks.

Letters from Iwo Jima Brilliantly and heartbreakingly told from the Japanese side of a climactic Second World War battle, this is Clint Eastwood’s companion to his Flags of Our Fathers. Eastwood caps a late-career inning by directing his best film yet—in another language, no less.

The Painted Veil Naomi Watts and Edward Norton shine brightly in an adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham’s acutely wrought portrait of a marriage in crisis and evolving—an unaccountably rare subject in cinema.

Notes on a Scandal/The Queen We could have included The History Boys here too, since the English have a killer way of combining the thrill of language with real-life events and social taboos. But these two have career-crowning performances from Judi Dench and Helen Mirren to recommend them, as well as (in Scandal?) Cate Blanchett in the best of her 27 appearances this year.

Sophie Scholl What’s the price of speaking out against atrocity? That’s the subject of this superb German re-creation of the final days of a rare heroine of anti-Nazi resistance.

Fateless This superb Hungarian film on the Holocaust had the curiously uplifting effect of focusing on the ability of youth—or one sensitive boy, anyway—to accommodate human tragedy.

An Inconvenient Truth Al Gore’s definitive global-warming polemic was the most important documentary of a fine batch released this year. Inconvenient, to be sure, but the truth is that disaster is racing down on us like a lion on a wounded yak that barely knows it is in danger.

Little Miss Sunshine Although a tad aimless toward the end, this otherwise delightful ride reminded multiplex dwellers that indie flicks could be fun, and proved that Steve Carell can play it straight.

Half Nelson Ryan Fleck’s no-budget effort, shot in Brooklyn and featuring Canadian Ryan Gosling as a crack-addicted teacher, showed what true independence looks like. (See Old Joy and Mutual Appreciation for more of same.)

A Prairie Home Companion If Robert Altman had died before it was released, this elegiac effort would have been difficult to sit through. As it was, the sister act of Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin, Kevin Kline’s slapstick, and all those great songs helped make this a most companionable way to say goodbye.

Volver Pedro Almodóvar’s loosest effort stylistically is also one of his most memorably acted, with Penélope Cruz giving one of her best performances as an angry Madrid housewife coping with the actual ghosts of her family history.

The Last King Of Scotland Kevin Macdonald’s hallucinatory evocations of Idi Amin’s debauched Kampala party days are equal parts David Lynch and Federico Fellini. Forest Whitaker is at the centre of the surreal maelstrom, channelling the dictator with demented fervour: in a blink, he can switch from being a cuddly man-child to a terrifying sociopath.

The Departed Helped by a Mephistophelean Jack Nicholson and a crack Hong Kong action script as inspiration (2002’s Infernal Affairs), Martin Scorsese’s gritty, blood-spattered cop thriller was the tautest two-and-a-half hours spent in the multiplex this year.

Manufactured Landscapes An Inconvenient Truth got all the press, but Landscapes proved pictures can speak louder than words. Photographer Edward Burtynsky and filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal spelled out our impending enviro-doom in apocalyptic, wide-screen panoramas.

The Proposition In most westerns, there are the guys in white hats and the guys in black hats, but in the rivetingly bleak and lawless Outback conjured by screenwriter Nick Cave, there are many shades in between. For reasons that only start with the bullet-riddled carnage, Sam Peckinpah would have been impressed.

Little Miss Sunshine The American family road trip gets a much-needed dose of blackly comic dysfunction (porn-obsessed grandpas or suicidal Proust scholars, anyone?) but still manages to be as adorable as its bespectacled, preteen pageant contestant.

Babel Alejandro González Iñárritu’s intense montage of globe-spanning story lines coalesces into a perfect metaphor for the post–9/11 world: messy, paranoid, chaotic. Evoking everything from a Mexican ranchero wedding to Japan’s Harajuku soda joints in vivid detail, his journey encompasses two of the most traumatizing scenes on screens in 2006: a tourist bleeding to death in a remote Moroccan hut, and an elderly woman lost in the desert with two dehydrated children.

L’enfant The Dardenne brothers’ brutal bite of Belgian realism cranks up unexpectedly into a frantic race by one amoral loser (the true “child” of the title) to right an unthinkable wrong.

Lady Vengeance Like a more artistic Quentin Tarantino, Korea’s Chan-wook Park gives his bizarre mix of lush visuals, ultraviolence, and revenge fantasy a feminist twist, creating a breathless onslaught of catharsis and emotion.

Borat Sure, it made you want to hurl or cringe as much as it made you laugh, but moustached Sacha Baron Cohen pulled off the ultimate attack on American arrogance. It’s hard to think of another comedy this subversive, or anyone else so willing to go to such lengths for a joke.

United 93 We’ve all wondered what it would have been like to be aboard one of the flights on 9/11. Making the most of mundane detail and meticulous research, director Paul Greengrass had the guts to put us there. The risk paid off in an unforgettable, if uncomfortable, journey that also serves as a shrewd dissection of what went wrong on the ground that terrible day.

Cache Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke proves once again that he is peerless when it comes to crosshatching technology and existential dread. The Franco-Algerian conflict provides the backdrop for this oblique thriller in which no detail is meaningless and what is unsaid is more important than what is.

A Comedy of Power Also French, but pitched in a very different key, is nouvelle vague veteran Claude Chabrol’s satirical take on his homeland’s notorious Elf scandal. Isabelle Huppert chews up the screen as a righteous prosecutor with the hide of a rhinoceros and the appetite of a piranha.

Border Post A Balkan dramedy about an isolated military base in 1987 that does a better job of explaining the dissolution of Yugoslavia than other, less-hilarious takes on the same subject.

The Promise Half Asterix and half Lord of the Rings, this CGI–heavy historical epic from Chen Kaige is unquestionably the best popcorn movie of the year.

Fateless Scripted by Nobel laureate Imre Kertész, this autobiographical look at the Holocaust is unique in terms of its self-imposed limitations. Only the protagonist knows what he experienced, and his youthfulness is all that protects him from the full horror of what is really going on.

Curse of the Golden Flower Greek tragedy combines with Jacobean revenge drama in what might well be the most meticulously designed and exactingly choreographed of all Chinese historical epics. Here, Zhang Yimou is working in a very different key.

Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles A Japanese father must make amends with a dying son by filming the Peking Opera in a dauntingly remote corner of China. A splendidly quiet work from the usually more flamboyant Zhang Yimou.

The Last King of Scotland As Uganda’s infamous strongman Idi Amin, Forest Whitaker delivers a Laurence Olivier–quality performance.

Catch a Fire Also set in Africa is this Shawn Slovo–scripted (she also wrote A World Apart) feature about a real-life ANC hero. It seems to embody everything the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is about.

Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man As an ex-Montrealer, I’d probably go to hell if I didn’t recommend this extraordinarily satisfying concert film.

An Inconvenient Truth It’s hard to pick the year’s most accomplished movie, so why not go with the most important? This movie will change your life. The only difficult concept it contains is that it’s possible to make an entertaining movie out of an Al Gore slide show.

The Prestige Only slickness and a lack of obvious gore prevented this diabolical thriller from being widely recognized as the most horrifying film of 2006. Christopher Nolan has created one of the most definitive statements about the lengths to which artists will go.

The Proposition A western transposed to rural Australia, this Nick Cave–penned drama about a bounty hunter and his vicious family is a study of the process by which men apply a veneer of civilization to themselves and their surroundings.

Brick A modern California high school is the setting of this haunting, impossibly stylish neo-noir film. Joseph Gordon-Levitt gives one of the year’s most exciting performances as the coldly brilliant gumshoe teen.

Click Not generally recognized as a brilliant movie upon its release, Adam Sandler’s latest is an astute reverse-engineering of Bill Murray’s Groundhog Day, in which the star’s stolidly oblivious persona is played for tragedy. Profound, with fart jokes.

Casino Royale In a year of disappointing hype (Snakes on a Plane, Superman Returns), one popcorn thriller finally delivered a full measure of spectacular, nerve-racking fun. Daniel Craig’s Bond is a charming sociopath, perpetually one martini from delivering (or receiving) a frenzied beat-down.

United 93 The conspiracy-minded might suspect future viewers will see this as a curio in the tradition of The Birth of a Nation or even Triumph of the Will—inseparable from a discredited message—but everyone can agree that this imagining of 9/11 from the passengers’ cabin and the ground is superior filmmaking, a gritty drama of unbearable suspense.

Little Miss Sunshine An ensemble comedy about a family’s journey to a preteen beauty contest, this movie inspires coarse guffaws and, more frequently, a tender sympathy for its well-intentioned, if ill-fitted, characters.

Thank You For Smoking Aaron Eckhart becomes a movie star in this story of a man who rides the cynicism and viciousness of corporate capitalism with the sexy aplomb of a champion surfer.

The Protector Instead of throwing another bone to one of the fancier titles out there, some of which are quite mediocre (I’m looking at you, The Departed), let us admire the dazzling physical performance of Tony Jaa, currently cinema’s most exciting special effect. A four-minute Steadicam shot of Jaa methodically clearing a building of gangsters will be studied in Geek Film School forever.

The Queen In Prime Suspect’s finale, Helen Mirren’s detective inspector admonished a subordinate: “Don’t call me ma’am. I’m not the bloody Queen.” Very funny. On the contrary, Mirren’s impeccable turn as Her Majesty anchored this riveting scrutiny of Elizabeth II’s motivation upon the death of Diana.

Dreamgirls Bill Condon’s flashy R&B soap opera is pure glam, bam, thank you ma’am. Behold American Idol reject Jennifer Hudson belting her way into the musical stratosphere! Observe Eddie Murphy gyrating his way into a showstopping new musical persona! Beyoncé who?

United 93 Paul Greengrass’s unsentimental chronicle of the men and women who were pushing tin on 9/11 explains the hijacking from these unsung heroes’ POV. Watching the controllers grasp why the planes have vanished from their radar screens is chilling.

The Departed Despite ear-scorching profanity and enough blood to keep blood banks afloat for a month, the twists of this mafia and flatfoot pas de deux easily penetrated my anti–Martin Scorsese force field.

The world’s Fastest Indian Believe it or not, old people have dreams, sex, and opinions. This uplifting, Grey Panther–friendly motorcycle variation on Seabiscuit reveals elders as relevant and celebrates camaraderie over dissension.

Thank You For Smoking Mormon–cum–Hollywood hunk Aaron Eckhart is scabrously funny here as a slick spinmeister for Big Tobacco. Canadian director Jason Reitman does father Ivan proud.

An Inconvenient Truth I’m with the Scottish wind-farming developer on this one. They want to pay for every child in their nation to see this disturbing global-warming documentary, featuring Al Gore as the voice of reason.

Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man A star-glutted musical salute to our country’s preeminent poet and sometime monk arouses one’s love for the inner true north, strong and free. It also makes you wonder why you don’t own The Best of Leonard Cohen.

For Your Consideration This love letter to the often fragile and vain creatures we call actors would be utterly tragic if it weren’t so hilarious. How Catherine O’Hara kept a poker face is a mystery on par with how they get the caramel in the Caramilk bar.

Scoop Thank you, Woody Allen, for eschewing your stud-muffin stance and giving heed to your need for incessant nattering. The New Yorker’s zany, verbose, London-based film heralded his return from personal ignominy to professional honour.

Now here’s a category for which we can never run out of candidates. Sure, worst is a relative term, and in some ways even more subjective than best. Certainly, a cheap teen comedy like Van Wilder 2: The Rise of Taj cannot be held to the same standards as Dreamgirls, a blockbuster that some thought worthy and others found truly painful to sit through for its final third.

Little Man Another year, another gimmicky trick-camera comedy from the Wayans family. It’s not the inherent vileness of their jokes that offends as much as the fact that in their raucously self-loathing way, they appear to hate black people even more than Seinfeld’s Michael Richards.

Open Season CGI flicks for kids have grown so ubiquitous, it’s hard to tell them apart. This one stands out for being forgettable while you are watching it.

Just My Luck The pratfalls are so painfully unfunny, there’s not even any sadistic pleasure in watching celebrity crotch-flasher Lindsay Lohan sitting in wet paint or snarling her (nonpubic) mane in a hair dryer.

The Black Dahlia Hollywood adults, looking like kids dressed up in their parents’ old clothes, are allowed to play detective in this corny, pseudo-noir potboiler.

Keeping Up with the Steins One of several “ethnic” comedies unleashed in the wake of My Big Fat Greek Wedding, this lame-o effort had an Entourage-less Jeremy Piven striving to stage the best-ever bar mitzvah for his son. Director Scott Marshall’s father, Garry, plays Piven’s trouble-making dad, occasioning extra years of therapy for all involved.

All the King’s Men Sean Penn’s fire-and-limestone performance and appalling Southern accent had us cringing at this bad remake that pretended to be good for us.

Nouvelle-France Possibly the worst historical epic ever made in Canada, this 145-minute tale of the 18th-century struggle between England and France could actually be the worst historical epic made anywhere. But we don’t want to find out.

Strangers with Candy Amy Sedaris, in ugly-girl makeup and spinning off a short-lived cable series of the same name, seems out to prove that brother David (in no way involved) is the funniest Sedaris who ever lived.

Conversations with God A dial tone is more interesting.

Black Eyed Dog We leave you with the bad-movie line of the year: “I like my men like I like my steaks: tough and local.” Okay. Like, see you later, then.