Top 15 of 2006

"It's time". "United 93" is possibly the closest thing we'll ever get to having a film remember September 11 without being blemished by the commercial and the sentinemtal. A movie that redefines omnipresence, the audience is allowed to hover these brave individuals as they do what they thought was best, faced with the certainty of death and the affect of terror. Paul Greengrass directs a brilliant cast of actors and real-life people, delivering a film driven by facts and some approximate recreation of what happened in that plane based from phone calls made to their families. In cinema verite, it is stripped of politics, opinions, agenda and prejudice. In contrast with other terror driven movies, it doesn't demonize its antagonists but portrays them more as people who were manipulated to think that what they were about to do was for the greater good. "United 93" is a tremendous film. A movie that could have easily been skewed towards the plastic and being contemptous, it is at the end a story of hope and bravery. And it did actually happen.

Haneke is a cinematic terrorist. Able to find terror from the simplest of situations, he brilliantly derives it from reality, politics and the threat of the home. We follow a well-to-do Parisian family, as they recieve anonymous cassette tapes, initially featuring a 2-hour surveillance of their house which later develops into something more sinister. Here's the dilemma: we never really do find out who films them. It acts as a MacGuffin to unravel Paris' unsavoury political past (as of course, they do prefer to get naked behind the curtains). With the effect of the tapes though, Haneke was able to involve the audience: one is that the people watching the film become the stalkers themselves, effectively breaking the fourth wall. The other effect was that the entire film sort of becomes a version of that mysterious videotape, especially highlighted by the intriguing last scene, where the devoted would be tempted to hit rewind just in case they missed something, like the movie's protagonists. That's basically why this film grabs you by the neck and never lets go... it's because you feel involved in a situation as disturbing as this. A perfectly calculated thriller, Haneke never disappoints.