Mark Slutsky’s top picks

1. Fast Food Nation Richard Linklater’s ambitious and underrated look at eating and working in America follows a handful of characters linked by a Big Issue without ever getting preachy or portentous à la Traffic or Syriana. It shouldn’t really work, especially the way it self-consciously touches on so much, but somehow Linklater and his cast bring it together.

2. Manufactured Landscapes The best Canadian film of the year; a hypnotic and compellingly beautiful documentary about the photography of Edward Burtynsky, or more specifically, about the massive-scale industrialization that is his subject. Gorgeous and terrifying.

3. The Queen Helen Mirren’s brilliantly sensitive and moving performance is enough to recommend this excellent film; Stephen Frears’s direction and the strong supporting cast (including James Cromwell’s awesomely prickish Prince Philip) make it one of the year’s best.

4. Dave Chappelle’s Block Party Chappelle’s show may be a thing of the past, sadly, but this Michel Gondry production about a great day in Brooklyn is a joyous, hilarious treat.

5. The Departed It’s such a relief to see Martin Scorsese making good movies again, after the head-shakingly bad Gangs of New York and The Aviator. Mark Wahlberg casually giving Matt Damon the finger is one of the year’s best movie moments.

6. Le Petit lieutenant A small, considered film about a Paris police precinct that deliberately flouts the clichés of the cop genre. Director Xavier Beauvois succeeds in creating a cleanly directed policier that makes the genre feel new.

7. Deliver Us From Evil A shattering, utterly compelling doc about sexual abuse in the Catholic Church and its shameful cover-up. Seemingly unrepentant pedophile priest Oliver O’Grady is the scariest character you’ll see onscreen all year; his victims, who tell their stories, are probably the bravest.

8. Jackass: Number Two 2006’s most audacious, ridiculous, brilliant comedy (and that’s counting Borat) features genital abuse in every flavour, madcap, dangerous stunts and plenty of magnificent, inspiring idiocy.

9. Shortbus A sexually explicit, polymorphously perverse art film that’s somehow charming, sweet, funny and way less insufferable than the description makes it sound.

10. Volver Pedro Almodóvar’s latest may not be as audacious as Bad Education, but it’s a quieter, sweeter film, and Penélope Cruz is just bodacious in a true screen goddess performance.

Honourable mentions: Spike Lee directed the year’s smoothest thriller in the immensely entertaining Inside Man, while the tensest was undoubtedly newcomer Gela Babluani’s nail-biter 13 (Tzameti). James Bond got a much-needed, if overlong reboot in Casino Royale, and Borat was obviously completely hilarious, even if we’re all sick of it now. With some of the year’s best set pieces, Mission: Impossible III shouldn’t have been slept on at the box office. The Roky Erickson pic You’re Gonna Miss Me was the best music doc in years. The brilliantly hilarious weird Japanese anthology pic Funky Forest: The First Contact would have been at the top of the list if it had played more than a couple of festival dates—as would my favourite film of the year, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s wonderfully beguiling Syndromes and a Century. Also a special extra-honourable mention goes to the year’s excellent TV: Battlestar Galactica, The Wire, The Office, 30 Rock, The Sopranos and everything else that gave the big screen a run for its money.

Bottom five

1. Lady in the Water Gloriously, magnificently, compulsively bad, M. Night Shyamalan’s “bedtime story” is exhilarating in its incompetence, and almost worth seeing for its sheer epic craptasticness.

2. The Wicker Man Never did a film less need remaking than the wonderfully eerie 1973 pagan folk musical original that writer/director Neil LaBute mutilated for this offensive, misogynistic, horrible piece of shit.

3. Doogal This totally, annoyingly stupid kids’ movie might be based on a beloved book (The Magic Roundabout), but that just makes all the creepy CGI douching around all the worse.

4. The Da Vinci Code An overly serious Tom Hanks and Audrey Tautou zip around Paris and environs solving number puzzles in this disastrously self-serious adaptation of the bestselling novel.

5. Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World Not a doc, as the title would imply, just a completely wasted opportunity for Albert Brooks in the year’s least funny comedy.

Matthew Hays top picks

1. Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan Crass? Yes. Occasionally cruel? Without a doubt. But Sacha Baron Cohen’s first feature is a brilliant social satire of George W. Bush’s America. From saluting the U.S. “war of terror” to getting unwitting Americans to cheer on the prospect of executing homosexuals, this film is both comic genius and a chilling barometer of a nation’s cold heart.

2. The Queen An incredible film that speculates about the inner workings of the British government immediately after the death of Princess Di. Helen Mirren rules.

3. Volver Almodóvar strikes again—this time with a screwball comedy about domestic violence, murder, ensuing cover-ups and ghosts. Just lovely.

4. The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada That Tommy Lee Jones is a brilliant actor is without question, but his filmmaking skills are now proven too. In his feature directorial debut, he ponders the contentious U.S.-Mexico border with intelligence and style. Given the deeply racist overtones over hysteria about the Mexican influx into America, this film couldn’t have been timelier.

5. Who Killed the Electric Car? The auto and oil industries have consistently told us that fuel alternatives were either too expensive or simply not tenable. So what happened to this, a GM-produced electric car that had its first owners raving? And why was virtually every model taken back from those who leased it and destroyed? A fascinating eco-whodunnit.

6. Quinceañera The filmmaking team of Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland have made a delightful film about the Latino tradition of quinceañera—a ritual young girls go through as part of their passage into adulthood. A superb melodrama, full of rich detail and surprising performances.

7. The Departed Not the best Scorsese ever, but hey, like just about everyone, I’m always happy to see him back with the guns and crooked cops. A killer cast helps.

8. Shortbus Most of the critics were so sexphobic (if not homophobic) that they couldn’t see past the sex scenes to understand that in its heart, this was actually an old-fashioned romantic comedy. I loved its sexual frankness, its winning cast and the scene where someone hums the American national anthem into someone else’s asshole.

9. Dreamgirls Bill Condon pulls off an epic hat trick, turning the smash Broadway musical (inspired by the Supremes’ tumultuous story) into a winning movie. For all my hatred of the Idol TV series, it was American Idol that brought Jennifer Hudson to notoriety, and damn, the girl is good.

10. An Inconvenient Truth Cinema purists will cry foul—this is, after all, a simple capturing of former American veep Al Gore’s lecture on global warming. But the content makes it required viewing; an utterly shocking look at just how bad the big picture is.

Honourable mentions: Robert Altman’s final curtain call, A Prairie Home Companion; Philippe Falardeau’s thoughtful cross-continental family mystery Congorama; Kevin Spacey as Lex Luthor (and Parker Posey as his sidekick) in Superman Returns; Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada; the strangeness of The Night Listener, the page-to-screen adaptation of Armistead Maupin’s semi-autobiographical novel.

Bottom five

1. The Da Vinci Code One of those movies where the hype and the actual movie are completely out of synch.

2. The Omen The original wee lad (Harvey Stephens) was just so damn creepy. And I love Liev Schreiber, but he’s no Gregory Peck.

3. Bobby In the year that legendary auteur Robert Altman died, this film—a simplistic and annoyingly empty film—made me wish that the sub-genre Altman virtually invented (the network narrative) would also be put to rest.

4. All the King’s Men So much bombast, so much soft focus, so many glossy production values, so much boredom.

5. Crank This film—a gratuitous rip-off of DOA—has a man learn that he only has about an hour or so to live. So he ventures to get revenge. A film so repugnant, so vile, so stupid (love the scene where he and his girlfriend decide to have sex in the middle of Chinatown) that it will probably ferment perfectly and will end up a cult classic.

Malcolm Fraser’s top picks

1. Half Nelson There’s something inspiring in the fact that the story of a crackhead Marxist ghetto schoolteacher could even be made or released in the USA in 2006, but that aside, it’s a gripping and compelling story told with great style and amazing performances.

2. Little Miss Sunshine In this dark family comedy, the ensemble cast is uniformly strong, and the filmmakers aren’t afraid to be intelligent—or, even more importantly, to be ridiculous or perverse, as the situation demands.

3. The Devil and Daniel Johnston This portrait of the schizophrenic singer-songwriter breaks the formulaic mould of music documentaries with an enviable wealth of archival material, a creative approach to re-enactments and the sheer power of his life story.

4. The Departed Scorsese gets his mojo back, DiCaprio and Damon remind us they can actually act and the crime drama is redeemed from the pits of David Caruso hell.

5. The Road to Guantanamo Michael Winterbottom’s sobering wake-up call about the sad reality of the “war on terror,” and the harrowing stories of a few of its unwitting victims, is unfortunately the closest we can get to understanding what’s going on in the USA’s secret prisons around the world.

6. Volver It’s not one of his masterpieces, but a half-decent Almodóvar is miles ahead of most filmmakers on a good day. His deliberate style, amazing colour schemes and almost Russ Meyer-esque fetishization of the female form make for a dependably solid viewing experience as always.

7. Accepted Okay, I’m sorry, but when sophomoric humour is done right, it’s a beautiful thing. Best campus comedy since Revenge of the Nerds itself.

8. Manufactured Landscapes Overwhelming, at times depressing, this documentary on the physical effects of consumer society is nonetheless both visually powerful and truly thought-provoking, in a way that preachier political docs rarely achieve.

9. Stranger Than Fiction The filmmakers chicken out on making it a truly heavy film, but this Charlie Kaufman-esque tale is still way more original and intelligent than most of what’s out there; plus, Will Ferrell and Maggie Gyllenhaal deliver one of the few genuinely charming screen romances in recent memory.

10. Down in the Valley Underrated Western-noir recalls Terrence Malick in the pre-wanker era and reminds us that Edward Norton is one of the best actors around today.

Honourable mentions: Borat—What can you say? The naked wrestling scene alone deserves some kind of special award of merit. Brick—“high-school film noir” sounds like a recipe for a trainwreck, but it actually works in this boldly original drama. How to Eat Fried Worms—the rare kids’ film that actually captures the 10-year-old mentality. The Black Dahlia—DePalma does it up right with a pastiche of the old-school Hollywood thriller. Harsh Times—Christian Bale comes through with another intense, disturbing performance in this demonstration of what happens when you combine the American dream and macho male bonding after they’ve both gone dangerously sour. Cheech—If Atom Egoyan was less self-important and had a sense of humour, he might come up with something like this Montreal-made dark comedy.

Bottom five

1. Peaceful Warrior A New Age inspirational film directed by a convicted pedophile... sounds like a bad joke, but it’s really just an unwatchable pile of crap. If you thought Nick Nolte’s GBH mug shot was a low point, it turns out he still had further to sink.

2. Persona Non Grata A no-budget Middle-East Conflict For Dummies? Gee, thanks, Oliver Stone! Next time, at least put the handicam on a damn tripod so we don’t get such a headache.

3. Deck the Halls Those of us who actually enjoy the holiday season are served another compelling reason to hate it with this tepid stew of clichés and cheap sentimentality. Maybe Danny DeVito was wasted when he signed on, or perhaps this drove him to drink.

4. Flyboys This WWI fighter-pilot adventure deserves awards for Most Predictable Plot, Most Stereotypical Characters and Most Clichés Per Minute. Painful.

5. Conversations With God This bizarro piece of religious kitsch, a biography of self-help author Neale Donald Walsch, is so wildly, across-the-board bad it’s almost good… but not quite.