2006 Movies You Must See Before You Die

 

The United States is embroiled in an ill-advised Middle East quagmire with no end in sight. After years of fascism enabled by both sides of the aisle, Democrats are preparing to retake a Congressional majority. Whatever’s left of the major movie studios looks to recruit young and international talent to punch up vanity projects and defibrillate dying franchises. Tech disruption has forever changed the way information disseminates (and capital flows.)

This is not a description of 2026, but of 2006: the last great year for big-budget cinema. Maybe that’s not true, but every awards season, some critic or columnist or programmer tries to make the argument that the bygone year has been an especially good one for movies. Taken as a whole, 2006 was that exceptional year (not to be confused with Ridley Scott’s 2006 vineyard drama A Good Year), particularly but not exclusively due to the fact “indiewood” subsidiaries like Paramount Vantage and Warner Independent Pictures were still in business. The Marvel-DC-Disney-Lucasfilm industrial complex was only just sputtering into existence. Weird movies got multimillion dollar budgets. Small, slice-of-life dramas still had a place in the multiplex. The digital revolution of Zodiac would come in 2007, as would the first wave of iPhones, forever changing how we engage with cinema.

Since this all-35mm program merely scratches the surface of that watershed year’s embarrassment of riches, we invite all attendees to brainstorm their own 2006 retrospectives as each 20th anniversary passes. Maybe 2006 Movies You Must See Before You Die is a brazen exercise in nostalgia for aging, millennial cinephiles, but it also offers a look into the recent-yet-distant past, at a tradition of quality that was easy to take for granted – a time when Hollywood was still Hollywood.

— Steve Macfarlane, series curator

Films in the series include:

The Fountain (Darren Aronofsky)
As a modern-day scientist, Tommy is struggling with mortality, desperately searching for the medical breakthrough that will save the life of his cancer-stricken wife.

Black Book (Paul Verhoeven)
After narrowly escaping death, young Rachel Rosenthal becomes part of the Jewish resistance, assuming the name Ellis de Vries. Her superiors order her to seduce a Gestapo officer named Ludwig. Ellis is successful in her mission but soon finds herself falling in love with her mortal enemy.

Crank (Mark Neveldine, Brian Taylor)
The hit-man Chev Chelios is poisoned by the criminal Verona and his friend and doctor Miles advises him that he must keep his adrenaline in an upper level to stay alive. Chev meets his girlfriend Eve and together he looks for Verona to kill him.

Click (Frank Coraci)
A workaholic architect finds a universal remote that allows him to fast-forward and rewind to different parts of his life. Complications arise when the remote starts to overrule his choices.

The Wind that Shakes the Barley (Ken Loach)
Set during the Irish War of Independence in the early 1920s. Damien, an Irish medical student, is about to leave Ireland to complete his training in London, but before doing so witnesses atrocious brutalities carried out by the Black and Tans which leads him to join his brother Teddy in the Irish Republican Army. Soon however, the peace treaty is signed, and the brothers are pitted against each other.

The Black Dahlia (Brian de Palma)
Two cops in the 1940s Los Angeles investigate the murder of a Hollywood starlet , and one puts his marriage in jeopardy by obsessing over the crime, while the other becomes involved with a woman from a prominent family, who happens to have an unsavory tie to the victim.

The Lake House (Alejandro Agresti)
Fantasy romance about a relationship that forms between an architect and the doctor who lived in his new lakeside house two years previously. Only able to communicate by passing letters into the house’s mailbox, the pair begin to fall for each other, but will they ever be together?

A Scanner Darkly (Richard Linklater)
An undercover cop in a not-too-distant future becomes involved with a dangerous new drug and begins to lose his own identity as a result.

The Departed (Martin Scorsese)
An undercover cop and a mole in the police attempt to identify each other while infiltrating an Irish gang in South Boston.

Idlewild (Bryan Barber)
A reticent piano player and his lead performer struggle to keep their speakeasy out of the hands of gangsters in the Prohibition-era South.

……and more TBA!